Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - March 11, 2024


Ep 965 ｜ The January 6th Journalist Arrested for Exposing Truth ｜ Guest： Steve Baker


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 14 minutes

Words per Minute

162.32216

Word Count

12,037

Sentence Count

751

Hate Speech Sentences

3


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 January 6th, a day that will live in infamy for many reasons. Yes, there was unjustified
00:00:08.640 violence and trespassing that occurred at the Capitol that day, but it also marks the beginning
00:00:14.420 of a new era of justice in the United States, the kind that criminalizes peaceful protest,
00:00:20.980 unacceptable beliefs, and dissenting speech. With us today is Steve Baker, a journalist for
00:00:26.680 the Blaze who was there on January 6th documenting the events that unfolded that day and who has
00:00:32.600 since put together pieces of a really disturbing puzzle that puts the potential corruption of the
00:00:38.560 DOJ, the FBI, and the Capitol Police in the spotlight. On March 1st, Steve was arraigned
00:00:44.360 before a federal magistrate accused of crimes allegedly stemming from events at the U.S.
00:00:49.880 Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and today Steve is joining us to detail the humiliating ritual
00:00:56.480 that he was forced to go through during that arraignment, the questions that he is still
00:01:00.760 working to answer regarding January 6th, and also the effect that this has all had on his life,
00:01:07.000 on his mind, and his spirit. You will be left with many questions yourself as well as many answers
00:01:14.500 about what really happened that day, but I think most of all you will be impacted positively by
00:01:20.900 Steve's courage. This episode is brought to you by our friends at GoToRanchers. Go to GoToRanchers.com.
00:01:25.500 Use code Allie at checkout. That's GoToRanchers.com, code Allie.
00:01:38.460 Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. You've been doing a lot of interviews
00:01:43.080 the past few days. Wow. I've been keeping up with all of it, and I just, I appreciate you
00:01:48.740 and the courage and the clarity that you have in talking about your story, so let's back up.
00:01:56.060 Let's go to, first of all, why did you decide to become a full-time journalist? That's what I want
00:02:03.420 to know. You know, it's a, let's just call it a late in life reinvention, or maybe I'm just a late
00:02:11.060 bloomer. I don't know. You know, writing has always been an interest of mine. You know, my editors may
00:02:19.180 not think so. They think I'm a good storyteller, but I write differently than what's expected for a
00:02:27.200 major publication. You know, I cut my teeth, you know, even as a kid, my favorite thing was
00:02:34.880 British literature. I just was consumed with that, that and science fiction. And so, I've experimented
00:02:43.040 myself telling stories like that over the years. I've always been a full-time musician and a, or in
00:02:51.880 the music business in some manner or the other, either as an artist management, concert promotions,
00:02:58.240 et cetera, et cetera, or as a performing musician. And so, that has always had the captain's seat in
00:03:05.140 my life, and the other was always a hobby. Then the internet came along. You see, I was around when
00:03:12.740 the internet came along. You weren't. But, but it was, it, it started out, we had this new format to
00:03:20.240 exercise that other, other talents or gifts, those of us who like to write. So, there's a lot of
00:03:25.860 amateur writers that were, that were stretching out with the advent of Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL.
00:03:32.700 All of that became MySpace. I actually started my first blog using the MySpace platform and my first
00:03:40.580 political blog. So, I actually had my personal page. I had my band page. I had my personal private
00:03:47.420 musician performance page on MySpace. And I finally launched my political page. And I established
00:03:53.980 that identity and started building a following there. Then, of course, it was, gosh, by 2008 or
00:04:02.020 something like that, pretty much everybody was leaving MySpace and all going to Facebook. And Facebook
00:04:07.440 had their own blog platform called Notes back then. So, I had the same thing, personal pages. I had
00:04:13.420 three or four different bands. I had all my band pages. And then I had my, my political page and where
00:04:19.600 I would do commentary, analysis, things of that nature. And, you know, as time went on, it began to grow,
00:04:25.680 began to take root. And, you know, it went from 1600 to 16,000 and then bigger than that, you know.
00:04:34.680 And then, then you start adding on the other social media sites as well. So, by the time COVID came
00:04:43.180 around and the government took my actual job away from me, because over those years, my, my hobby had
00:04:52.440 become basically my side hustle, the writing part of it. But music was still my primary source of income.
00:04:58.680 And I had several streams of income during that time, all dependent upon live performance.
00:05:04.180 Right.
00:05:04.920 The bands that I was managing, my own bands. I had three bands of my own.
00:05:10.660 All of that was taken away. And so, I was suddenly put in a position where after two weeks to flatten the
00:05:19.500 curve became two months that I went, all right, I'm going to buy all the podcast stuff. You know,
00:05:26.340 so I did. And I, I bought, you know, all the gear and then I, um,
00:05:31.460 You're just a creative person. Always looking at, you need an outlet, which I can relate to.
00:05:36.280 Yeah. And there, there, there certainly was that. And, and I made, actually made the decision. I
00:05:44.220 announced to the tens of thousands of blog followers that I had that I was moving this
00:05:52.180 to the captain's seat of my life. And I was going to move my career to the co-pilot seat because I
00:05:59.040 had no idea how long this was going to be two weeks, two months, or two years to flatten the
00:06:03.460 curve. Or if we were ever going to get it back again, if we would ever normalize or just descend
00:06:08.160 into some dystopian nightmare, you know, uh, at the end of this, I didn't know. Um, but I had a lot
00:06:14.080 to say about it. And so myself and another friend of mine, actually a, uh, a colleague, uh, very close
00:06:20.500 friend of 30 years and a very great writer who's written, uh, for some big names, um, both as ghost
00:06:27.560 writer and doing other things. Uh, he and I decided to actually work on a COVID book together and he was
00:06:34.220 going to do more of the political side of that. I was going to cover the hard, you know, nuts and
00:06:40.480 bolts, investigative side of that, get into the, you know, the nitty gritty. And, and, uh,
00:06:46.480 we began working on that in earnest. And one of the things that I decided to do during this time
00:06:52.120 was because I have that, I have this investigative instinct that I got from my dad, who was a private
00:06:57.280 investigator. That's a whole nother long story. And I used to work for him when I wasn't traveling
00:07:01.220 with bands, I would, you know, I would work with him on his operation. And so I began to travel
00:07:08.380 all over the country during the lockdowns. I actually traveled to 28 States during the lockdowns
00:07:14.660 to meet with, I was doing meetups with my blog followers. Uh, but obviously I was asking questions.
00:07:22.000 I wanted to know what their experiences were. I wanted to know how many people in their own life
00:07:27.140 had either been dramatically affected by COVID-19 if they had had family members or people that they
00:07:32.740 were close to that died. And so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm collecting data for our story and for our book at the
00:07:38.140 time. And one of those trips had been an extended two or three month trip. And I got home just in
00:07:47.080 time for, um, new years on, uh, what would be new years of 2021. All right. So we've been locked down
00:07:55.800 for 10 months effectively at this point. And president Trump had announced that there was something
00:08:03.420 going to be happening, going to be happening, something wild happening on January 6th and that
00:08:09.540 he would have, he would be speaking. And so my close friend who I was working on the COVID book
00:08:15.380 with, who also lives in Raleigh, we decided to go up and cover the event for whatever it was,
00:08:21.220 not knowing what it would become.
00:08:23.240 So you really had no idea.
00:08:25.080 No, no idea.
00:08:25.760 What it was.
00:08:26.740 Oh, and I announced, I announced to my, my blog followers, I said, I, I was anticipating actually,
00:08:33.700 you know, cause there, there had, there had been this notion. Um, I think it was first floated,
00:08:38.160 uh, by Sidney Powell, uh, one of Trump's lawyers that they were going to unleash the Kraken.
00:08:44.340 Yeah.
00:08:44.620 Remember that?
00:08:45.240 Yeah.
00:08:45.640 And the Kraken never came. And so I'm thinking, okay, if it's going to come, it better come on
00:08:50.080 January 6th.
00:08:51.140 Yeah.
00:08:51.540 If at all, ever.
00:08:52.620 Yeah.
00:08:53.620 And I'm not a Trump supporter. Never was. And so this was, you know, I'm just an observer.
