A new adviser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee compared Capitol Police to white supremacists in a series of tweets on January 8, two days after mob of Trump supporters breached the building and forced lawmakers to evacuate.
Dyjuan Tatro was hired as the DCCC’s Senior Advisor of Strategic Outreach for its Diversity and Inclusion Department on February 3, almost a month after posting the comments. Tatro made his statements while arguing against an increase for the Capitol Police budget, in a tweet thread saved by Fox News in a screenshot.
“From 2000 to 2021, the Capitol Police budget soared from $115 to over $500 million. If anything, Wednesday’s events are an argument to #DefundThePolice. More & more money to the Capitol Police, over 20 [years], didn’t prevent a mob from taking the Capitol,” Tatro wrote. “The answer to white supremacists storming the Capitol is not to give more money to a different group of white supremacists who’s [sic] job it is to uphold white supremacy.”
The head of the Capitol Police union, Gus Papathanasiou, said in January that 140 officers from Capitol and Washington, D.C., police were injured defending the building from rioters. Two officers committed suicide in the wake of the attacks.
Tatro compared reforming police to reforming Nazism in a tweet in June, following massive protests and riots in response to the death of George Floyd, an African American man killed during his arrest by Minneapolis officers.
“To all those people who want to reform the police because all cops aren’t bad, should we just go ahead and revive Nazism because all Nazis weren’t bad? I didn’t think so. Case closed,” Tatro wrote at the time.
Tatro also described looting as a “vital form of social protest” on Twitter in August, responding to comments from another user calling for police reform as well as condemning violence.
“I don’t understand why you can’t CONDEMN VIOLENT POLICE [and] acknowledge LOOTING as a VITAL form of social PROTEST,” Tatro wrote at the time.
National Review has reached out to the DCCC for comment.
Tatro is a former member of the Original Gangsta Killas, a street gang from Albany, N.Y. Tatro was sentenced to prison for shooting two rival gang members as well as participating in a racketeering conspiracy, the New York Post reported.
While in prison, Tatro obtained a bachelors’ degree via the Bard College Prison Initiative, which gives incarcerated individuals the opportunity to earn a college education. Tatro was freed in 2017 and was featured in a PBS documentary about the Bard Prison Initiative, and was part of a debate team that defeated Harvard undergraduates in 2015.
Tatro “has served his time for the crimes he committed and is now a national leader in the bipartisan movement to reform our criminal justice system and bring meaningful improvements to the education system in American prisons,” a DCCC spokesman told the Post.