A Capitol Police officer was suspended Monday after a congressional aide saw a copy of infamous anti-Semitic conspiracy reading material near the officer’s workstation.That document was the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the story. The officer, whose name has not been released, was suspended after Zach Fisch, the chief of staff to freshman Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones of New York, spotted the text as he was leaving the Longworth House Office Building.Capitol Police told VICE News that the officer was suspended pending an investigation by the police department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. “We take all allegations of inappropriate behavior seriously,” Acting Police Chief Yogananda Pittman said in a statement. “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.”In a series of tweets on Monday, Fisch described the printed copy as “tattered and over two years old.” He wondered if it had “been passed around.”
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When tweeting about his alarm over spotting the text, Fisch invoked the Capitol riot on January 6, during which some participants wore pro-Nazi clothing. Several Capitol officers are also under investigation for suspected involvement in or inappropriate support of the riot. “Our office is full of people — Black, brown, Jewish, queer — who have good reason to fear white supremacists,” Fisch tweeted. “If the USCP is all that stands between us and the mob we saw on Jan. 6, how can we feel safe?”
Nearly three dozen Capitol Police officers are under investigation for their conduct during the riot on January 6, which left five people dead, including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, and injured more than 140 Capitol Police members. Six of the officers under investigation were suspended with pay last month. Rioters and others have alleged that some Capitol Police officers were complicit. One rioter told the New York Times in January that a Capitol Police officer gave them directions to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office. An officer guarding the Capitol during the insurrection allegedly shook hands with members of the mob, the Washington Post reported in January. And another officer allegedly hugged a member of the mob and said, “It’s your house now.” The Elders of Zion is a racist and anti-Semitic conspiratorial text purporting to document meetings planning for Jewish world domination. It was written and distributed in Tsarist Russia and was debunked in the early 1920s, yet it was still popularized by anti-Semites including Henry Ford and the Dearborn Independent newspaper he owned. It also gained prominence as the Nazis and Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. The Nazis published nearly two dozen editions of it between 1919 and 1939, and it was taught as if it were fact in some German schools during Hitler’s reign, according to the United States Holocaust Museum.