Thousands of former President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building following a “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters imprisoned for their role in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, one of the candidates running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court joined the campaign to rewrite the history of what happened that day, glossing over the offenses of the Jan. 6 defendants.
Speaking with right-wing radio host Vicki McKenna on her iHeart Radio podcast on Thursday, former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who is running in the April election for a seat on the state’s highest court, complained that the Jan. 6 defendants never got “a fair shot” in court and accused Democrats of “abusing the court system” for “political gain.”
McKenna and Schimel agreed that Democrats are guilty of “lawfare” — political warfare via the courts. But it was Schimel who specifically brought up Jan. 6.
“Another piece of the lawfare manipulation is that they utilize jurisdictions that are overwhelmingly to the left in terms of the voters — which means the jurors that you’re going to draw to hear these cases,” Schimel said. In Trump’s New York hush money trial, for example, he said, “there was no way any jury was going to rule anything other than he’s guilty of whatever you can give him, whatever charge you give them.”
“The same thing for these January 6th defendants who were all prosecuted in the Washington, D.C., district, which is overwhelmingly liberal,” Shimel continued. “This part of the manipulation is to go to districts like that. They would never take you, they would never take their prosecution in a district where you had a fair shot as a defendant.”
Republicans across the country have hopped on the bandwagon to “flip the script” on Jan. 6, as The New York Times reports in a long article detailing how Trump and his supporters “laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.” Two weeks from now, the piece points out, Trump will take the oath of office on the very spot where his followers stormed the Capitol, kicked and stomped a police officer, beat another officer with an American flag pole and broke into the building vowing to attack and kill the officials who were there to certify the election Trump lost.
After a brief period during which Republican lawmakers who hid under their desks during the attack emerged to denounce the desecration of the Capitol and the Big Lie about a stolen election, Trump made his comeback, campaigning on the idea that Jan. 6 rioters were martyrs, and former Republican critics began to change their tune.
Still, Schimel’s comments stand out. For a Supreme Court candidate to suggest that jury trials don’t work and that the whole U.S. system of justice is so politicized it can’t be trusted is deeply undermining of the very institution Schimel proposes to join.
During the McKenna show, both McKenna and Schimel engaged in some familiar partisan liberal-bashing, casting aspersions on Dane County and suggesting that the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decisions allowing absentee ballot drop boxes to be used again and declaring the Republicans’ egregiously gerrymandered voting maps unconstitutional were merely political, not serious constitutional decisions.
Both implied that courts dominated by conservative justices are fair and impartial and that only Democrats and liberals politicize the process.
That’s pretty rich coming from Schimel who, as former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attorney general, was involved in a Christian conservative coalition’s plan to end federally protected abortion rights.
Schimel made government transparency a major talking point in his campaign to be the state’s top lawyer, but then tried to hide records of his trip to a conference hosted by the controversial Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled an anti-gay hate group. Schimel was there with his colleague at the state Department of Justice, attorney Micah Tseytlin, who, according to The New York Times, presented “his legal strategy to end Roe. … He proposed his idea for an abortion ban that set a limit earlier than 20 weeks to undercut Roe more openly.”
Schimel told McKenna that, unlike liberal justices on the court, “I’m going to follow the law and the Constitution. That’s something we’re missing right now.”
He criticized the Court’s liberal majority not just for their decisions but also for the cases they haven’t decided yet on the anti-union Act 10 law and on whether abortion is legal in Wisconsin. “They don’t want this issue to be resolved. They want to keep dragging it out. And that’s, that is playing political games with these cases,” he said.
It’s pretty obvious from Schimel’s political background that he is hardly the impartial, nonpartisan figure he claims to be. His insistence that the Jan. 6 defendants couldn’t get fair treatment in a Washington, D.C., courtroom is a big clue. In our increasingly toxic political atmosphere, it’s easy to forget that there are other kinds of judges, who listen to the evidence and make clear-eyed decisions based on the law, not partisanship.
Take the Washington-based federal judge who heard the case of Philip Sean Grillo, who bragged about storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the Times reported, rejected Grillo’s request for a delay of sentencing on the grounds that he was about to be pardoned by Trump. Lamberth filed a court document reminding everyone of the gravity and the violence of the Capitol attack. He and his colleagues on the D.C. Circuit had presided over hundreds of trials, heard from witnesses, read hundreds of documents and watched thousands of hours of disturbing video footage.
“They told the world that the election was stolen, a claim for which no evidence ever emerged,” Lamberth wrote of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. “They told the world that they were there to put a stop to the transfer of power, even if that meant ransacking, emptying, and desecrating our country’s most hallowed sites. Most disturbingly, they told the world that particular elected officials who were present at the Capitol that day had to be removed, hurt, or even killed.”
Lamberth’s sober judgment, and his biography, undermine Schimel’s claims about D.C. courts stacked with liberals who made a partisan target of the Jan. 6 defendants. Lamberth was appointed to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan.
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