Brian Sicknick's Life Doesn't Matter

Not to Trump, and not to the Fraternal Order of Police.

Hard cheese, Officer Sicknick.

The Fraternal Order of Police didn’t have to wait long for President Donald Trump to sell them out. The FOP endorsed Trump in 2024 because he stood by the cops during the George Floyd protests. But within hours of his swearing in Trump issued pardons for all but 14 of the January 6 insurrectionists, and extended clemency to those 14. At the start of this year 80 people had pleaded guilty to felony assault of a police officer, and 76 had been tried and convicted of assaulting, resisting, impeding, and/or obstructing officers during a civil disorder. One hundred and forty police officers were assaulted on January 6, and three of them died in its immediate aftermath, one (Brian Sicknick) from stroke the next day, and two (Howard Liebengood and Jeffrey Smith) by suicide three and nine days later.

Sicknick was attacked with bear spray by Julian Khater. After returning to the district office Sicknick collapsed and was taken to the hospital. He suffered two strokes and died on January 7. Khater was not charged with murder because the D.C. medical examiner concluded Sicknick died of natural causes (though he also said “all that transpired played a role in his condition”). Khater pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and got six years. He will be released shortly from a federal prison in Wisconsin if he hasn’t already. Sicknick’s brother Craig yesterday called Khater’s pardon a “betrayal of decency.”

The FOP tried to avoid saying anything for awhile (my emailed request for comment still remains unanswered), and then finally it issued a joint statement with the International Association of Chiefs of Police saying the two organizations were “deeply discouraged” by the actions of both Trump and former President Joe Biden.

Biden? What the hell did Biden do? Well, shortly before leaving office he commuted the sentence of the 80 year-old the Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who was serving a sentence for killing two FBI agents 50 years ago. Biden also commuted the sentence of Ferrone Claiborne and Terence Richardson, two Black men who were acquitted of murdering a Sussex, County, Virginia, police officer named Allen Gibson 27 years ago but received life sentences anyway for selling crack. Even Gibson’s own daughter has expressed doubt that Claiborne and Richardson had anything to do with his murder. The FOP’s and IACP’s both-sidesing these presidential actions is an act of extreme cowardice. It is also a slap in the face to the families of Sicknick, Liebengood, and Smith.

All this is the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.