This is the 'internet garbage' that inspired Trump's Jan. 6 pardons: expert

A reporter who has written extensively about the Jan. 6 insurrection condemned Donald Trump's blanket pardon of more than 1,500 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the 2020 election results.

NBC News correspondent Ryan Reilly, whose work has been cited by the FBI and by the Jan. 6 committee, appeared Tuesday on "Morning Joe" to discuss the newly inaugurated president's sweeping pardons of his supporters who violently attacked police officers, vandalized the Capitol building and interrupted the congressional certification of Joe Biden's election win.

"What you have in all all of these cases is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that these Jan. 6 defendants are guilty of the crimes that they have been convicted of by either a jury of their peers, by a federal judge, or because they stood before a judge, swore in and admitted that they assaulted those officers on camera," Reilly said. "There's zero question about any of this, because these cases have been so thoroughly looked at, and it's just, you know, stepping back."

Right-wing disinformation created the conditions that led to the insurrection, Reilly said, and also established the justification for Trump's pardons of violent felons.

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"One of the key figures here is Ed Martin," Reilly said. "I mean, he's someone I wrote about last night. He was on the platform committee for the RNC, he's this longtime conservative activist, and he was on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project. That's an organization that was started by the aunt of the Jan. 6 defendant, actually a Jan. 6 defendant who looked like Hitler in some photos that were on his phone. He was sort of famous, went a little bit viral, and he stormed the Capitol. There was that woman who started, Cynthia Hughes, who started this organization, and then you have this individual, Ed Martin, who was on the board of that organization. Ed Martin is now the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, meaning that he's the top federal prosecutor overseeing all of these cases."

Martin has spent the last four years spreading conspiracy theories about Jan. 6, particularly in a blog post that claims "January 6th was Staged by Mr. Coffee," an individual he claims set up the gallows outside the Capitol and then walked in the direction of the FBI field office, which he concluded was proof of law enforcement's involvement.

"He launched this really intense investigation into who set up those gallows, and then because this person who he called 'Mr. Coffee' vaguely walked in the direction north just vaguely of the FBI field office, he surmised, and presented in this video, that that was an individual who set up the gallows. And was the FBI behind all of this?" Reilly said. "So just a bunch of, like, internet garbage essentially here compiled together, put forward as some sort of argument which would never even come near, coming up to the standard for a court of law."

The pardons set an ominous tone for the next four years, Reilly said, but he said Democrats should point out that many of the individuals Trump put back on the streets were genuinely bad people.

"Clearly, this was the first defeat of the Trump administration's 'team normal,' right?" he said. "Whatever contingent of 'team normal' is still there and decided to join up this time around, I think, lost out here because obviously this is going to be, if Democrats sort of step up to the plate and, you know, go through a lot of these cases and make political hay out of it and sort of, you know, fight back and in this information environment that's, you know, then that's something that they can pick from because there's just so much material that you could go from, right? You could go through these cases right now and say, and not setting aside all of the Jan. 6 stuff, there's a bunch of pedophiles amongst these Jan. 6 defendants, people who've been convicted of statutory rape. You could focus on them. In fact, someone who was just arrested a couple of weeks ago, he was actually serving some time because he looked at kiddy porn, had possession of kiddy porn. So that's something that Democrats could theoretically focus on, but there hasn't been sort of a lot of real fight."

"I think, you know, with the Jan. 6 committee, when you go back to that, what the Jan. 6 committee decided to do was they decided that Americans couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time," Reilly added. "They decided that they had to go with this sort of just Trump-only narrative, and I think the opening that that allowed for was because the Jan. 6 committee didn't call out some of these huge law enforcement failures that we saw before Jan. 6. They left their backside open, they had an open flank, right. So when you sort of had these conspiracy theories about, 'Oh, what if it was the FBI, those things were allowed to grab hold because they weren't smacked down by the Jan. 6 committee in the first place. So I think that that's one of the major sort of, you know, failures. When we look back at this era, what exactly happened and allowed for this information environment to be implemented that allowed for these pardons to happen."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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