Capitol invasion day had 14 arrests, and in 2 years number reached almost a thousand

The Minister of Justice and Public Security of Brazil, Flávio Dino, said on Sunday night (8) that about 200 people were arrested in acts of attack on democracy in Brasília, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL). The case was, at all times, compared to the invasion of the US Capitol by supporters of Republican Donald Trump in January 2021.

Among the many similarities between the two episodes, one of the differences is precisely the number of arrests carried out on the very day of the attacks.

Checking promoted by the newspaper USA Today counted at least 14 arrests made on January 6, 2021. and promoting disruptive conduct in a restricted public building.

A press release from the Congress police, however, confirms that there were 14 arrests made that day by the corporation. The number of arrests that may have taken place around the Capitol is also uncertain. Media outlets at the time cited at least three outside the legislature building, and the Metropolitan Police also announced arrests at the time.

The US Department of Justice considers that the number of assaults on security forces agents on January 6 — at least 140 were recorded, among representatives of the Capitol and metropolitan police — may have made the work of arrests more difficult.

It is certain that, since then, the American authorities have multiplied the actions of punishment for what was classified as an attempted coup d’état. In the following days, the number of arrests reached 90. But a series of investigations, in different instances, brought the figure to almost a thousand today, two years and two days after the episode that continues to haunt the halls of power in the United States .

The FBI claims it has arrested more than 950 people – the investigation is considered the largest in the agency’s history. In all, cases were opened against 940 people, according to the Program on Extremism, a group at George Washington University, in the US capital, which monitors the cases of January 6th. More than half of the defendants, 482, confessed their guilt, and another 44 were considered so by the Justice.

The longest sentence so far was given to a former New York military and retired police officer, Thomas Webster, 56, who was sentenced in September to just over 10 years in prison — for, among other things, hitting a police officer with the flagpole. of a flag and hanged him trying to remove his helmet and gas mask. The aggression was recorded by the agent’s body camera and by other protesters.

Webster’s sentence, however, is an exception. Of the 353 defendants whose sentence has already been decided, only 47 have been sentenced to more than one year in prison; most received only a few weeks of sentencing.

how justice punished those responsible

The US court decided to divide the defendants into three groups. The first, with people who were physically in the Capitol but did not commit violence. The second brings together those who have proven to have committed violent acts, most of them against police officers —according to the FBI, of the nearly 1,000 arrests made, around 200 involved aggression against security agents; one of them died the next day after two strokes, and four others committed suicide after the invasion.

With the progress of the processes of these two groups, testimonies and access to publications on social networks, exchange of messages and photos and videos taken in the days of the invasion, the investigation now advances on the third group, that of radicals linked to extremist groups such as Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

The actions against the invaders are not the only ones, and Trump himself is the subject of an investigation by the Department of Justice. The Republican has also just been accused by the House committee investigating the attack, which called for his indictment for crimes such as conspiracy and incitement to insurrection.