Brent Bozell III, founder and president of the Media Research Center, spoke to Breitbart News Daily after revealing that his son received nearly four years in prison for January 6, while the Justice Department (DOJ) seems to use a lighter hand on activists pushing left-wing causes.
On Tuesday, Bozell wrote an op-ed revealing what happened to his son after staying quiet about it for two and a half years.
“You felt so much pressure on him because of his conservative pedigree…you feared that if you said anything public, it would be used against him during the trial. And so, I kept silent for two and a half years. Now that he has been sentenced, I can speak out,” he said, explaining that his son is “not a political person.”
“His only participation was participating in a prayer group that prayed daily for America. But he was one of those who entered the Capitol,” he said, explaining that he broke two windows on the way in but did nothing else, walking around before leaving.
Support of President Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
“So those were the charges against him. On the proverbial eve of the trial, they hit him with a big one, and we knew that was going to happen, especially if the obstruction charge was dropped. Because if he dropped the obstruction charge, then all you’ve got is people entering the Capitol, just like people enter the Capitol who support Hamas, just like the Code Pink people who disrupt the Capitol, and they would get the same kind of punishment that these people would in a fair judicial system, and that means misdemeanors and $45 fines,” Bozell said, adding, “That’s what this thing would have been had the obstruction charges been dropped.”
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On the eve of the trial, the DOJ hit his son with an assault charge against a police officer, which he said would have been shocking if it were true, as the Bozell family has great respect for the police.
“When you see the footage, it is not to be believed. It is grainy footage from a distance that shows my son on one of the decks of the Capitol standing next to a policeman. He will tell you he was standing and talking to that policeman on and off for two minutes. A crowd started collecting on the steps to his left. When it reached mass size, somebody said, ‘Push,’ or there was something that was said, and the whole crowd, like dominoes, lurched forward. Well, who do they get to at the top of the steps standing next to the cop? My son, who turns and is pushed toward the policeman,” he said, explaining that the “judge himself acknowledged you couldn’t even tell if my son even touched the policeman.”
“So how could that be an assault charge? Well, that’s when you learn that an assault charge doesn’t mean, necessarily, attack. It can also mean impede or interfere. And the fact that he was at the front of the line, he was impeding and interfering with the policemen’s duty — bam. Guilty of assault,” he said, writing in his op-ed that there is other evidence that his son had positive interactions with the police that day. There is footage showing his son “bringing water to an officer suffering from tear gas” and “successfully commanding a menacing rioter to sheath his baseball bat after he’d ignored similar demands from an endangered cop.”
“There exists also footage showing my son helping yet another policeman to his feet after being knocked over,” he wrote.
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But after the conviction, “conviction for an assault on a policeman, obstruction, breaking two windows, and all the other corollary charges, on the eve of sentencing, they hit him with the most incredible charge imaginable,” Bozell said, pointing to “terrorism enhancement.”
“They claim that what he did was an act of terrorism…This man — this father of three, of three girls, who has never had a criminal record higher than a traffic offense — was now to be equated with Osama bin Laden. When they went to sentencing, the judge refused to accept that. They argued and argued for it. He refused to accept it. But then, he pointed something else out: that the prosecution had lied. Deep, deep in the files, he caught something that everyone had missed. In a footnote, he caught the price tag of one of the windows broken — $847. That makes it a misdemeanor, not a felony. So the Justice Department had invented a crime,” Bozell said.
“Breaking two windows — one of them a misdemeanor, one of them a felony — in a just system, he would be charged just like anybody else would be charged — restitution, probation, misdemeanor — because he had no criminal record,” he said, revealing that he got “almost four years in prison.”
“At the same time, you have got thousands upon thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa people who set fire to city after city after city in 2020, burned down, killed cops…$1.2 billion in damage, the highest in history. And yet, there are probably just a handful of people who’ve ever been charged with that. So is this a system of justice?” he asked.
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