The Friday Night News Dump

If you are a political person who has to report on a story that does not support the media narrative, the best time to leak the story is on a Friday night. It is really advantageous to leak the story on a Friday night when something like the fall of Afghanistan is occurring. The chances of anyone seeing your story are minuscule compared to what they normally would be. So it is not surprising that the following story was posted by Reuters at 5 pm on Friday, August 20th.

Reuters reports:

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”

This is not news to anyone with a brain. There were a lot of eyewitness accounts about people who were not dressed like the Trump supporters at the rally and did not have the attitude that was prevalent at the rally. There was also the fact that the attack on the Capitol occurred before the rally was over. There was also the fact that President Trump instructed those at the rally to go to the Capitol to show their support for the Congressmen protesting the possible election fraud and to do it peacefully. This news article goes against the picture the Democrats and some Republicans were attempting to paint. Therefore it was released at dinnertime on Friday.

The article continues:

Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described “dirty trickster”, and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.

FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.

The article includes a picture of one aspect of what happened in the Capitol that day with a predictable caption. There are no pictures taken from the video of the police waving the protesters in.

The article notes:

Prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack.

Many of those defendants are still being held in intolerable conditions in the Washington, D.C., jail without bail or visits from their families. They are essentially political prisoners in America.

The article includes the usual spin, failing to mention that the assault on the Capitol began before President Trump told his supporters to peacefully march there and referring to the President’s speech as incendiary.

Again, the article at Reuters is a classic example of a Friday-night news dump. They spun it as best they could, but a well-informed reader will see right through the spin.