Gastonia, NC Correspondent — January 6 was ugly, illegal, and a gift to every camera in the country. Whether it was domestic terrorism depends on whether the noun means anything or just means a crowd we dislike on a day we can use.

A coherent priority would have found the word in 2020. A police precinct burned in Minneapolis. A federal courthouse in Portland took a siege that ran for months. A section of Seattle was surrendered and two people were killed inside it. Those had organization, munitions, and duration, and the coverage discovered the word “mostly.”

I want ordinary criminal law applied to the sixth. Trespass, assault, destruction of property. People who beat officers should be prosecuted as people who beat officers, and a fair number of them are being.

What I don’t want is a standing ideology office that skipped a summer of attacks on federal property and then found the category in January. If the same statute doesn’t reach two streets, it isn’t a doctrine. It’s a jersey, and jerseys don’t deserve permanent staffing.

Owatonna, MN Correspondent — Domestic terrorism is a specific thing for a reason, and the reason is planning, a campaign, and a design to coerce a population.

A mob that became a breach after a rally is a riot and a scandal of crowd control. The summer before it was a crime wave on a calendar rather than an afternoon. One got a directorate and one got a sociology.

That asymmetry is the whole answer. A coherent priority would have named organized violence against federal facilities while it was happening in front of everyone with a mayor describing it as speech.

Prosecute the people who broke a window or an officer’s face. Don’t launder a date into a theory of the country that requires forgetting May through August.

I won’t sign a category that can’t survive tape from both years. Tape from both years exists.

Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — This coast watched both on the lobby television. One was months and one was an afternoon, and you can guess which one produced the new federal architecture.

I’d put the objection narrowly. If a season of attacks on a federal courthouse wasn’t domestic violent extremism, then the phrase isn’t a threat category. It’s a filter.

Charge the sixth as what it was — a riot that got inside a building it shouldn’t have gotten inside. Charge the arson from the summer under the arson statutes that already existed and mostly weren’t used.

What worries me about the language is where it goes next. “Insurrection” as a casual noun for a failed rally-plus-breach is how the vocabulary ends up at a school board meeting in two years.

Dayton, OH Correspondent — A shop floor knows a broken window, and it also knows when the company writes up only the shift it already wanted to fire.

Stretching domestic terrorism over a riot that lasted hours, while a two-month siege of federal property was a protest environment, tells half the country that the law is a team. Teams don’t get tips. Tips are how you stop an actual bomber, and there was an actual bomber that morning who has never been identified.

That’s the practical cost of the label. It isn’t abstract. A category that half the country reads as aimed at them is a category that stops producing the phone call you need.

Charge the offenses on the tape. Don’t build furniture around a noun that requires amnesia.

Tyler, TX Correspondent — East Texas watched the tape like everyone else, and what’s on it is two things at once.

Part of it is a genuine fight. Officers were injured badly and the tunnel footage isn’t ambiguous. Part of it is a perimeter that didn’t hold — barriers opened at one entrance, officers ceding ground in front of a crowd they couldn’t have stopped with what they had.

Both are true, and the second one is the part the terrorism framing can’t absorb. The Capitol Police chief testified in February that he asked for Guard support before the day and was told there were concerns about how it would look. The Sergeant at Arms he named denied it under oath. The Senate report last month found the board that makes that decision was dysfunctional and the intelligence never got where it needed to go.

That’s a security failure, and a security failure is a different object from a coordinated campaign. It doesn’t pardon a man who punched an officer. It complicates a noun that requires an assault on a defended building.

Then put up the split screen with a summer of sieges nobody categorized. Charge the crimes. Skip the founding legend.

Las Vegas, NV Correspondent — A house that wants a room secured posts a line and staffs it. What I saw was a thin line and a building surprised by a crowd it had spent four years calling uniquely dangerous.

Some of that video is a brawl and I won’t pretend otherwise. Officers got hurt. Some of it is a barrier being moved aside.

By spring the chief’s testimony was public — he’d asked for more and hadn’t gotten a clean answer, and the man he pointed at disagreed with him on the record. The Senate’s own report in June said the board structure didn’t work. That’s not a fringe theory. That’s the committee’s finding.

None of it makes a baton on an officer legal. It makes the terrorism stamp a stretch, because the stamp needs a perfect victim building, and the building declined the extra fence.

Add the summer they won’t stamp and you have a category selected rather than derived. Keep the ordinary charges. Drop the war noun.

Knoxville, TN Correspondent — County people have now seen both sets of pictures and they can hold both.

The legal story of the day is that people committed crimes and a lot of them are being prosecuted for it. The political story can’t be that the complex was stormed like a fortress that did everything it could, because the record doesn’t support that. The chief said he asked for help and didn’t get it. The Senate committees found the security apparatus was broken before anybody arrived.

Under-set perimeter plus real violence is a riot that was allowed to become worse than it had to be. That’s bad. It isn’t a war.

What makes this a label rather than a priority is the comparison. The office didn’t open when a city surrendered a grid or when a federal courthouse took a season of nights. Season versus afternoon is the hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is why nobody here believes the category is about violence rather than about which crowd.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — I’ll take this from the charging side, since that’s where I spent ten years, and I think the facts help part of this table’s argument more than the argument they’re actually making.

There is no federal domestic terrorism charge. There’s a definition in the code used for sentencing enhancements and for allocating resources, and there are terrorism statutes that require a foreign nexus or specific predicates. A prosecutor cannot walk into court and charge somebody with domestic terrorism, because Congress never created the offense.

So look at what was actually charged. The large majority of January 6 defendants face misdemeanor trespass and disorderly conduct. A much smaller group faces assault on federal officers, civil disorder, and obstruction of an official proceeding — real felonies with real exposure. Almost nobody has been charged with anything approaching a terrorism theory, and the Department has not sought the enhancement broadly.

That undercuts the loudest version of the rhetoric. The prosecutions look like what this table says they should look like: crimes, charged as crimes.

Where I’d part from the room is on the conclusion. The rhetorical inflation is real and I’d criticize it. The prosecutions aren’t the inflation, and I’d be careful about treating a speech at a podium as evidence of what’s happening in a courtroom, because in this instance they aren’t the same thing at all.

On the analytical office: I’d want a threat assessment that names organized violence against government facilities regardless of the politics of whoever is committing it. We didn’t have that in 2020 and we don’t obviously have it now.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — Allies are asked to take American domestic-threat language seriously, and I’d tell you plainly that this year has made that harder.

January 6 looked from here like a riot that shamed a capital, and shame is real. It isn’t the same as a terrorism campaign, which has duration and cells and a program.

What makes it read as a label from outside is the sorting. A summer of sustained attacks on federal facilities was analysed as a social phenomenon and an afternoon was analysed as a threat category, and the sorting tracked the politics of the participants rather than the conduct.

I’d add a caution from our own experience. We have expanded proscription powers over the past two years, and the expansion was justified by pointing at genuine right-wing extremist networks that do exist here and are being monitored for good reason. The expansion has also been used more broadly than it was sold, which is the normal life of these instruments.

Charge the crimes. Build a threat picture that names fire on a federal door regardless of the chant. Anything narrower will be discounted by your partners, and discounted bulletins are worse than no bulletins.