00:08:58.220 You just wanted to know.
00:08:58.780 Yeah. I mean, I'm politically libertarian. Um, I, uh, in 2016, I voted for Gary Johnson,
00:09:05.580 libertarian party in 2020. I did vote for Trump, but I voted for him to block what I knew was coming
00:09:11.340 from the Biden administration. Uh, I mean, you know, I was not going to waste my vote on that.
00:09:17.320 And I decided, and I announced again on my blog that I was going to January 6th to see
00:09:25.620 what was going to happen.
00:09:27.160 What's the Kraken?
00:09:28.080 So I took my camera, my tripod, my man on the street microphone, and all I intended to do
00:09:35.640 was document whatever was said from the stage. If there was something significant at all,
00:09:40.300 and then to get people's impressions on the side of the street, you know, on the street
00:09:43.860 corners and sidewalks as they were, uh, were there, had no idea how many people were going
00:09:50.180 to be there in my gut. I just, I had a feeling cause it was on a Wednesday and it was in winter
00:09:57.600 in DC. It was cold, 25 mile an hour wind. I'm thinking 30, 35,000 people. That's what I thought
00:10:04.820 would be there.
00:10:05.860 I had no idea that hundreds of thousands of people on a work day would show up. And in fact,
00:10:12.260 standing in the Washington Monument lawn, as I did 360 camera views of this overwhelming number,
00:10:20.400 I've never been in a sea of so many people in my life. And I remember asking my, my friend,
00:10:27.500 I said, do you think this many people are here on a work day, a Wednesday in the winter because
00:10:37.100 they've been displaced because of COVID? Or do you think that there's something else going on?
00:10:44.780 Because it seems hard to believe, you know, depending upon where they came from in the country,
00:10:49.040 it might take, this is a two day commitment, you know, for, for myself, it was a two day commitment.
00:10:54.020 I just lived four and a half hours away from DC. And if you've had to fly across the country,
00:10:59.520 it's almost a three day commitment to do that. And, and he said, you know, he's looking around and he
00:11:05.740 said, I don't know. It may be a combination of all that, but it turned out it was a combination
00:11:10.580 of the frustration that people were feeling. And I'm not talking about just about the disputed
00:11:17.120 election fraud claims and things of that nature, but people had been, they've had their lives
00:11:23.720 disrupted. And this was, again, not something I anticipated, the powder keg that that was.
00:11:30.720 And that's what, you know, started thing. Actually the powder keg of the people's frustration didn't
00:11:37.760 start this. There were provocateurs there to launch this. And then when you can use mob mentality and
00:11:45.900 you can fire them up, then you can create a scenario that they did eventually create, you know,
00:11:52.360 later in the day. But we can get into that as much as you want to.
00:11:56.680 Yeah. I want to play some footage, some of your footage from when you recorded in the Capitol.
00:12:03.020 This is shot one.
00:12:19.020 Okay. So this is footage. You can see you just, uh, just filming there. And as this was happening,
00:12:27.580 as you were going from the rally where president Trump made his comments and you noticed that
00:12:33.080 people were going to the Capitol, people were going in what was going through your mind at the time.
00:12:38.560 At that moment right there. Yeah.
00:12:40.880 Well, there's a lot of things that led up to that moment that were surprising and unexpected.
00:12:45.580 Uh, not only the violence and the, uh, the, uh, the blood, uh, the, uh, tax on law enforcement that I saw,
00:12:53.260 uh, coming from the other side, the illegal use of what they call less than lethal, um, weapons to,
00:13:00.560 to try and disperse with the crowd. They weren't just using them illegally. They were using them
00:13:06.600 immorally. I mean, against their training. Um, and so I'm, I'm documenting all of this before
00:13:13.220 the crowd ever broke through up to the upper terrace and then eventually breached that door.
00:13:18.820 None of which I saw, I was down documenting what was happening on the lower West Terrace.
00:13:23.840 And then when hundreds of people started moving through this open door, I had no idea how that
00:13:28.560 door was open or how it was breached. It's just, it was open. Cops were now standing down. Uh, they
00:13:34.660 were, they were not inhibiting the flow of people going in whatsoever. I made the decision to document
00:13:40.620 what was happening to follow the story where the story went as I had done up to that point in the
00:13:46.500 day, except this time the story went inside the building. And you had a sense at this time that,
00:13:51.620 wow, this is phenomenal. Like not in a good way, but something is happening. Yes. Yeah. And,
00:13:58.860 and really and truly you don't, I say, I'm not a riot chaser. I mean, there, there were young,
00:14:06.100 you know, 20 something year old riot chasing journalists that do this all over the country.
00:14:12.500 And they especially got good at it during the BLM riots of 2020. I don't do that. That's not my
00:14:19.100 thing. And I don't ever want to do that again. Um, but well, I shouldn't say, but as a result of not
00:14:27.480 having that experience, I was really in two frames of mind, get as much of this own film as you can
00:14:36.240 get. Cause this was, this is important and stay safe. I had to, I got, I had to avoid, um, police
00:14:44.800 launching pepper spray into the crowd with these big tanks of it, you know, the high, you know,
00:14:48.860 like, like super soakers. Uh, and then, and then, and then the, the, the, uh, flashbang grenades that
00:14:55.260 were being launched into the crowd, tear gas grenades that were being launched in the crowd.
00:14:59.380 I got hit by one of them. It landed about three feet, um, to my right detonated, exploded in the
00:15:06.200 shrapnel from it, hit me in the side of my knee. And I had a bruise there for six months. And,
00:15:11.600 but there were people that got hit in the head by the people that were shot in the face by rubber
00:15:15.940 bullets penetrated. Um, they, they were, it was, uh, horrible use, but these cops were scared too.
00:15:26.380 They didn't know. And I, in fact, one of the stories that I wrote about the Capitol police
00:15:32.020 is I tried to get the audience to understand from their perspective, what they were seeing. Can you
00:15:37.500 imagine you showed up as though it was just another day at work and no Intel has been passed down
00:15:45.940 to you from Capitol police leadership. That's, that's the interesting part of that story is why
00:15:51.620 were these frontline officers not informed about what was coming when they knew what was coming.
00:15:57.140 Right. And so all of a sudden these unprepared frontline officers, they're, they're not looking
00:16:03.960 at me standing there with a camera or the other cameraman, or even the persons that were striking
00:16:08.260 at them with sticks or flagpoles or whatever. They're looking over my shoulder and seeing tens of
00:16:14.820 thousands of people advancing in their direction. And they have no idea if these people are armed.
00:16:20.320 They have no idea. And they literally to a man or a woman didn't know if they were going home that
00:16:26.540 day. Right. They had no idea. Yeah. Many of those officers who I've interviewed both unnamed and
00:16:32.840 whistleblowing sources that we've brought, you know, in to help us develop our stories here at the
00:16:37.360 blaze. Um, they called, they called their wives and said, please tell my kids I love them. Yeah.
00:16:44.220 I don't know if I'm coming home. Yeah. Um, but when you get up to the door itself,
00:16:52.340 what was I thinking again, by then there's no violence. Okay. It's all calmed down and the,
00:16:58.320 and the police are standing off to the side. It's just this long, thick line of people going in the,
00:17:03.100 the door. So the violence that you saw was outside the door. Correct. And that was police trying to do
00:17:10.440 everything they could to keep people from coming in. And then did it seem like the police just
00:17:14.760 decided, all right, we're not going to be able to stop all these people from coming in. So I guess
00:17:19.100 we're just going to let them, but people were just kind of trudging forward into the Capitol.
