The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 240 ｜ Should Pardon ALL Jan. 6 Defendants？! ｜ John Strand ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 And now, a Blaze Media Podcast.

00:00:04.220 Are the January 6th defendants heroes or villains?

00:00:08.640 Did they all storm the Capitol with the intent to dismantle democracy?

00:00:13.280 Or were there patriots that were there?

00:00:16.900 These patriots that were caught in a trap laid by their own government?

00:00:20.320 Or is it a little of both? I'm not sure.

00:00:23.280 The truth is never simple, but the truth is important.

00:00:27.660 Today, I have a man with me who spent a year in prison, including four months in solitary confinement.

00:00:34.640 That is the definition of cruel, unusual punishment.

00:00:38.360 Now, he spent all that time in prison.

00:00:41.400 The Supreme Court is the one that released him for what came down to four nonviolent misdemeanors.

00:00:48.700 Sound fair?

00:00:49.840 I think he's clearly a victim of injustice, but does that make him a patriot?

00:00:55.040 Should we take his plans to restore justice for the January 6th defendants seriously?

00:01:01.520 Should President Trump?

00:01:03.500 You will decide in the end.

00:01:06.620 Welcome, the author of the new book, Patriot Plea.

00:01:10.300 January 6th defendant, John Strand.

00:01:14.780 Before we get to John, let me tell you about Berna.

00:01:17.900 I'm a gun owner. I'm a Second Amendment advocate.

00:01:21.460 I've got plenty of guns. Unfortunately, I lost him in a boating accident.

00:01:26.460 But anyway, one of the things I do have that I didn't lose in a boating accident is something that is 100% legal to carry in every state.

00:01:35.120 You don't need a background check.

00:01:39.100 You don't need a license.

00:01:40.180 You just have to be 18 years or older. 0.97

00:01:43.040 According to law enforcement statistics, 99% of all situations where force may be required does not require lethal force.

00:01:52.360 So you don't want to pull a gun at a knife fight, but you also don't want to have a knife at a gun fight.

00:01:58.720 But you have the best of both worlds, I think, especially if you're in places like California or New York or where you just can't carry guns.

00:02:07.460 You can carry this.

00:02:08.740 It looks like a gun.

00:02:10.000 It looks like a scary gun, actually.

00:02:11.420 And it shoots rounds out that are less lethal.

00:02:18.380 They'll shoot out tear gas or connective little projectiles that hurt. 0.55

00:02:27.180 The tear gas or the pepper spray, whichever, could go 60 feet, and it will incapacitate somebody at 60 feet for about 40 minutes.

00:02:37.240 Legal in all 50 states.

00:02:38.940 No background checks.

00:02:40.060 All you have to do is go to Burna.com.

00:02:43.400 Burna, B-Y-R-N-A dot com.

00:02:46.940 Make sure you go there now.

00:02:48.440 Burna.com slash Glenn and save.

00:02:51.980 John, I want to take you through your story and try to do it almost chronologically, at least for a while.

00:03:13.860 So where were you January 6th, and why were you in Washington?

00:03:19.260 What were you doing?

00:03:20.020 Great question.

00:03:22.360 Thank you so much for having me on, Glenn, and allowing me to share this story.

00:03:26.600 It's the story of my life in America.

00:03:28.660 But I've been working my career as an artist in Los Angeles as an actor and a model for a long time.

00:03:36.820 And then 2020, COVID lockdowns, I could tell the world was changing dramatically, and I, for the first time, became sort of politically active at that point in my life, not because I was looking to get into politics.

00:03:48.820 I just wanted to push back against lockdowns, but that ended up becoming synonymous with the ongoing presidential campaign of President Trump.

00:03:56.920 So I was leading a freedom rally in Los Angeles called the Beverly Hills Freedom Rally.

00:04:00.780 President Trump actually retweeted that, became really well known.

00:04:03.120 We had tens of thousands of people coming into Beverly Hills to support the freedom and liberty movement, as I saw it.

00:04:09.260 And that's how I got to meet Dr. Simone Gold, who founded America's Frontline Doctors, which rocketed to the stage during the COVID chaos.

00:04:16.000 And that's why I was in Washington, D.C.

00:04:19.620 I actually would have been leading my own rally in L.A. to support the Stop the Steal effort, asking for an audit, a forensic audit of the election.

00:04:28.420 But because of Frontline Doctors, we were scheduled to be on the East Coast for a whole two-week speaking tour.

