Members-Only Article
At least five people died during the events of January 6th on Capitol Hill. More than 100 Capitol Police officers were injured, at least 15 of whom required hospitalization. Two Capitol Police officers took their own lives in the days immediately following the assault, presumably spurred by trauma and/or guilt over the insurrection. But the death of Officer Brian Sicknick has loomed over the events of the January 6th like no other. While others were bludgeoned or attacked and could have died of their injuries the fact that Sicknick did die added a gravity to the events of January 6th it would not, for better or worse, otherwise have had.
Because of this, a new ‘truth movement’ has begun to crop up on the right suggesting Sicknick’s death was unrelated to the insurrection and may even be part of a cover-up to tarnish the reputation of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s ugly and utterly predictable.
This first came to my attention when I read this article by Andrew McCarthy in The National Review. McCarthy’s piece is part of a common pattern. Conspiracy theories arise in obscure publications or on 4chan style message boards. They are then laundered into more respectable publications, with the balder lies and innuendos trimmed back, from which they enter the mainstream media discourse. As a lawyer, McCarthy comes at the issue as a technical evidentiary matter, claiming that the article of impeachment against Donald Trump is in fact deficient because the House impeachment managers have not explained precisely how Sicknick died or who killed him. “Democratic impeachment managers have a duty to explain how Officer Sicknick died,” the article’s subhed intones.
McCarthy uses a mix of innuendo and ‘just asking questions’ style reasoning to suggest that in fact Sicknick died of natural causes on the day of the insurrection. Only a rush to judgement and a desire to impugn the the reputation of Republicans led people to claim that pro-Trump insurrectionists were responsible for it.
As with most conspiracy theories, this one begins with a grain of truth. We don’t know exactly how Sicknick died. The proximate cause of death appears to have been a blood clot in the brain, a stroke. But what caused it is not clear. The uncertainty goes back to the earliest press accounts which tell us that Sicknick engaged with the insurrectionists, returned to his office and then collapsed. These mingled with reports that Sicknick had been hit over the head with a fire extinguisher. But these were always less clear and subsequent videos showing a different officer being hit with a fire extinguisher suggests this may have a conflation of two separate events.
The lack of information about Sicknick’s death is part of a larger paucity of information, more than a month after the insurrection. To date, federal authorities have only held a single press conference about the event. Many observers have reasonably asked why we don’t know more about how Sicknick died and why no one has been charged with his death.
At the moment we only have reports based on anonymous sources. But the delay in charging anyone seems in part because investigators have not been able to piece together precisely what injury caused his death. A CNN story from a week ago reported that investigators have not been able to isolate what lead to Sicknick’s death after reviewing video tape evidence. A law enforcement source told CNN an autopsy did not find evidence of blunt force trauma which would support the early report of being hit over the head with a fire extinguisher. Without obvious signs of physical trauma, according to the CNN report, investigators have considered the possibility that a chemical irritant in pepper spray or bear spray used by insurrectionists could have caused a reaction leading to Sicknick’s. Shortly before his death, Sicknick texted his brother Ken that he’d pepper sprayed a couple times while engaging with the insurrectionists but was otherwise okay.
These are key details to get to the bottom of. But it’s important to step back from this skein of bad faith innuendo to note the obvious point. Sicknick engaged with insurrectionists who had violently breached the Capitol for the first time in more than two centuries. He returned to his Capitol office, collapsed and subsequently died after being transported to the hospital. The idea that this fit 42 year old man, in apparently good health, happened to die of natural causes at just that moment is, while theoretically possible, basically absurd. Yet, by the end of his article, McCarthy is treating the idea that Sicknick died in the line of duty as a borderline absurd hypothetical. “Clearly,” he agrees, “if Officer Sicknick died because of something the rioters did, that is a serious matter.”
McCarthy does do us the favor of telling us the where he’s been getting his ideas about Sicknick’s death. Tucker Carlson’s show is one place. But McCarthy bases his account and links to this article in a publication called “Revolver”, which bills itself as the “new Drudge.” The article appears to be the work of Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter who was fired from the White House for attending a White Nationalist conference before being appointed to a board which oversees Holocaust commemoration shortly after the November election. Calling it a “blood libel” against the MAGA movement, the article’s lede gives you a good sense of where they’re coming from.
The stakes are high: Officer Sicknick’s death is the only purported death by a largely tourist crowd that was let into the building by police, stayed inside the velvet ropes, seemed at least partly there out of confusion, for social media clout, or just for the memes, and that even the New York Times conceded caused limited property damage.
The revolver article suggests a plot to either kill Sicknick or blame his unrelated death on the pro-Trump insurrectionists. The article suggests that Sicknick was cremated to destroy the evidence about how he really died.
Unannounced to anyone except incidentally in that Sicknick’s memorial remains turned up in an urn instead of a coffin, Sicknick’s body has been cremated. That means no further forensic analysis can be done to establish the cause or time of Sicknick’s death. Why, one must wonder, would a family still searching for answers, who has no autopsy results, no death certificate, and no medical report, authorize a cremation? Did they?
Now the Sicknick “truth” movement has made its way to The National Review, the Tucker Carlson show, disgraced former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s show and appears ready to take off as the MAGA movement’s latest effort to normalize, excuse and embrace the January 6th insurrection.
