A federal jury yesterday convicted four Proud Boys of participating in a seditious conspiracy aimed at keeping Donald Trump in office after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Those verdicts, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut argues in an MSNBC opinion piece, show that the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol was "an organized, violent uprising meant to overturn the 2020 election." According to Aftergut, "It's now established beyond a reasonable doubt that the Capitol siege was not spontaneous, but rather a planned assault by force on our democracy."
There are a couple of problems with that characterization. First, the prosecutors in this case, who relied heavily on questionable inferences, never showed that the defendants explicitly planned to disrupt congressional certification of Biden's victory. Second, it seems clear that most of the Trump supporters who participated in the riot did act spontaneously, a point that Aftergut glides over.
