WHO ARE LOCAL POLICE AND MEDICAL EXAMINERS IN THE NATION'S CAPITAL TAKING THEIR ORDERS FROM?

Jan. 6 and D.C.’s Political Death Inquests

 

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

 

The Wall Street Journal

March 5, 2021

 
Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Christopher Wray sternly rejected the demands of U.S. senators on Tuesday, indicating that his agency doesn’t know or won’t tell how Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died a day after the Jan. 6 riot or even whether a homicide is suspected. Mr. Sicknick is the one officer said to have been killed in the melee, hit on the head with a fire extinguisher according to the New York Times in a claim since retracted. The District of Columbia medical examiner’s long-completed autopsy results remain hidden from the public but presumably not from the FBI. What is going on here?

 

The case is unrelated in every way to the death in Washington five years ago of Russian oligarch Mikhail Lesin except that it coincidentally intertwines the D.C. police, the D.C. medical examiner’s office, the FBI and Justice Department in a fatality investigation with national or international political implications.

Both deaths are of legitimate public interest, Mr. Sicknick’s for the very reason that the fire-extinguisher claim was advanced by elected officials in the Donald Trump impeachment trial and universally cited in the media as symbolic of the Jan. 6 rampage. Every natural human interest bent toward Mr. Wray’s comments on Tuesday being the newsiest part of his testimony and yet his remarks went widely unreported. The spin you get with the news is one thing, a whiff of news being ignored is something else.

The Russian Lesin was an aide to Vladimir Putin and then his wealthy media catspaw, founder of the Russia Today propaganda apparatus that was subsequently employed to meddle in U.S. elections. Lesin and the regime later had a falling out. Unclear is why he turned up in D.C. in November 2015 from his luxurious exile in Los Angeles. He was expected at a gala but stories in Newsweek, BuzzFeed and other outlets suggested he had an appointment to confer with U.S. authorities about money laundering or Kremlin propaganda efforts.

Eventually a timeline was pried out of officials thanks to the enterprising efforts, ironically, of the U.S. government’s own Radio Free Europe. The investigative findings pointed to a man seemingly engaged in a concerted effort at self-inflicted alcohol poisoning over several days, unrelated to any attempt at having a good time. Lesin had rooms in two separate hotels. He had one visitor and avoided another but their identities were redacted in official reports.

After a two-year legal fight, RFE obtained a copy of the 149-page D.C. medical examiner’s report. It described a pattern of injuries more consistent with assault and “hanging or manual strangulation” than with the final D.C. police and Justice Department determination that Lesin fell down repeatedly while alone in his hotel room.

If a suspicious Putin-connected death occurs in your nation’s capital, it behooves the host government to do something about it even if it might prefer not to. Just weeks after the Lesin death an official report described the British government’s own reluctance to get to the bottom of a Russia-related murder. This column has often referred to the U.S. government’s history of keeping Mr. Putin’s secrets for him.

It’s one thing to bury the facts but another not even to want to find them. An ominous development would be if any politically sensitive death investigation in the nation’s capital now is liable to be manipulated for political reasons, including Sicknick’s. Supposedly, the District of Columbia is a separate entity, not an adjunct of the White House when occupied by a Joe Biden or Barack Obama.

In the Lesin matter, anonymous law-enforcement officials were quoted in the press saying the case was suspicious but, hey, if the responsible authorities don’t want to follow up, end of story. If more such truths are falling through the cracks nowadays, a key enabler is the decline in the number of reporters sitting around looking for something to do. We used to refer eye-rollingly to all the folks at the Boston Globe who were perfectly comfortable, and so were their editors, to see their bylines in the paper once a year. The unbelievably flush news organizations of yesteryear were good for something and that something was not letting interesting questions go unanswered.

If a Mikhail Lesin had turned up suspiciously dead in a Washington hotel room in the lusciously funded 1980s, the Washington Post would have put a team on it. If no answers were forthcoming after six months, the team would be told to take another six months. And it’s hard to believe that at least eight news organizations wouldn’t have been turning over every rock to find out what’s contained in a secret Justice Department appendix to its public report on James Comey’s weird doings in the 2016 presidential race. This latter story is perhaps the ultimate eye-popping case of news not merely slipping through the cracks but perhaps being actively suppressed by today’s lost-soul newsrooms.

Which brings up a disturbing likelihood: The FBI’s Mr. Wray and other servants of the state nowadays realize they have to stonewall only for a day or two. The press will move on because it no longer can afford the time and effort to chase down important truths.