00:17:22.960 Well, by our investigations, we now know exactly what happened because we have access to the Capitol
00:17:27.900 police radio comms. And we know that just right at two o'clock, give or take a couple of minutes,
00:17:32.860 there was an actual pullback order and, and they were afraid at that time that the building itself
00:17:38.700 was going to be breached. So they issued a pullback, unfortunately, because of the crowd noise,
00:17:45.220 the chanting, the singing, the explosions, all the things that were going on. A large number of those
00:17:50.380 Capitol police officers never heard those pullbacks, but the ones up in the upper terrace did. So they
00:17:56.300 pulled back. And that's why that line basically was easily breached at that point. And then these people
00:18:01.980 could get to the door and start the process of busting out windows and jumping through the
00:18:06.460 windows, coming around and unlocking that first door, what they call the Northwest Senate wing
00:18:11.620 door. And then once that door was breached and people were coming through the windows and that
00:18:15.400 door, hundreds of people started flowing throughout the Capitol and opening doors all through the
00:18:21.140 Capitol. And they facilitated the breach. The cops did not facilitate the breach, but they did
00:18:26.140 do their best to deescalate. We've seen pictures and photos and videos of them holding
00:18:31.940 doors open. I can tell you authoritatively, because I've had access to all this video,
00:18:36.740 cops never opened those doors for the protesters. Protesters went through those first breaches,
00:18:42.800 spread out through the building, opened six other doors. And then sometimes we would see cops holding
00:18:49.340 the door open. And even sometimes we can hear them on audio saying, I don't agree with this,
00:18:53.880 but you guys, you know, please behave yourself, you know, as people are filing in.
00:18:57.220 Um, it was for their own safety, basically that they deescalated that, um, rather than continuing
00:19:05.200 the violent attempt to prevent people from coming in. But, but, and that's a complicated scenario,
00:19:12.220 but then, then once inside, I'm not witnessing any violence. Was there violence that did happen
00:19:18.840 inside? Yes. I never saw the violence happen inside. I was never in that area where that was taking
00:19:24.740 place. I did witness some property damage. I actually documented on my own camera when they
00:19:30.540 took the speaker of the house sign down Nancy Pelosi. They actually, I can see them not using a pole or a
00:19:37.060 flagpole or something and, and knocking it off of the, the arched entryway into her hallway where her
00:19:42.340 offices are. Uh, I see the, I capture the sign falling and then they, they start breaking the sign
00:19:48.640 into splinters and handing it out the pieces as souvenirs. So I did see some of that. And, and as I said,
00:19:54.740 I caught it on my own camera, uh, the, the moment you asked me about in, in, uh, that video that you
00:20:00.940 just showed that was taken in the crypt. And this was a just, I mean, just hundreds of people piling
00:20:07.020 in there and it was, you know, elbow to elbow and every single passageway hallway, uh, room that I
00:20:14.820 got into my first endeavor was to get up and above the crowd. So you, what you saw there was me getting
00:20:21.320 up on a bench so I could document what was happening, not participating, not chanting,
00:20:26.440 not singing. They were, they sang the song, the national anthem. They chanted whose house,
00:20:31.980 our house stopped to steal USA, USA. Those were the three big chance of the day. And I would always
00:20:38.200 get up above it, never joined in with any of that. And then you saw at the very end there,
00:20:42.520 I'm actually leaning against the wall. Um, this was right outside of the, uh, house of representatives
00:20:47.600 chamber. People were piling in, trying to get in the door. They were trying to bust that door open
00:20:52.500 to get inside. And by the way, there were still Congress members in there at the time that they
00:20:56.620 were doing this that had not been evacuated yet. And so I didn't know that, but I, um, based on what
00:21:04.160 I had already seen, what I'd already witnessed, I felt like I needed to write some notes down. I needed
00:21:08.300 to get some texts out to people. And so I stopped, actually set my, uh, my, um, backpack and tripod and
00:21:15.340 all that on the floor and leaned up against that wall for, I think it was four and a half,
00:21:19.300 five minutes and something and took a bunch of notes, sent a couple of texts out. And then,
00:21:23.840 uh, while I was doing that, the Capitol police released tear gas at that crowd there. And if
00:21:31.240 you, if you saw that, uh, video that we released yesterday morning, if you watch the whole thing,
00:21:35.880 you can see suddenly that crowd almost disappears in that cloud of gas. And when it, and when the gas,
00:21:42.000 um, starts to disperse a little bit, you can see me going, where'd everybody go? I was caught so off
00:21:50.140 guard. And then another thing that I learned that I, because I'm not a riot chasing, you know,
00:21:56.220 reporter is that, uh, when you are caught up in an event like that, especially if you're not prepared
00:22:02.800 for it, your mind and your memory is Swiss cheese afterwards. The things that I have seen
00:22:10.480 from my own video. And then the things that I've seen, once me and the blaze team were able to go
00:22:16.220 to the Capitol and harvest this Capitol CCTV video of me, I'm like, you don't even, I don't even
00:22:22.780 remember it. Right. And there's places that I went, I don't even remember being there.
00:22:26.420 I remember watching it as it was happening, or at least shortly after it was happening on January 6th,
00:22:45.940 2021, and just being spontaneously brought to tears because the things that I saw, I mean,
00:22:52.800 it did at the very least look barbaric and chaotic and yes, some violence, some people obviously trying
00:23:00.760 to shove their way into the Capitol, the, you know, the attempts by police to mitigate as much of the
00:23:08.680 craziness as they possibly could. And it kind of just was a moment as a bystander of thinking, what in the
00:23:16.000 world is happening to this country? Obviously knowing, as you described it as a powder keg, there had been a lot
00:23:21.380 attention, a lot of questions, a lot of disappointment, and a lot of distrust from the public. And so it's
00:23:31.360 not like it was all that surprising that something like that would happen, but to see it in front of
00:23:36.940 your face, at least from the vantage point that I had, I mean, I thought, wow, this is the end of
00:23:42.980 something. I don't know what or the beginning of something, but this is, does feel like a new stage.
00:23:49.960 Now, I'm not sure if that was the correct assessment, but it has certainly created
00:23:55.440 a new era of American so-called justice. And that has also been appalling to me over the past couple
00:24:03.460 of years. And you are included in that. Now you are in legal trouble for the reporting that you
00:24:09.940 have done. So tell us a little bit about that.
00:24:14.320 Well, the view from 30,000 feet is this, because this is a complicated journey and it's been
00:24:21.840 over two and a half years. It's obviously been over three years since January 6th, but it was in
00:24:26.480 July of 2021, just six months later that I got my first phone call from the FBI. Now I had been
00:24:33.920 expecting it at any time because not only were they arresting people that went in, but they were
00:24:41.180 interviewing journalists. So when I got the first call, I'm not necessarily a hundred percent sure
00:24:46.520 that this is an investigation into me or if they want my observations or if they want me to turn
00:24:51.040 over my videos. I'm not a hundred percent, but once my attorney started negotiating with the FBI as far
00:24:58.520 as the dates and we began to kind of get a sense that this was, they were actually looking at me for
00:25:03.000 some reason. Um, then my interview actually took place in October of 21, um, with two FBI agents
00:25:11.920 and my attorney. And then it was a month later of the week before Thanksgiving of 21, my attorney got
00:25:19.600 an email from, uh, an assistant U S attorney who said to him that his client would be charged within
00:25:27.100 the week, meaning me. And it actually included a felony charge at the time. The felony charge was
00:25:33.780 laughable, but nevertheless, uh, uh, scary. They were going to charge me with interstate racketeering.
00:25:41.300 Wow. Now nobody else in January 6th, there's been over 1300 arrests so far in January 6th cases.
00:25:49.540 Nobody's been charged with interstate racketeering. The only way that they could prove that or assert that
00:25:54.500 was they were going to make an allegation that somehow I had, I had, I, for it to be racketeering,
00:26:00.040 I had to have foreknowledge that an illegal event was going to take a place, take place across state
00:26:06.060 lines. And that I went there with the intent of profiting from the illegal event. The profit was from
00:26:14.040 the licensing of my videos because HBO, New York times, um, other, I actually had an agent. Um, so there
00:26:22.060 was my videos were licensed and I did make some money off the, off of that as is the norm with
00:26:29.080 journalists. Right. Right. So, so that was a big stretch. We were able to say that you had to have
00:26:34.960 known that something illegal was taking place. You did know something was taking place, but they
00:26:41.260 claim that you knew that it was illegal, that you crossed state lines to make money off of this
00:26:45.600 illegal activity that you knew was going to happen. That was, that was the only way they could make
00:26:50.740 that. Was your attorney shocked? We were laughing about that charge. We were laughing about it. They
00:26:56.760 also, now the scene you showed is very interesting because it has something to do with that first,
00:27:01.540 uh, threat of prosecution was in the crypt room when I got stood on a bench and stood up above the
00:27:08.060 crowd. Who knows or who knew? I certainly didn't know that, but in the code of federal regulations,
00:27:14.320 just the very act of standing on a piece of furniture in a federal facility is a crime,
00:27:24.400 a misdemeanor. It's property damage, even though you don't damage the property,
00:27:28.860 even though there's no damage whatsoever, the act itself is a misdemeanor offense.
