A Capitol Police officer has been suspended following the discovery of antisemitic literature at a security checkpoint at the entrance to a Congressional office building, The Washington Post has reported.
Zach Fisch, who serves as the chief of staff to Democratic Congressman Mondaire Jones of New York, on Sunday spotted a copy of the the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion on a table near the security checkpoint, The Post reported. The tract outlines an alleged secret Jewish plot to take over the world and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, has been used to fan the flames of antisemitism since the turn of the 20th Century.
Fisch took pictures of the antisemitic literature at the Capitol Police security checkpoint, and he gave those pictures to The Post. When the newspaper approached the Capitol Police for comment on the photos, the department announced the suspension of an officer and said there would be an investigation into the matter.
“We take all allegations of inappropriate behavior seriously,” Yogananda Pittman, the acting chief of the Capitol Police, said in a statement to The Post. “Once this matter was brought to my attention, I immediately ordered the officer to be suspended until the Office of Professional Responsibility can thoroughly investigate.”
Antisemitism was among the ugly elements present on January 6, when the pro-Trump mob overran the U.S. Capitol. One widely shared photograph of the insurrection shows a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt. That man, 56-year-old Robert Keith Packer, of Newport News, Va., was arrested in January and now faced federal charges, according to NBC News.
In addition, some Capitol Police Officers were caught on video simply allowing the rioters to walk right into the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. In the wake of Monday’s suspension, Fisch took to Twitter to ask other questions of the Capitol Police:
“Why did that officer feel comfortable leaving this out in the open?
This printout was tattered and over two years old. Had it been passed around?
How many other USCP officers share these beliefs?”
This is both a national security problem and a workplace safety problem.
Our office is full of people — Black, brown, Jewish, queer — who have good reason to fear white supremacists.
If the USCP is all that stands between us and the mob we saw on Jan. 6, how can we feel safe?
— Zach Fisch (@ZachFisch) March 15, 2021
Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the city’s levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregory’s ouster as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, the collapse of Washington’s Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.
