Has anyone ever asked the D.C. medical examiner what the hell he meant about Brian Sicknick's death?

I mean anyone? Anyone at all?

One of the most enduring claims about the January 6 Capitol riot is that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed as a result of the chaos that day. Sicknick engaged with protestors at the Capitol on the afternoon of the sixth, collapsed late that evening, and died the next day, on the seventh, nearly 24 hours later. Wild rumors flew that he had been bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher to the head. The Capitol Police office released a statement hours after his death that he died “due to injuries sustained while on-duty.” Acting A.G. Jeff Rosen said the next day that Sicknick died from “injuries he suffered defending the U.S. Capitol.”

All of that appears to have been false. The D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner subsequently ruled that Sicknick died from natural causes, specifically “acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis,” i.e., a stroke. The medical examiner found no trace of either internal or external injuries on him.

So, okay, the man died of a stroke. It was undoubtedly sad. It sounded like he was a decent guy. But strokes are exceptionally common in the United States. The CDC estimates nearly 800,000 of them every year in the country and calls them “a leading cause of death” here. It’s not at all unreasonable to surmise that Sicknick’s death adjacent to the Capitol riot was merely the confluence of a common fatal medical event with an uncommon political incident at which he was present.

And yet the D.C. Chief Medical Examiner, Francisco Diaz, apparently couldn’t resist himself. This is what he told the Washington Post after his office’s report on Sicknick’s death:

Diaz’s ruling does not mean Sicknick was not assaulted or that the violent events at the Capitol did not contribute to his death. The medical examiner noted Sicknick was among the officers who engaged the mob and said “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”

Um, what? What the hell? What does that mean? “All that transpired played a role in his condition?” Huh? What kind of vague, equivocal, absolutely noncommittal bullshit is that? What exactly are we supposed to make of such a brief, indefinite, completely indeterminate quote like this? The Washington Post didn’t even provide the full quote—they gave us a partial quote! You can’t drop that kind of bombshell revelation in a major news report without giving full quotation on both sides of the remark in question. You have to give absolutely as much detail as possible.

Most importantly, when a source makes that kind of allegation, you have to do a followup. You can’t let that sort of thing just sit on the page. You have to hammer the source for more information, explication, explanation. “What did you mean by that?” “Can you expand on that?” “Can you provide more information?” If the source gives you more information, you have to tell your readers what it was. If he doesn’t give you more information, you have to tell your readers that, too. “Diaz refused to clarify what he meant by those remarks,” etc. You don’t have to do this for every claim made by a source, of course, but you do have to do it for the really important ones, and “this police officer did in fact die because of a highly politically charged and violent incident at the U.S. Capitol” is a really important quote, especially from the medical examiner who performed the autopsy. You gotta dig into that more.

The Post gives no sign that it even asked any more questions about it. And maybe the craziest thing is that, in the two years since that report ran, apparently nobody else has queried the Washington OCME about it. That’s really nuts. That’s kind of insane, honestly. Journalism outlets should be all over this. I mean, well, look, obviously most mainstream outlets aren’t going to pursue this. They want to publish as little actual information about the Jan. 6 riot as possible and instead rely on the heavily political, heavily filtered reports from Democratic committees and Senate press conferences. So you can’t really rely on them. But is it really the case that no conservative outlets have followed up on this either? Or even some of the nominally nonpartisan news outlets that have sprung up and/or become popular in the last decade or so? You’re telling me the Epoch Times and the Intercept have never dug into this?

This is very bizarre. A great deal of political hay has been made about Sicknick’s unfortunate death, and most of it rests on a completely vague and evasive claim by the D.C. medical examiner, one that apparently no major or minor media outlets or journalists have bothered to dig into. Why? Can we get more information on what Diaz meant? Can we get a full transcript of the Post’s interview with him? Can we get a full release of Sicknick’s medical report? Can we just get more questions, more information, more clarity? How have we gone two years without any of those things?