00:27:34.740 And they were going to charge me with that as well for that very scene that you just showed right
00:27:37.940 there. Um, we were able to back them down. Um, we did a media offensive back in, uh, the week of
00:27:45.960 Thanksgiving and for whatever reason, we have no idea. Uh, we didn't hear from them again for 20
00:27:53.120 months. They just went away. So a media offensive in that you shared your charges on social media and
00:27:59.220 you made a big deal of it. Yeah, we, we issued a press release to about 200 media organizations,
00:28:03.820 you know, uh, newspapers, television, uh, podcasts, radio, blah, you know, we, it was full on. I was
00:28:12.100 doing dozens of interviews again, then about the threat. And then, uh, for whatever reason,
00:28:19.160 they decided I was too much of a pain in the butt or something. And somebody took my file.
00:28:23.900 That's the only thing that's only because we don't know I'm conjecturing right now. I don't know what
00:28:28.200 happened behind those closed doors or at the conference tables at DOJ when they were looking at my
00:28:32.860 case, but we kind of feel like that they just said, this guy's a, you know, a real pain.
00:28:37.880 So at that time they didn't charge you. They just told you, this is what we are going to charge you
00:28:41.380 with. And then they didn't after you made a big deal with it. The exact quote to my attorney was
00:28:45.660 your client is going to be charged within the week. And then they listed the charges. Right.
00:28:51.680 And then we didn't hear from them for 20 months. So now we're into 2023, summer of 23,
00:29:00.160 and I'm in negotiations with the blaze because they know what stories I'm working on. And, uh,
00:29:08.840 I've been in negotiations with, uh, our editor in chief here for about a month. And then suddenly I
00:29:16.520 get a grand jury subpoena for my videos, which we had offered cooperatively voluntarily to the FBI
00:29:25.020 20 months before, but they didn't take it then. So there's only two reasons. Either this was,
00:29:33.740 well, first of all, it was an unnecessary grand jury. If they just wanted to see my video
00:29:37.800 grand jury subpoena, but grand juries, unfortunately are not seated for misdemeanor offenses. Grand
00:29:46.200 juries only investigate and look at felony offenders. So this was rather ominous.
00:29:54.300 And the fact that they came out of nowhere after 20 months of silence, I kind of felt like after 20
00:29:59.880 months, they had decided, okay, we don't, we want to, we don't want to fight the fight of a first
00:30:04.880 amendment battle with a journalist, but it was very suspicious. The coincidental timing,
00:30:11.640 um, that right when I was in negotiations with the blaze to come on board as a correspondent,
00:30:18.360 that suddenly I got a grand jury subpoena. Yeah. And, uh, and that's what happened. And then
00:30:25.380 again, through my attorney, we voluntarily or cooperatively, I should say, uh, complied with
00:30:30.960 the subpoena. We handed over all my video and then we didn't hear from them for another four months.
00:30:36.560 Then they popped up again in December, the week before Christmas, uh, saying that, uh, I needed to
00:30:43.460 self-surrender in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I live the next week. Well, by now I'm with blaze
00:30:50.880 and the whole machine went into high gear. And within 24 hours, we backed them down again
00:30:57.880 with the media offensive. Just the press, the publicity, all of the shows, both the, you know,
00:31:04.120 the blaze, uh, TV shows and hosts, uh, all the outside press that we did, um, uh, within by the,
00:31:11.860 by the close of business of the next day, they contacted me yet again and said, okay, well,
00:31:18.940 we're not going to do this till after, um, Christmas sometime. And then we didn't hear from
00:31:22.600 them for two more months. Yeah. So the gap between not hearing from them was, was getting, you know,
00:31:27.840 shorter and shorter. It was 20 months and then it was, uh, four months. Then it was two months until,
00:31:33.080 as you know, about a week and a half ago, I got the notice that, um, this was the big one and it's
00:31:39.220 time. And, um, we want you to self-surrender. And then they took, uh, the, the nearly unprecedented,
00:31:47.940 um, action of, even though it was only, they, they, they apparently couldn't impress upon the grand jury,
00:31:59.060 whatever felony they were wanting because they only got, came back with misdemeanors. So whatever,
00:32:05.900 whatever felony the grand jury was looking at, the grand jury must've said, even a DC grand jury went,
00:32:10.440 no, don't think so. Yeah. So they came back and told my attorney that it would only be misdemeanors.
00:32:15.780 But even though it's only misdemeanors, we want Mr. Baker to show up on Friday morning,
00:32:22.620 March 1st in, and I quote, t-shirt shorts and flip-flops. Yeah. And that is for the purpose of
00:32:34.760 humiliation. What do they say the reason is for that? They didn't give a reason, but we knew what
00:32:39.660 it was. Uh, first of all, it would, it was obvious that it was to facilitate. I just assumed that they
00:32:45.300 were going to put me in an orange jumpsuit. I'd be able to easier, just slip the jumpsuit over the,
00:32:49.180 you know, uh, that, uh, I had already anticipated that there would be, uh, shackles and leg chains,
00:32:56.760 uh, because they had done that to other, uh, misdemeanor defendants in the J6 community.
00:33:02.300 They've also done it to other independent journalists, um, that full, you know, orange prison
00:33:08.240 jumpsuit and shackles, and then march them in front of the magistrate that way for their arraignment.
00:33:13.980 And this is for, this is literally for standing on a piece of furniture,
00:33:18.640 texting for a few minutes. Although they did not charge me for that. They actually didn't. I got
00:33:23.840 the same four basic misdemeanors that all the low level January 6th defendants get. Um, the first one
00:33:31.540 is what I call the glorified trespassing charge entering and staying in a restricted building.
00:33:35.480 The second two are actually redundant. They accuse you of, um, abusive and loud speech
00:33:42.060 inside of a restricted area and then inside the Capitol building. So they, they hit you with the
00:33:46.280 same exact charge twice. And then the fourth one is the really, um, absurd it's called picketing and
00:33:54.180 parading in a, you know, in a Capitol building. Obviously I was not picketing or parading, which is
00:33:59.240 why we rolled out this video yesterday to show that, that we had harvested from the Capitol CCTV
00:34:04.800 to show that I wasn't wearing any Trump paraphernalia. I wasn't wearing any political
00:34:09.200 speech at all on my clothes, hat, scarf, jacket, nothing. And, um, I, uh, uh, certainly didn't
00:34:18.060 carry a flag or I didn't chant. None of the things that that charge applies to, but see, this is what
00:34:23.620 the department of justice does is they specifically purposefully, and this is not just January 6th.
00:34:30.140 They do this in other cases as well outside of that realm, but they always overcharge,
00:34:37.860 egregiously overcharge for the purpose of scaring you into either a plea deal or a plea deal that
00:34:45.820 accompanies you becoming a quote unquote cooperative witness against whoever you might've been there
00:34:50.640 with. And, and, um, and so that's, that's just modus operandi for, for the department of justice
00:34:57.640 anyway. But with January 6th defendants, uh, it's, we've been able to watch the pattern as it develops
00:35:04.320 because we have had three years to watch this. And of course, because I've been covering many of
00:35:09.300 these trials and many of these cases, and I've read hundreds of these charging documents, I pretty
00:35:14.240 well knew what was coming my way, but what we did not, um, and which, for which I will never forgive
00:35:21.740 them and for which we will go after them, uh, with great guns legally. Um, uh, I have to say that
00:35:30.300 you have to clarify, you know, and I say go after somebody with great guns nowadays. Um, the, uh,
00:35:36.680 this notion that they punished me in the manner they did by the humiliation tactics, there was no doubt
00:35:44.100 that they were in fact retaliating against me for the stories that we've developed and that I have
00:35:49.940 been rolling out here since being at the blaze, uh, as well as things that I did before I was here.
