Lawmakers debuted a Jan. 6 falsehood this week on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker each suggested Thursday that Capitol Police officer William Evans died last year from injuries sustained during the riot.
This is not true. Evans, a Massachusetts native, was killed on April 2, 2021. He died after a Louis Farrakhan acolyte rammed a car into the barricades outside the Capitol complex.
The details of Evans’s death, which Biden, Pelosi, and Baker ostensibly meant to mourn with great sincerity, apparently don’t matter all that much to Biden, Pelosi, and Baker.
“Some have already made the ultimate sacrifice in this sacred effort,” Biden said Thursday at a Jan. 6 memorial event. “Jill and I have mourned police officers in this Capitol Rotunda not once but twice in the wake of Jan. 6: once to honor officer Brian Sicknick, who lost his life the day after the attack, and a second time to honor Officer Billy Evans, who lost his life defending this Capitol as well.”
Sicknick, by the way, suffered two strokes after the riot and died of natural causes, according to Francisco Diaz, the chief medical examiner in Washington, D.C. There is no evidence Sicknick suffered injuries from the riot, Diaz said.
In fact, exactly one death can be attributed to the violence of Jan. 6. Trump supporter and U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed that day when she attempted to force her way into a hallway filled with lawmakers.
Also, in case it needs repeating, Evans’s death has exactly nothing to do with Jan. 6. Why Biden chose to include it in an event meant specifically to mark the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is anyone’s guess.
Over in the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi held a moment of silence Thursday for those who supposedly died in the riot.
“Let us acknowledge today,” the congresswoman said, “our fallen heroes of that day. U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. U.S. Capitol Police officer Howard Liebengood. Metropolitan officer Jeffery Smith. U.S. Capitol Police officer Billy Evans of a later assault.”
If Evans was killed in a “later assault,” as Pelosi rightly noted, why include him in the role of the Jan. 6 dead? Also, as a reminder, both Liebengood and Smith died days after the riot from suicide. Pelosi’s use of “our fallen heroes of that day,” therefore, is a bit confusing.
Elsewhere, the Republican governor of Massachusetts likewise suggested Evans was a casualty of the riot.
“The despicable attempt on the part of former President Trump and his allies to undo what generations of Americans fought and died for, the right to free and fair elections, will stain this nation’s history forever,” Baker said in a statement. “Thankfully, the Capitol Police and every law enforcement officer and member of the U.S. Military there that day stepped into the violence and successfully restored order.”
The statement then added, “One of the officers who lost his life protecting the Capitol last year was William Evans, a North Adams native who tragically leaves behind a beautiful family. His sacrifice, and his colleagues’ actions, will stand as shining examples of heroism and bravery.”
If this were a one-off, the lack of attention to detail, and the casual inflating of the Jan. 6 death toll, one could reasonably assume a mere oversight.
Sadly, though, lawmakers have been toying with the overall death count for quite some time now. Various lawmakers have placed the number at anywhere between four to five to seven and, now, “almost 10.”
It’s almost as if these people want the body count to be higher, perhaps so that everyone else will take what happened that day as seriously as they do?
