The medical examiner’s office in Washington, DC, on Thursday revealed that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died of “natural causes,” debunking yet another false narrative promoted by Democrats.
Sicknick’s cause of death was confirmed to have been a stroke, as had been reported for several weeks in conservative media.
Initially, the New York Times had used anonymous sources within the Capitol to claim that Sicknick died of injuries sustained during the Jan. 6 uprising, a mostly peaceful breach of the Capitol during the joint session of Congress to install Democrat Joe Biden as president.
Democrats—who likely fed that false narrative to the press—then used it as the justification for an exceedingly harsh response, including a second impeachment effort against former president Donald Trump. Biden’s Justice Department continues to indefinitely detain hundreds of participants on federal charges.
The Times and other outlets had backpedaled on their premature claims when it was revealed that Sicknick’s brother had spoken to him after the events at the Capitol and he reported to be fine.But that didn’t stop House Democrats from promoting the lie heavily during their public Senate trial for Trump.
“It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died,” noted libertarian critic Glenn Greenwald. “That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol”.
Rhetorically the Left linked the event to historic atrocities such as Kristallnacht, the night in which German Nazis began their formal persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Democrats including Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., whose exhortations of violence earlier this week resulted in police in Minnesota being fired on, appeared poised to receive a free pass from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Likewise, the New York Times and other media, whose failure to properly do their due diligence as journalists had the harshest of implications on a deeply divided country, seemed unlikely to learn its lesson.
The development marked the second time in a week that the Times was debunked over a major story attacking Trump that relied on anonymous sources.
The Biden administration acknowledged late last week that claims about Russia offering the Taliban bounties for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan was false as Biden mulled his own possibility of withdrawing troops from the two-decade war there.