00:35:55.320 Uh, I've been poking as my, I asked my attorney, why are they doing this to me? And he said,
00:35:59.300 this is my lead attorney. And he's been with, he was 20 years, over 20 years, a federal prosecutor
00:36:05.000 himself. He was an assistant U S attorney. And I said, Bill, why are they doing this to me? He said,
00:36:10.740 you know why you've been poking them in the eyes for three years and they're getting you back.
00:36:16.000 Yeah. So rather than me getting just a simple order to appear on nonviolent misdemeanor charges,
00:36:24.100 showing up in my suit and tie with my attorney and his suit and tie and sitting in the gallery of the
00:36:30.520 magistrate's courtroom and waiting for my number to be called to go up and be arraigned for those four
00:36:36.640 misdemeanor charges. They chose to have me surrender to an actual arrest by the FBI.
00:36:45.980 at their field office, at which time they did not put me in the orange jumpsuit. They took my
00:36:51.640 shoelaces. They took my tie. They took my belt and my jacket away from me. I was able to wear my
00:36:56.840 shirt and my pants. And then you didn't show up in the uniform that they wanted you to. I did not.
00:37:03.200 The flip flops and the shirt in the shorts. It was kind of your own way of protesting for your own
00:37:09.780 dignity. That's it. I said, I'm not giving up my dignity for this. Yeah. And, and so I dressed
00:37:19.480 as I deemed appropriate and with a hundred percent support from all six of my attorneys
00:37:26.420 in so doing, two of my attorneys, uh, accompanied me, um, blaze accompanied me. Um,
00:37:34.640 my editor in chief here, camera crew, reporters, and others from outside of the blaze, uh, were there to
00:37:43.480 cover. And after I surrendered my belt, my shoelaces, my tie and my jacket, I walked over,
00:37:51.020 I shook hands with the two FBI agents. They took me inside, did the search, pat down,
00:37:56.000 fingerprinted me, uh, put handcuffs behind me with my hands behind my back in the most uncomfortable
00:38:04.740 position possible. They could have cuffed me in the front. They didn't have to come be cuff me at
00:38:10.100 all, but I guess, I suppose once you're there and you're in the situation, that's what they have to
00:38:14.920 do. And then they marched me out for my perp walk in front of the cameras and took me to a car, uh,
00:38:21.480 where they transported me then to the, uh, courthouse, the federal courthouse and handed me
00:38:27.080 over to the U S marshals. And it was the U S marshals who then put me in leg chains, belly chains
00:38:34.540 with my wrist cuffed to my belly and my, uh, shackles on my ankles and, uh, then put me in a
00:38:42.400 cage with a meth dealer. Wow. And so where I sat for a couple of hours before my hearing began,
00:38:48.520 and then they did the most humiliating thing they could have done is in front of my colleagues
00:38:56.840 and friends that were there and my attorneys, they marched me in with felony defendants,
00:39:06.480 one in the jumpsuit, um, drug dealers and marched me in with them, uh, in leg chains.
00:39:16.300 Wow. Then what happened from there?
00:39:20.720 I was first up. So, uh, went up and went through the, you know, the legal proceeding, you know,
00:39:26.440 it's, it's, it's all, um, pretty template stuff at that point. Uh, there was no motion from the
00:39:31.940 government to detain me. They could have, they've done it before. Uh, so there was no, uh, request
00:39:37.340 from the federal government to have me sit out either the weekend or just be permanently detained
00:39:41.980 pretrial. Um, so once all of that was established, they took me back out again and I took me back
00:39:49.120 to my cage and then it got interesting because by now the U S marshals knew I wasn't supposed to be
00:39:56.820 there. And the U S marshal that took me back upstairs, he said, he goes, look, let me get you a cell by
00:40:07.700 yourself. And he did. So he took me over a little further away, got me a private cell by myself. So I
00:40:13.780 didn't have to be holed up with drug dealers again. Right. And then, um, I had to wait, uh, a few minutes
00:40:21.700 for some paperwork to come up from the court. Then he took me back into the processing room where they did
00:40:27.420 electronic fingerprints, the mug shots, all of that. And I will not use the language he used on your
00:40:35.900 show, but he looked at, he looked at the paperwork and then he looked at me and he said, this is BS.
00:40:43.300 Of course he said the full word. And I said, yeah, it kind of is. He says, and you, you want to know
00:40:51.500 what is even bigger BS? I said, what's that? He said, the fact that Trump is not paying for all of
00:40:59.100 you guys legal fees. Right. He said, I've had you, he said, you cannot believe how many of you guys I've
00:41:05.400 had to process through this thing. And so, um, they finished up, uh, that I had to go back and sit in
00:41:12.240 the cell for a few more minutes. And then finally, um, they had all the paperwork they needed to release
00:41:18.260 me. And they, they let me go, took the chains off, took me downstairs. Uh, and, uh, it was,
00:41:25.180 it was a world, it's been a whirlwind since then. You know, I walked straight across the street from
00:41:29.540 the courthouse, right onto a live TV show. And it's been that way ever since.
00:41:33.220 So your lawyer noted the disparate treatment that you have gotten versus other journalists. There
00:41:51.900 was a freelance journalist who published a lengthy story about January 6th, just a few days after it
00:41:56.700 happened. And he was nominated for a Pulitzer. Um, I don't think you have been quite yet. Um,
00:42:03.080 so why, why is that specifically, you mentioned you've been poking them in the eye for three
00:42:09.780 years. What exactly does that mean? I got really, well, obviously after being at the event on January
00:42:18.540 6th, I'm now curious about all things related. I've not devoted to it in, in the manner that I have been,
00:42:25.700 uh, in, in recent months or especially for the last year and a half. Um,
00:42:32.080 I wasn't even as devoted to it, even after my initial threat of being charged,
00:42:36.860 what happened was, is that I was still working on my, you know, COVID book with my coauthor,
00:42:43.700 which by the way, uh, you know, January 6th kicked the chair out from under that project.
00:42:50.060 But as my curiosity about the cases, and I began to see what the justice department was doing
00:42:55.740 and doing to other people things in a manner that they had never done before in the history of,
00:43:01.640 American jurisprudence, uh, like for instance, the FBI in their hundred plus year history,
00:43:09.980 never investigated misdemeanor cases. Never. It's not what they do. Kyle Serafin wrote a great
00:43:18.180 article, uh, op-ed for the blaze. And in which he said, you know, he said, when I got hired by the FBI
00:43:24.480 and became an agent, he said, they, they don't, we don't deal with the small fish. We go after the
00:43:29.460 whales. And he said, suddenly January 6th, we're not only being tasked to go after
00:43:37.220 nonviolent misdemeanor grandmothers or young couples or whoever that took a selfie inside the
00:43:45.540 Capitol. And we're in there for 10 minutes, but they're requiring us now to swat them
00:43:50.320 at 6 30 in the morning with guns up on nonviolent misdemeanor. It's something we've never done in
00:43:56.680 the history of this agency. Everything changed January 6th. Not only that, but more egregiously
00:44:04.400 in the grand scheme of things, they're pulling these agents off of real crimes. They're specifically,
00:44:12.320 uh, FBI whistleblower, Steve Friend taken off of child trafficking cases to go arrest
00:44:19.180 grandmothers that took a selfie in the Capitol and maybe chanted the three horror words of all USA,
00:44:26.560 USA, USA. And he's, he said, I'm not doing that. Not only, not, not only is this against everything
00:44:34.520 that we're supposed to be, we're violating our own handbook in doing so. And he became a whistleblower.
00:44:41.280 And of course, not only him, but many others. And, and so you then go to the department of justice
00:44:49.500 itself, which is the over, uh, writing agency above the FBI. And they're the ones sending down these
00:44:56.520 instructions. And of course, the department of justice is, they answer to the Biden administration.