00:04:34.480 January 5th and 6th were two dates on that tour.

00:04:37.960 And Dr. Gold had been invited to participate in a rally with a government-approved permit alongside of a number of congresspeople and other national figures.

00:04:46.000 And I was her communications director and security guard at that time, so I was there.

00:04:50.600 So when you were there, you obviously attended the rally, Stop the Steal rally.

00:04:55.920 When you went into the Capitol, did you go in with the intent of stopping the certification of the votes?

00:05:06.500 Or what was your intent when you went in?

00:05:09.220 I didn't intend to go in.

00:05:11.540 So once I was in there, my intention was simply to figure out how we got in there.

00:05:15.760 Then how did you get in there first then?

00:05:19.920 So there was some confusion during the course of the day.

00:05:23.420 This is one of the aspects of January 6th that people often gloss over or have not had a truthful accounting of.

00:05:29.960 It was a very long day.

00:05:31.620 There were over a million people in the city.

00:05:33.560 There were a variety of activities scheduled in advance.

00:05:36.340 There were, I think, over a dozen different permits that had already been secured for various free speech activities that day.

00:05:44.040 Ours was just one of many.

00:05:45.900 So we had attended the morning event at the Ellipse where President Trump spoke famously.

00:05:51.100 And then it had been expected in advance that there would be a march, a protest march, as is very common, along Constitution Avenue from the Ellipse to the Capitol for afternoon events that would have incorporate speeches and so forth.

00:06:05.800 We traveled that distance and arrived at the Capitol building to find, to our confusion, that there wasn't a stage where you would assume there would be a well-set-up environment to have congresspeople and other national figures delivering speeches.

00:06:21.160 But the audience was there.

00:06:22.480 So the way I describe this, this is truly, I think, the best way to understand the reality and the context of what happened on January 6th, particularly in the afternoon as we approach the Capitol building.

00:06:32.040 It would be as if you had purchased tickets planned for a year in advance with travel and arrangements to go to the Super Bowl.

00:06:39.400 And then you pile into the stadium and literally at game time, an announcement says, so sorry, folks, the team didn't make the plane, so they're not here to play the game.

00:06:49.860 So we'll just have to schedule it for next year.

00:06:51.380 But you have 100,000 people in a stadium that have planned all year to watch the Super Bowl.

00:06:55.740 What do you expect to happen in that environment?

00:06:58.820 So we had—

00:07:00.360 Okay, so I didn't even know this part of the—so there was a planned speech with congressmen coming out and officials coming out and talking to this crowd?

00:07:12.660 Yep.

00:07:13.240 This is all well-documented.

00:07:14.760 There was no surprise here.

00:07:15.800 Planned weeks in advance.

00:07:17.880 Organized by whom?

00:07:18.900 This particular rally—oh, gosh.

00:07:24.620 The permit poll for ours might have been for—I can't remember if it was some health and freedom conference or if it was the—I don't think it was the Stop the Steal rally group.

00:07:34.380 Okay.

00:07:34.700 They had, I think, a different permit.

00:07:36.060 But there were multiple groups with multiple permits.

00:07:38.100 I just know that we were part of a group expected to speak alongside of Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lance Gooden, Paul Gosar.

00:07:44.760 Wow.

00:07:45.180 And the list goes on.

00:07:47.240 Okay.

00:07:47.640 So then you're standing there.

00:07:49.720 There is no event.

00:07:51.840 What goes through your head, and how do you end up inside?

00:07:55.420 What went through my head was this does not make any sense, and I'm not going to just say, oh, well, I guess we'll come back next year.

00:08:05.480 I wanted to give it a few more minutes to determine where are all these people that were committed to coming and doing this event, and what is it exactly that happened?

00:08:15.240 So I didn't see a stage, but I did see a whole bunch of people, and I didn't see anything else concerning.

00:08:22.000 I didn't see violence.

00:08:23.100 I didn't see anything along those lines, but I just saw kind of a lack of organization, and I was specifically looking for law enforcement and crowd control measures, and I saw almost nothing.

00:08:36.040 I think five or six police officers standing up at the top of the steps in front of the Columbus doors, and that was it.

00:08:42.240 So we stood there in the plaza for a few minutes trying to determine what was happening.

00:08:50.320 It's well reported now that cell phone communication was almost entirely not functional that day for hours and hours, and certainly at that moment, we could not get messages in and out or very infrequently.

