This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
The federal government's orchestrated "shock and awe" campaign against the Jan. 6 protesters is over, with President Trump's pardon or sentence commutations for some 1,500 or 1,600 people targeted by Washington.
But it may be rebounding against the FBI and other agencies that participated.
"The shock may be gone for these defendants, but it may only be beginning for the Justice Department and the FBI," warned constitutional expert Jonathan Turley.
The federal government essentially had admitted it wanted to scare and intimidate Americans after those protesters gathered in Washington on that day and objected to what they viewed as a skewed president election.
Evidence later confirmed their concerns, as the $400 million plus that Mark Zuckerberg handed out to election officials who often used it to recruit Democrat voters was revealed as an undue influence.
Further was the undue influence of the FBI's decision to interfere with the results. That bureau claimed, falsely, that the Biden family scandals uncovered in the laptop computer Hunter Biden abandoned were Russian disinformation, when they all were true.
But while most of the protesters simply walked into the Capitol building and later left, some acted on their rage, vandalizing and even physically confronting police and security.
The government responded with a campaign to scare as many Americans as it could.
Turley explained, "Four years ago, the Justice Department set out to send a chilling message to the nation. In an interview with CBS News a year later, Justice Department official Michael Sherwin indicated that they wanted to send a message with the harsh treatment of defendants."
Sherwin had confirmed, "our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe … it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they're, like, 'If we go there, we're gonna get charged.' … We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did."
The DOJ did this by keeping people in prison for offenses like trespassing. Government lawyers insisted that defendants be kept behind bars, sometimes in gruesome circumstances, for years awaiting trial. Then they enhanced charges and demanded lengthy prison sentences.
Turley confirmed the widespread opinion that those who engaged in violence should have been arrested and punished.
But he said the "excessive treatment of some of the January 6th defendants undermined the credibility of their prosecutions for many."
"The Justice Department rounded up hundreds and, even though most were charged with relatively minor crimes of unlawful entry or trespass, the Justice Department opposed the release of many from jail and sought absurdly long sentences in some cases," he said.
He cited the case against "so-called QAnon Shaman."