00:45:02.440 So this is coming from the top, the way they are treating. And as we've seen before in so many other
00:45:08.080 instances, it doesn't matter if they, if they're targeting Catholic groups, it doesn't matter if
00:45:12.780 they're targeting abortion, uh, clinic protesters. It doesn't matter if they're targeting, um, uh,
00:45:19.360 remember Merrick Garland famously issuing a threat against the parents. They're protesting
00:45:25.960 at school board meetings, literally calling them terrorists, domestic terrorists. Well, so this is
00:45:33.420 what they have done. They've created an entire new class. So not only is your speech at a school
00:45:39.060 board meeting, make you a domestic terrorist, but now that's almost, it feels like there's this new
00:45:44.200 class of misdemeanor terrorism related to January 6th. I mean, there is no such thing. There is no such
00:45:52.060 law, but that's the way they're treating us. That's the way they talk about us. There are even judges
00:45:59.440 who have let it slip in the courtroom in January 6th cases who have called them terrorists in their
00:46:06.680 pretrial hearings. Right. Two of the stories that you're asserting kind of embarrassed or the blaze has
00:46:14.740 asserted embarrassed the DOJ had to do with oath keepers and their perjury. And then also the DNC
00:46:21.900 pipe bomb. Yeah. So the consequences that you are detailing, the humiliation that you had to endure
00:46:28.280 has come after these two stories where you are kind of poking holes in the official DOJ narrative of how
00:46:35.580 things have gone. And your lawyer is asserting, yeah, they just didn't like that. And so they are
00:46:41.200 retaliating for your journalism. It doesn't really have to do with what you did on January 6th,
00:46:47.600 which we all saw was just reporting. It has to do on the content of what you are reporting, right?
00:46:53.980 That's exactly what it is. You know, obviously, I have been following as much of the news and
00:47:02.880 commentary about my case as I can. And one of the things that I've been most interested in is how many
00:47:08.980 like legal affairs podcasts and writers are specifically talking about how almost blatantly
00:47:19.400 obvious this is retaliation in their viewpoint because of the stories that I've been working on.
00:47:25.060 Because see, taken on its face, if we're talking about me having a scent, you know, as an investigator
00:47:34.500 of potential perjury of a couple of federal officers in January 6th trials that resulted
00:47:43.420 in the conviction imprisonment of several people, not only were we able to prove that conclusively
00:47:51.560 by virtue of my access to the Capitol CCTV viewing room, that's just the surf, that's just what we see
00:48:01.320 on top. You see, these officers didn't choose to perjure themselves on their own. These two officers
00:48:08.120 didn't get together in a back hallway somewhere at the Capitol and make up a story. We have the
00:48:13.920 evidence of how the story was put together and who put them up to it, which will be coming. And they
00:48:18.740 know it's coming. And our sources inside the DOJ said all the way back as early as February of last
00:48:25.320 year that they were terrified of what I was working on because they know this goes to the heart of them.
00:48:31.320 These officers, these federal officers, won a special agent on the dignitary protection detail
00:48:36.900 for Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House. You think he decided to risk his entire career
00:48:44.140 by going in front of a courtroom in a jury in D.C. and telling a story that was not only false,
00:48:51.440 but one that could not have happened because what he claimed to have witnessed in the Capitol,
00:48:57.040 he couldn't have seen. He was in another building. And we found him on Capitol TV at that time.
00:49:03.200 And this is Lazarus?
00:49:04.440 David Lazarus. Special Agent David Lazarus.
00:49:07.180 Yes.
00:49:07.600 So when you find things like that, well, it rattles the cage of the people who put them up to these
00:49:19.360 false testimonies. Then you get to the pipe bomb and you start showing the actual cameras that would
00:49:28.700 be used to document and aid in the investigation are being purposefully redirected away from the scene.
00:49:37.120 And we've now found three of them. I only revealed two in our video reveal. We've now found a third.
00:49:41.960 Actually, Joe Hanneman from the Epoch Times, he called me up all excited. He says, hey,
00:49:45.800 I found a third camera turned away. I said, you're kidding me. So we now have three cameras turned
00:49:49.900 away from this event. Allie, that's cover up.
00:49:54.240 In case people don't know, two pipe bombs were said to have been discovered outside the RNC and
00:49:59.060 DNC headquarters in D.C. on January 6th, 2021. So just in case people didn't know what you meant
00:50:06.140 by pipe bomb.
00:50:06.840 Yes. And we found these cameras that were supposed to be locked on a crime scene.
00:50:15.760 Somebody in the command center, six blocks away at the command center of the Capitol Police
00:50:22.940 were ordering those cameras turned off of that scene. And this was a scene where when it began,
00:50:30.840 Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was in the building only feet away. Her motorcade drove 15
00:50:37.440 feet from the bomb itself. And that raises so many other questions that we've asked in our video
00:50:44.960 series. And so when we start asking questions, it's because we intend to find those answers.
00:50:51.680 And again, the people who know the answers don't want to be exposed.
00:50:54.900 Hmm. It raises a lot of questions about how this all originated and how it's been perpetuated over
00:51:02.060 the past few years. And what is the ultimate goal? I mean, I can tell you, again, just as a bystander,
00:51:08.320 the trickle-down effect for people in my audience is, well, you should never go to a protest. You
00:51:13.920 should never go to a rally because you don't know what it's going to turn into. And you might think that
00:51:18.640 you're an innocent participant exercising your First Amendment rights. Well, I'm never going to talk
00:51:23.880 about the things that DOJ don't want me to talk about. I mean, it's just a way of intimidating
00:51:28.600 you. I mean, I know that that is at least one effect, one chilling effect to all of this, that
00:51:35.100 most people at the end of the day are not willing to sacrifice their safety, their family, their
00:51:41.940 livelihood to write about something, to poke the DOJ bear, or to even protest. I'm not defending the
00:51:51.080 people who pushed their way into the Capitol, but it does send a message to the regular conservative
00:51:58.820 American, you can be conservative, don't speak up about it, and don't ask questions that we don't
00:52:04.980 want you to ask. Well, you're very perceptive because this is the ultimate effect, and it was the ultimate
00:52:13.880 purpose of what happened on January 6th was that chilling effect, to throw a wet blanket over
00:52:21.720 freedom of speech, over the First Amendment, to frighten all Americans away from using their
00:52:31.960 right to bring their redress of grievances to the Capitol, but not just the Capitol. We mentioned
00:52:39.940 earlier, school board meetings, abortion clinics, anywhere else. They're creating an entire class
00:52:47.600 of domestic terrorists, and the overriding evidence of this, and I've reported on this,
00:52:55.900 and I've even gotten MSM colleagues, we'll call them. Mainstream media. Mainstream media colleagues
00:53:03.940 to admit to admit to it in private to me, they'll never write about it because they won't be allowed
00:53:09.700 to by their editorial staff, to say that when these people are convicted and then they're sentenced,
00:53:19.000 if there was speech involved at all, that's what causes their sentencing to be more severe.
00:53:27.840 Hmm. And people that are living in D.C., these legal affairs journalists that cover every one of
00:53:37.280 these trials, I mean, they work literally out of the courthouse. I don't work out of the courthouse
00:53:41.120 in D.C. I have other things to do, but those who are there every day and cover all these trials,
00:53:46.300 they have all said, yeah, yeah, you're right about that. Yeah. And so if you were just a grandmother
00:53:55.620 and you walked into the rotunda at the Capitol and took a selfie and you were in there for 10
00:54:00.540 minutes and you didn't chant or you didn't sing or you didn't wave a flag, then you came out,
00:54:06.200 you got arrested, maybe you got swatted, maybe you don't, but the point being is, is that when you
00:54:12.780 negotiate your plea deal, you get your two years probation, a $2,000 fine, 100 hours of community
00:54:18.380 service, and then you get to go try to rebuild your life. Right. Because you lost your job,
00:54:23.520 you got kicked out of your church, you know, whatever clubs you were in, they've disassociated
00:54:27.880 from you. You're a pariah in your neighborhood. You no longer can pass anybody on the street
00:54:33.080 when you're walking your dog and say hi anymore. That's what they've turned you into. You are,
00:54:37.540 you are literally a domestic terrorist as portrayed by your local hometown newspaper
00:54:42.300 and television stations for taking a selfie in the rotunda. Okay. But if you're the same person
00:54:50.000 and you walked into the rotunda and you took a couple selfies and you chanted and you sang and
00:54:55.760 you waved your flag, or maybe even worse, when you got back home, you did a Facebook live and go
00:55:01.540 jokingly, I stormed the Capitol yesterday. Oops. I hope you didn't say that. Yeah.
