A spokesperson for the independent US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr said a passage in a fundraising email that called January 6 prisoners “activists … stripped of their constitutional liberties” was the result of an error by an outside contractor.
“That statement was an error that does not reflect Mr Kennedy’s views,” the spokesperson, Stefanie Spear, told NBC News, which first reported the fundraising email. “It was inserted by a new marketing contractor and slipped through the normal approval process.”
The email, sent by Team Kennedy, asked for “help … call[ing] out the illiberal actions of our very own government”.
It also said: “This is the reality that every American citizen faces – from Ed Snowden to Julian Assange to the J6 activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their constitutional liberties.”
Snowden, who leaked information about National Security Agency surveillance to outlets including the Guardian, has lived in Russia for 10 years. Assange founded WikiLeaks, which leaked US national security information, also to outlets including the Guardian. Jailed in the UK since April 2019, he is fighting extradition to the US.
On 6 January 2021, Congress was attacked by a mob Donald Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his election defeat by Joe Biden, in support of Trump’s electoral fraud lie. Nine deaths are now linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,300 arrests have been made and nearly a thousand convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy.
Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. As the presumptive GOP nominee for president this year, he has called January 6 prisoners “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots” and featured at rallies a rendition of the national anthem by some held in a Washington jail.
Trump has said that if re-elected, he will “free the January 6 hostages being wrongfully imprisoned”.
An attorney by training, Kennedy, 70, is the son of a US attorney general, Robert F Kennedy, and nephew of a former president, John F Kennedy. Though his independent campaign is unlikely to win the White House, he has polled strongly. If elected, he has said, he will pardon Snowden and Assange and “look at individual cases” regarding January 6.
Kennedy has also said Biden presents “a much worse threat to democracy” than Trump, because of supposed suppression of free speech regarding the coronavirus pandemic – a comment Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic and Covid conspiracy theorist, then claimed was deceptively edited.
On Thursday, reporting the Team Kennedy email that called January 6 prisoners “activists”, NBC detailed how just 15 such Trump supporters are being held without having been convicted.
“Most of them are credibly accused of violence against law enforcement officials,” NBC said.
Examples included two prisoners who have killed people, one “charged with setting off an explosive in a tunnel full of police officers” during the Capitol attack and one “charged with conspiring to kill the FBI employees who worked on his case, a plot that allegedly unfolded after his initial pretrial release”.
