… According to charging documents, a longtime activist named Adam Eidinger was among a group that went to the front steps of the National Archives on Jan. 10, climbed ladders to the top of its Corinthian columns and raised a 40-foot banner urging then-President Joe Biden to recognize the Equal Rights Amendment.

After police arrived, six demonstrators were arrested for unlawful entry, similar to the charge that faced 95 percent of Jan. 6 participants. The arrests happened without incident; the activists never went inside the building. “I followed all orders” from law enforcement, Eidinger told me. There were no tasers, bear-spray canisters or purloined metal barriers involved.

In a Washington still haunted by images of a frenzied pro-Trump mob beating up cops and trashing the Capitol, this isn’t exactly the stuff of nightmares. In short order, the offending banner was gone, the original one was back and there was no indication that anything had happened. If Jan. 6 was Mardi Gras, the Archives incident was a sleepy Sunday morning in Lent.

And yet Eidinger, unlike the pardoned mob that stormed the Capitol, still faces the possibility of jail time for this much more sedate stunt just a few blocks away.

In February, Martin’s office let the other arrestees take deferred-prosecution deals that should lead to dropped charges, a common outcome for arrests at demonstrations. Eidinger, with a record of left-wing protests and civil-disobedience arrests, didn’t get the deal. He goes to trial in October.

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