00:55:09.420 Because then you get, instead of two years probation, you get two months, six months,
00:55:15.120 eight months, 10 months in prison. I think what a lot of people see,
00:55:32.580 and yet it doesn't make it any more comfortable realizing the double standard, it actually just
00:55:40.260 makes it even more chilling when you see that, okay, the DOJ is going to go after one kind of
00:55:45.780 speech, one kind of so-called writing and not another. It's not just an attack on the First
00:55:51.840 Amendment. It's not just an attack on free speech. That would be scary enough. Yeah. It's scary that
00:55:57.140 it's some kind of speech. If you want to express your anger at the injustice of systemic racism
00:56:05.360 and literally stage an insurrection in some ways and burn down buildings and say that you are a
00:56:13.460 terrorist, basically, is what a lot of these left-wing extremist groups do, then probably
00:56:18.960 nothing is going to happen to you, at least on a federal level, in many of these cases. I think the
00:56:24.720 scary part is that it's some free speech, a very certain kind of category of free speech that is
00:56:32.380 not allowed. That, to me, is the even more intimidating aspect of this.
00:56:39.200 It's far worse, and we have multiple examples of that as well, even among journalists. The first
00:56:45.180 person arrested out of the panhandle of Florida, his name was J.D., or he is J.D. Rivera, and he's a
00:56:52.320 professional videographer, photojournalist, was under contract by a mainstream television station out of
00:56:58.320 Mobile, right across the bay from Pensacola, Mobile, Alabama. He traveled up. He carried all
00:57:04.340 of his expensive gear, you know, his big, bulky, expensive camera gear with him, all of that. He
00:57:09.040 went through the exact same broken window that the freelance journalist for the New Yorker you
00:57:14.760 mentioned a while ago, Luke Mogelson, went through. They basically paralleled each other through the
00:57:19.680 Capitol, doing their jobs. Luke was doing his job. J.D. was doing his job. J.D. never chanted,
00:57:26.060 never sang, never waved a flag, but behaved himself professionally as a journalist while he was in
00:57:32.640 the building. He exited, drove home. A couple of days later, he swatted for the four basic
00:57:41.600 misdemeanors by 25 agents with guns drawn on him, his wife, his children, and they had visiting
00:57:49.040 family relatives. Now, what did he report that made him so dangerous? He hadn't even had a chance.
00:57:55.140 This was in the very, very early days. J.D. They were afraid of what he might have said.
00:58:00.040 J.D. Might have said, might have seen, might have caught, whatever. But this was what his crime was.
00:58:04.400 It wasn't even that, because he hadn't even had a chance to report anything yet.
00:58:08.740 His crime was, is that he had been an activist since the early days of the first Trump campaign
00:58:14.960 in Latinos for Trump movement. So they did not arrest him, swat him, charge him for his journalism.
00:58:24.680 They denied him the right to even present the fact that he was a journalist and he was there for
00:58:30.720 legitimate journalistic purposes. Instead, they were, they arrested him for who he was, not even for his
00:58:37.800 speech on the day, but for his activism in politics prior, because what they deemed is that this showed
00:58:44.620 his intent was actually not to be there as a journalist, but to there to be there as part of
00:58:50.620 the mob. And that's the big quote in all these charging documents. He was there to participate with
00:58:56.240 the mob.
00:58:57.720 And that's probably what it was for you too, at least in the beginning, right? Because this was before you
00:59:03.100 even worked for the blaze before they knew what you would be reporting on. I mean, I know that you
00:59:07.480 said that you weren't a Trump supporter, but you had voted for Trump. You are a libertarian, which they
00:59:11.300 also don't like. You were writing about COVID, which they also don't like. So don't you think that was
00:59:15.780 probably part of the motivation for you?
00:59:18.040 My second article about January 6th was published on February 24th of 2021, six weeks after the big event.
00:59:27.300 And the title of that article was who was up the chain on January 6th. And in that article,
00:59:32.380 I already had an idea of who put this thing together. And I had already started putting
00:59:39.020 the pieces of the puzzle together. I was also the first journalist to reveal that army special
00:59:43.740 forces had been embedded in the crowd. For what reasons, I don't know. And it was 10 months after
00:59:49.480 that before Newsweek actually ran an article that said that they command army commandos with shoot to
00:59:55.500 kill orders were embedded in the crowd. So I was, I beat Newsweek to the punch by 10 months.
01:00:00.720 So I think that they probably already knew that I was a danger to their narrative early on.
01:00:08.020 And that you had been putting things together. What do you have coming down the pipeline on this?
01:00:12.980 I mean, I know you can't say everything, but just as far as the questions that people have,
01:00:18.040 what are you seeking to answer?
01:00:19.520 Well, as it relates specifically to January 6th, to a man and to a woman,
01:00:28.320 the law enforcement officers that were thrown to the wolves that day, I actually called them
01:00:32.960 in a series I did called Capitol Police Were Sacrificial Lambs. I believe that the frontline,
01:00:39.120 low level, lower than command level officers were intended to be sacrificed that day. And they were
01:00:46.380 even, and that the Capitol Police leadership and those who were calling the shots on that day
01:00:51.540 were willing to, because they expected the MAGA people to show up fully armed with guns and all
01:00:56.340 of that. I think they expected a shootout that day. And I expect that they were fully willing to
01:01:01.040 sacrifice a number of Capitol Police officers that day. I also, as I said, to a man, to a woman on the
01:01:09.840 frontline, they all believe that they were set up. We can prove that. We know that they were.
01:01:13.940 We know that they were set up. We're going to continue telling that story and showing how
01:01:17.120 that's happened. And as we continue through this process, we're going to name names. We've had an
01:01:23.960 incredible amount of assistance from Congress. Yeah. Does it feel like they're slow rolling us on
01:01:31.980 January 6th, not having hearings? They should be at least duplicating what the original January 6th
01:01:37.740 select committee was doing that was put together by Pelosi that put on a Hollywood produced,
01:01:43.940 primetime show trial, essentially, is all that was? Yeah, they should be. The GOP should be doing
01:01:53.360 that. But there's some problems there. The GOP are not united on this. More telling, though,
01:02:01.560 is we're now learning how powerful the Capitol Police are. And this is a major part of where we're
01:02:06.820 going. But when you think about it, it doesn't take, but maybe just a slight little bit of prompting
01:02:13.140 and you'll see what I'm talking about. The Capitol Police are effectively the personal bodyguards
01:02:19.860 of Congress. As a result, they know where all the bodies are buried. They know who's buried the
01:02:27.520 bodies. They know who's sleeping with who. They know who's sleeping with not who they're supposed to be
01:02:32.440 sleeping with. And all the other dirty laundry that's on Capitol Hill. And so as when the GOP
01:02:40.940 gained control of the House in January of 23, and McCarthy, Speaker McCarthy, came out and said,
01:02:48.220 we're releasing all the January 6th video. And then two weeks later, no, we're not. And then he sent
01:02:53.440 his lieutenants like MTG and other ones out to say, oh, but there's reasons why. Otherwise, we're going
01:02:58.480 to get some innocent people jacked up in the J6 trial system if we do that. And all of a sudden,
01:03:03.580 they pull back. And then all of a sudden, Tucker went out. He did his couple of days of reveal
01:03:07.780 after having access to Capitol CCTV. By the way, Tucker's producers called me to ask me what they
01:03:13.480 need to be looking at. Yeah. Then all of a sudden, he goes away. I mean, he really goes away.
01:03:20.480 You know, he gets fired from Fox. But suddenly, with all of this unprecedented access he had,
01:03:26.020 he only did two nights and then never mentioned it again. And then, jump forward again, Mike Johnson
01:03:34.960 is given the speakership. He says, I'm going to release all the video. And then all of a sudden,
01:03:40.920 for weeks, nothing is released. There was another batch released the other day. The problem is,
01:03:47.140 as we know it, is the power of Capitol Police leadership. The Capitol Police Board,
01:03:53.200 basically, I mean, there's no other way to say it.
01:03:59.040 Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh. You release that. We release what we know.
01:04:03.140 Right. That's what you're saying is going on. Both Republicans and Democrats have a lot of
01:04:08.780 skeletons in their closet, and they don't want those doors to be opened by Capitol Police.
