Following the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Joe Biden had this to say about the police force that, at a great personal cost, prevented the rioters from completely overrunning the building and injuring members of Congress, as well as the U.S. Vice President:
Not only did we see the failure to protect one of the three branches of our government, we also saw a clear failure to carry out equal justice. No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true. And it is unacceptable.
Biden is like a little boy with a new toy — in his case, the language of BLM and “equal justice.” He can’t stop playing with it. And as long as the Washington Post applauds, he never will.
But Biden is dead wrong about the Capitol Police. As Marc Thiessen notes, the video played by the impeachment managers shows a heroic police force acting courageously to thwart the mob:
We saw officers running toward the mob while senators fled, holding off the horde that was just 58 steps away to give them time to escape.
We saw how Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman saved Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who was headed right for the mob until Goodman ran toward him, waving his hands, and turned him around in the opposite direction.
We saw how Secret Service officers hid the vice president in an office less than 100 feet from the ascending mob as Goodman diverted them, and then exfiltrated Pence and his family to a more secure location. If Goodman had not acted and the mob had arrived seconds earlier, they would have been in eyesight of the vice president.
We saw Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) escaping down a hallway and coming within “just yards” of the rioters, before his protective detail quickly rushed him back through a pair of doors at the mouth of the hallway, and then used their bodies to hold the doors closed.
We also know that an officer searched frantically for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was hiding in the bathroom in another building, so he could ensure her safety. Ocasio-Cortez misconstrued this as threatening conduct, but that’s her problem.
Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Senators acknowledge the heroism of those who protected them on January 6. Schumer says:
As for me and my situation, I just want to give tremendous credit to the Capitol Police officers who were in my detail. They are utterly amazing and great, and we love them.
In the context of an impeachment trial, it serves the interests of Democrats to cast the Capitol Police as good guys and victims, not as thugs and racists. But impeachment aside, I doubt that even Schumer would slander members of the force after they rescued him from the mob.
Joe Biden was eager to do so. As Thiessen observes:
[A]t the very moment when Americans of all political stripes were united in outrage, [Biden] sought to divide us. Worse, he did it by accusing the heroes who saved our elected representatives of bigotry, saying they would have treated Black protesters differently.
If Biden could string a few sentences together with the articulateness of an average 16 year-old, he would be a demagogue. America will never unite behind him. Nor should it.
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