Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s campaign walked back an email they'd sent in which the independent presidential candidate referred to "J6 activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their Constitutional liberties." The team blamed the insertion of that sentence on a new vendor, but just a day after that email, Kennedy himself was back on the topic, with a new promise. In a Friday statement, RFK Jr. vowed to "appoint a special counsel—an individual respected by all sides—to investigate whether prosecutorial discretion was abused for political ends" regarding the Capitol attack, per the Guardian. Kennedy added, "I will right any wrongs that we discover."
He went on to call the Jan. 6 riot "one of the most polarizing topics on the political landscape," insisting that he's "listening to people of diverse viewpoints on it ... I want to hear every side." Kennedy acknowledged that an earlier protest on Jan. 6 had morphed into a riot, "with the encouragement of President Trump," but he's not sure that it qualifies as an actual "insurrection." Kennedy concedes he hasn't "examined the evidence in detail," but that "reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection. They observe that the protesters carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest 'peacefully.'"
CNN pushes back on his "whitewashing" of that day, especially the "no plans" part, as multiple Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members were convicted of sedition. And the Guardian notes that a House probe into Jan. 6 detailed how some protesters carried weapons, including guns, and how Trump didn't appeal for calm until long after the protesters had been whipped into a frenzy. A bipartisan majority of Congress, meanwhile, determined during the former president's second impeachment trial that Jan. 6 could, indeed, be called an "insurrection." NBC News lays out other instances in which RFK Jr. has dismissed the severity of the attack on the US Capitol. (More RFK Jr. stories.)
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