In August 26, 2020, Kevin Phomma was arrested in Portland for assaulting several police officers with bear spray during that city’s nonstop siege by Antifa and Black Lives Matters protesters. Phomma and others surrounded the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, blocked traffic, and fought with law enforcement.
In a press release announcing his arrest, the Justice Department said, “Phomma doused several officers with pepper spray while they attempted to arrest him. Once in custody, officers discovered the pepper spray was in fact a powerful bear deterrent pepper spray.”
Phomma, 26, also had a three-inch dagger in a sheath strapped to his left hip. He was charged with a dozen counts ranging from civil disorder—a felony—to unlawful use of mace. He appears to contribute little to society except for his skills as a professional protester.
A few days after his arrest, Phomma was released on bail. His trial is still pending; his lawyers claim the civil disorder charge is “a vestige of opposition to civil rights for Black Americans.” (He does not appear to be black.)
While Phomma roams free, acting as the aggrieved party rather than the aggressor, the two men who allegedly sprayed officer Brian Sicknick with a chemical irritant on January 6 are not so lucky.
George Tanios and Julian Khater were arrested in March and accused of “attacking” Sicknick with a chemical spray; the indictment, not coincidentally, was filed just a few weeks after the initial account of Sicknick’s death—the murder-by-fire-extinguisher story—was exposed as a lie.
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Unlike Kevin Phomma, one charge filed against Tanios and Khater is “assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon.” Unlike Phomma and his accomplices, Tanios and Khater also are charged with conspiracy for allegedly pre-planning the assault on a federal officer.
Also unlike Phomma, neither man has been able to post bail; a federal judge last month agreed with Joe Biden’s Justice Department to keep the pair behind bars awaiting trial. D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, a Reagan appointee, even rejected a $15 million bond package backed by 16 relatives of Julian Khater—an amount three times higher than the court-ordered bail for Harvey Weinstein, as one reporter noted.
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Since they didn’t get the Kevin Phomma treatment, Tanios and Khater, like dozens of Capitol defendants, now languish under solitary confinement conditions in a D.C. jail specifically used to house January 6 detainees. Neither man has a criminal record.
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Those accusations, on their face, are preposterous. Barrier lines, mostly made of bike racks, already had been crossed by the time Tanios and Khater arrived and neither man entered the Capitol building. If their intent was to help the mob siege the building, why didn’t they go in?
Further, the government’s evidence against the men is inconclusive if not nonexistent. The FBI investigator in charge of the case couldn’t give a clear depiction of how the spray was used or prove the chemical hit any of the officers, including Sicknick. Also, it wasn’t bear spray.
Videos purporting to show the assault do nothing of the sort, in fact, the cherry-picked clips should work in favor of the defense since there is no proof Khater used the can of spray or that its contents hit officer Sicknick. (Tanios is not accused of spraying the chemical but faces the same charges as Khater; the pair also have been charged with conspiracy.) Moreover, unless we accept the word of the government, it’s not even clear that the officer in the video actually is Brian Sicknick.
Again, not coincidentally, the government released its selective footage a week after the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office finally released a long-delayed autopsy report on Sicknick. The officer, age 42, died of natural causes, a stroke caused by blood clots near his brain.
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More:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/28/...-persists-alleged-attackers-languish-in-jail/
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/arc...-persists-alleged-attackers-languish-in-jail/
