Where Did They Get Rasputin?

The more I dig into the QAnon Shaman case and the surrounding issues, the more questions I have. The iconic image of the January 6 whatever-it-was is the one above, with Mr Chansley, shirtless, screaming at the ceiling next to some guy who looks like Rasputin as a Capitol Police officer remonstrates in a gesture that brings the viewer right into the scene. But let's ask a few questions. We now know that for several minutes, two Capitol Police officers escorted Mr Chansley to the Senate chamber -- and in most of those vignettes, Mr Chansley is alone with the officers as they progress through the empty halls.

In fact, more detailed accounts of their progress indicate that the officers escorted him through a maze of corridors and up two flights of stairs to get to the Senate chamber. And all of this is captured on adequate, though not well-lit or high-quality, video. Let's briefly reprise the photo from yesterday's post.

The more famous photo, unlike the security footage, is well-lit and remarkably well-composed, and there's a whole new character, Mr Rasputin, standing next to Mr Chansley. Although Mr Chansley himself is behaving like an utter wacko, nevertheless he's standing in a tightly composed tableau, taken by someone with a media-quality camera. This is not security footage. Who took the photo? By Capitol Police Lt Johnson's account, the Senate chamber had been evacuated by the time Messrs Chansley and Rasputin got there.

And where did Mr Rasputin come from? We know from the security footage that he didn't arrive with Mr Chansley. Escorted or not, he took an entirely separate route.

Another photo of the QAnon-Rasputin tableau suggests that again, it was tightly composed and tightly cropped, and the participants may well have been shepherded into place by the photographer. Here, Mr Rasputin is doing the raving, while Mr Chansley remains quiet, almost at loose ends. Are they following the photographer's instructions?

But this photo, from a wider angle, shows a few additional nerdy middle-aged guys who didn't suit the narrative and were cropped out of the final version with QAnon doing the screaming. In any case, the wider angle shows fewer than a dozen people in the entire scene, with several being Capitol Police officers, and a row of listless guys lined up in front with various props, posing in docile fasion for the photographer.

I noted the other day that Jonathan Turley perhaps unintentionally remarked that Mr Chansley might as well have been sent in by Central Casting. Mr Rasputin could have been his understudy, but once the photos were reviewed, he didn't give scream as well as Mr Chansley, so he wound up just a bit player, a little like the Apostle Jude at the Last Supper. It's hard not to conclude that there were several takes that led up to the final version of the famous photo.

Some guy named Mike Miller at Red State gives the current conventional wisdom on the January 6 events:

Let the gratuitous attacks begin, but the entire pretense that the whole thing was peaceful is flawed.

Barricades were broken down, windows were smashed, threats to “hang Mike Pence” were made, and untold numbers of protesters forced their way into the building.

So if I’m the undermanned Capitol Police inside that building, and these people are already inside, what am I supposed to do? Start arresting them, leading to an escalation of what was occurring outside? Or, attempt to diffuse the situation by allowing those already inside to walk around at will, while remaining with them to assure no further damage? I’d pick “b” every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Miller treats the whole day as if it were a single event. But what we see here isn't "untold numbers of protesters". We have fewer than a dozen people, one of whom (and I'm sure by no conicidence the most bizarrely dressed) was quietly escorted into something that looks very much like a photo session, where at least one photographer said, "Stand here -- can you maybe wave your arms? Thanks! (Click)", and the rest look bored. Somebody picked those guys out of the crowd and took them inside, if indeed they weren't selected for their roles even earlier. Miller thinks this is the storming of the Bastille:

[I]f these people are already inside the building, do the Capitol Police stand their ground in front of the Senate chamber doors, or do they continue attempts to de-escalate? (Pick “b.”)

Agsin, as an OP: Live fan, I see de-escalation all the time. De-escalation is when an officer chooses to stick with a taser instead of drawing his firearm. De-escalation is not appeasement. If they're trying to de-escalate a domestic dispute, they spend a lot of time urging one partner to spend the night in a motel and leave the volatile situation -- they don't just let the pair go at it again. The officers -- like the blonde guy in glasses at the top of this post -- are posing for photographers, not de-escalating anything.

I could certainly be mistaken, but the bottom line so far seems to be that the existence of security footage that contradicts the prosecution narrative, combined with the increasing likelihood that it was withheld from the defense, will turn out to be a massive embarrassment for the government. But it's still worth asking whether this was a burning of the Reichstag type moment.