A Capitol Police officer was suspended after a congressional staffer found and reported seeing a copy of an anti-Semitic document.
Zach Fisch, chief of staff for freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones, a New York Democrat, saw a copy of the Elders of Zion, infamous anti-Semitic literature, near the officer’s work area as he was leaving the Longworth House Office Building on Sunday.
The Washington Post provided photographs of the document to Capitol Police on Monday morning after receiving them from Fisch, and hours later, acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman suspended an officer pending an investigation “after anti-Semitic reading material was discovered near his work area on Sunday.”
“We take all allegations of inappropriate behavior seriously,” Pittman said in a statement. “Once this matter was brought to my attention, I immediately ordered the officer to be suspended until the Office of Professional Responsibility can thoroughly investigate.”
It’s unclear whose copy it was, but a date stamp indicates that it was printed in 2019. The tattered and stained pages were held together by a binder clip.
Fisch tweeted that he was “horrified” when he saw the copy of the Elders of Zion.
The chief of staff, who identified himself as Jewish, invoked the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, when numerous people wearing anti-Semitic apparel stormed the halls of Congress in an effort to subvert the peaceful transition of power from former President Donald Trump to President Biden.
One man at the riot was seen wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt, while others were wearing “6MWE” shirts, an acronym on the far-right standing for “6 Million Wasn’t Enough,” which is a reference to the number of Jewish people who were murdered during the Holocaust.
“In January 6th, we watched as USCP officers were indifferent to — and even accommodating of — white supremacist insurrectionists, some of whom wore Camp Auschwitz t shirts. More than two months later, we evidently haven’t solved this problem,” Fisch tweeted. “This is both a national security problem and a workplace safety problem. Our office is full of people — Black, brown, Jewish, queer — who have good reason to fear white supremacists. If the USCP is all that stands between us and the mob we saw on Jan. 6, how can we feel safe?”
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The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is literature created by the czarist secret police at the turn of the 20th century, and it describes an alleged secret plan of Jewish leaders to take over the world. The document has continued to be used by anti-Semitic groups in the decades following its creation.