01:04:12.840 And I don't believe, for a moment, because I've spent time with each of them. I've spent time with
01:04:16.960 Speaker Johnson. I've spent time with Barry Loudermilk, whose subcommittee has control,
01:04:22.140 actual direct oversight over the access to the Capitol Police. They've helped us tremendously.
01:04:28.040 They've not held anything back from me yet, except some documents. I've gotten all the video that I've
01:04:35.740 asked for, both with the permission of the Speaker and Loudermilk. We've worked with some other
01:04:43.200 congressmen. We're working with more. Uh, there's still some internal documents that are in the
01:04:49.680 files of the United States Capitol Police that they know that if it ends up in my hands, that it's
01:04:56.520 volatile. In fact, one of the documents that we've seen, but we can't write about it until we have it,
01:05:02.420 you know what I mean? I can't, I can't, because if I can't prove it to the American public,
01:05:06.820 I can't write about it. But senior congressional aide, who's had his eyes on it, told me,
01:05:15.080 quote unquote, it's nuclear. Wow. Wow. Yeah. So we continue to, uh, these are not classified
01:05:24.720 documents, but Capitol Police is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. They're
01:05:31.100 exempt by Congress, wonder why, from FOIA requests. And so we can't just, as a news agency,
01:05:38.880 FOIA that information. It's being blocked at the highest level.
01:05:54.540 How have you dealt with all of this personally, emotionally, spiritually? I'm sure you couldn't have
01:06:00.760 anticipated being in this position five years ago. And so how have you worked this out in your own
01:06:07.240 mind and heart? I, I fully believed that I was going to die on stage from an aneurysm from playing
01:06:17.900 my trumpet too late in life. And, you know, after my, after my, uh, you know, my arteries and my veins
01:06:25.940 had gotten weak and the pressure it takes to play a trumpet, that's what I've done for, you know,
01:06:31.460 over 50 years of my life. Yeah. Over 40 years of that professionally. Uh, I'm a singer. My favorite
01:06:38.720 thing that I've ever done as a singer was I had a, a David Bowie tribute act that was shut down because
01:06:45.460 of COVID. That's why in these videos, I have a lot longer hair, uh, in the, in these Capitol CCTV.
01:06:51.300 I was using, I was using, I was using the COVID lockdown time to actually grow my hair out to
01:06:56.020 another, um, look of Bowie's. And so anyway, the go down, going down the list emotionally, I,
01:07:10.820 everything that I've been through in the last four years,
01:07:13.760 if you, if you, if you can't see that as divine providence, you're, you have a sealed or seared
01:07:24.900 soul, conscience, spirit. Um, that doesn't mean I haven't wrestled against it. That doesn't mean
01:07:34.280 that for over two years, I haven't prayed, Lord, let this cup pass from me. But I have also said
01:07:42.680 that if I have to be poured out as a drink offering on the altar of Liberty.
01:07:57.540 So be it. I'll do it.
01:08:01.540 And I don't want to.
01:08:05.120 It's not where you saw your life going.
01:08:06.960 No, but my children are proud of me. They believe in me.
01:08:12.680 I can't remember who I told the other day, but I'll repeat it here.
01:08:24.700 There's only two people on this planet because of me.
01:08:28.220 It's my son and my daughter.
01:08:29.540 And as long as they're proud of me, I can go the next step.
01:08:41.080 Amen. I understand that. And even though most of us are not in your position and can't even
01:08:48.100 imagine what it has been like for you that we can relate to that we can relate to.
01:08:54.320 How can my audience specifically be praying for you?
01:09:00.160 I think it should be self-evident.
01:09:03.860 I, you know, we need, we need wisdom, uh, in our next step, um, in terms of how we're going to
01:09:12.620 plan our defense strategy with my attorneys.
01:09:15.160 Uh, that's, uh, that's to be determined.
01:09:18.780 The first piece of the puzzle that we have to gain access to is who our judge is going to be.
01:09:23.400 Uh, and you know, with as many judges in the district court there in DC and all the trials have to be there.
01:09:29.980 They've not granted a change of venue in a single trial yet.
01:09:34.940 Um, so we may get a hanging judge or we may get a reasonable judge.
01:09:40.880 But even if, regardless of the case, uh, of what type of judge we get, a radical leftist, um, activist judge who we know how severely he or she might treat the J6 defendants.
01:09:57.940 We know that, um, uh, even with the more common sense and reasonable judges, you know what, you know what you're up against in DC.
01:10:09.760 See, it's a 99.75% conviction rate on January 6th trials so far.
01:10:18.820 Only two acquittals have happened out of over 1300 cases so far.
01:10:25.660 And in both of those cases, it was a bench trial.
01:10:29.280 Got a reasonable judge and a bench trial.
01:10:32.520 No defendant has yet got out completely unscathed by a jury.
01:10:37.260 Um, they were either convicted on all counts or convicted on some counts and others, you know, acquitted on maybe lesser charges or worse charge or this or that other thing.
01:10:47.020 There's been some hung jury moments, but not on all charges.
01:10:50.340 No one's gotten out unscathed on a jury yet.
01:10:52.860 So we don't know what our strategy is going to be until we start putting this together.
01:10:56.900 And of course, it's a long ways before there will be a trial because there will be all kinds of motions.
01:11:01.920 I mean, we're certainly going to file intense and vigorous motions to dismiss over selective prosecution and things of that nature.
01:11:10.960 Um, and, uh, and they, and they know all this is coming.
01:11:14.280 I'm not saying anything, I'm not giving anything away and I'm not going to get chastised by my attorneys for talking like this at the moment.
01:11:19.700 But, uh, there's a lot to, so we, so yeah, to answer your question, we, we have to pray for wisdom at the end of the day.
01:11:26.860 I need the wisdom because whatever my six attorneys bring to me as suggestions, it's going to be my decision about which way to go.
01:11:35.720 And so that's the most important thing.
01:11:38.520 And just for continued courage, I'm thankful for your courage.
01:11:42.300 We often say that courage is contagious.
01:11:44.620 Courage begets courage.
01:11:46.380 And so not everyone will find themselves in your exact position, but your courage is an example to people that you can do hard things.
01:11:54.580 I think probably what they wanted you to do was to say, oh gosh, I'm getting in trouble.
01:12:00.760 I'm going to stop talking about this.
01:12:02.200 And you could have done that.
01:12:03.360 You could have, you could have said, I think I'm going to go back.
01:12:05.660 I think I'm going to go do something easier.
01:12:08.920 And I really don't want to be poking this bear anymore because this bear is huge and it's really scary.
01:12:13.980 But you decided that was a decision.
01:12:16.460 You decided to forge ahead.
01:12:17.980 It's not just that all of this is happening to you.
01:12:20.760 You've decided to wage war and that takes bravery.
01:12:24.640 And I'm thankful for that.
01:12:26.500 However, this ends up and we will be praying so much for your success and for your protection and the protection of all of these people who have been caught up in all of this.
01:12:34.400 But, um, and for true justice, true justice to prevail.
01:12:38.180 So I just want to, I just want to thank you because it means a lot to me.
01:12:42.140 Thank you.
01:12:43.860 I'm doing it for one reason and one reason only.
01:12:46.220 It's because I believe in the cause of liberty.
01:12:48.600 I believe in our constitution.
01:12:50.780 I believe in our bill of rights and I want that country for my children and their children.
01:13:02.240 And I've got a, I'm in a unique position.
01:13:05.020 You know, I'm single.
01:13:05.960 I've been for 17 years.
01:13:07.840 Um, my children are grown.
01:13:09.400 And the government weaponized me against them when they took my job away.
01:13:15.960 This is their fault.
01:13:19.760 And Lord, give me the wisdom, give me the knowledge and, uh, and whatever talents and experience you've given me accumulated in my life, use them as you see fit.
01:13:34.280 And that's the prayer.
01:13:36.100 Amen.
01:13:36.660 Well, thank you so much.
01:13:37.780 Thanks for taking the time to come on.
01:13:39.200 Thank you.
01:13:39.700 Thank you.
01:13:40.200 Thank you.
01:13:40.620 Thank you.
01:14:01.180 Thank you.
01:14:05.340 Bye.
01:14:07.300 Bye.