00:09:02.660 So that was making confusion, increasing the confusion.

00:09:06.320 So the crowd, though, because regardless of cell phones or anything else, they're all just moving from the ellipse to this plaza by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

00:09:16.740 So the crowd was filling up, and they moved their way into the plaza and on the stairs.

00:09:21.540 Dr. Gold looked at me at one point and said, I don't know exactly what's happening, and before I just go home and give up, I want to at least try to address the people that are here.

00:09:30.500 I have an important message, and whoever will listen to me, I will shout and just try to be heard, because that was her obligation, her mission.

00:09:37.180 She was dedicated to it, especially at that time, the urgency of the COVID lies were really pressing on her mind.

00:09:44.020 Right.

00:09:44.480 So I had this internal calculation in the book, Patriot Plea.

00:09:49.380 I tell this story, and I explain.

00:09:51.100 I have security guard instincts and experience that told me we should have a recalibration and sort of check what happened and why.

00:09:58.740 But Dr. Gold said, look, I just got to go to the crowd because they're here.

00:10:01.760 They're forming, and something needs to happen.

00:10:03.960 And I thought, well, if she starts calmly addressing them, that at least gives a focal point for what should happen.

00:10:09.140 That could be a good thing, potentially.

00:10:11.220 There was nothing else really to do other than just leave.

00:10:13.880 But she didn't leave, and I had to make sure that she was safe, so I stayed with her.

00:10:17.480 She just walked up the steps, lots of people milling around.

00:10:20.460 We tried to get a balcony position over to one side where maybe she could have a vantage point where people could hear her. 0.99

00:10:25.100 But the crowd was so thick up there that we couldn't quite get into that spot.

00:10:28.740 And we kind of got funneled into between the balcony and the East Columbus door.

00:10:33.440 So we were on the right side of the doors, but not too far from them.

00:10:36.400 And over the course of another 10 minutes, again, the crowd is still building and filling as people walk over.

00:10:41.940 And we got pressed towards the top of the steps, kind of squashed like in a mosh pit at a concert.

00:10:46.680 It was kind of exciting, but also sort of weird, like, what are we doing here?

00:10:50.880 But I continued to monitor the energy around me, the activity, and I did not see still anything at this point violent, criminal, or even really angry.

00:11:01.260 I mean, certainly there were people generally upset about the election issue.

00:11:04.080 But the tenor of the crowd, the tone of things was still very First Amendment, America first, we're here to be who we are, express our opinions, and potentially listen to some important people speak about it.

00:11:18.500 And that all changed, Glenn, in a singular moment.

00:11:22.640 I remember it seared into my memory when just a boom sounded like a bomb went off, and the crowd panicked.

00:11:30.640 Now, the crowd was already tightly packed.

00:11:34.340 But that flashbang, which sounded like a grenade, and then several ensued, and then smoke filled the air, turned the tenor instantly.

00:11:42.820 And there was panic.

00:11:43.940 There were shouts and screams.

00:11:46.300 I understood we were under assault generally, just instinctively, but I couldn't actually see it.

00:11:51.260 Too many people pressed around me.

00:11:52.560 And then I basically just tried to keep Dr. Gold from getting stampeded or crushed in that moment until maybe five, eight minutes later, the doors in front of us opened from the inside.

00:12:06.800 And we were standing there.

00:12:08.140 Which, by the way, I don't want to just rush past that.

00:12:12.360 The Columbus doors are metal, big, heavy metal doors that don't open up.

00:12:18.420 Ten thousand pounds of bronze?

00:12:20.060 Yeah.

00:12:20.420 Right.

00:12:20.900 They don't open up without somebody opening them from the other side, and it's electronically open at this point.

00:12:29.120 You know, it's held together.

00:12:30.680 You're not storming those gates.

00:12:32.840 Those gates should have never been opened.

00:12:35.260 We still don't have an answer, as I understand it, on who did open those gates.

00:12:39.360 But someone with authority did open those gates.

00:12:42.740 And you say that was part of this turning point?

00:12:46.560 Well, it was a turning point.

00:12:48.140 I will be accurate with you about the specifics as I understand them, though.

00:12:52.200 Okay.

00:12:52.760 It's actually a non-government citizen who was prosecuted by the Biden DOJ.

00:12:57.920 I believe his name is George Tenney, who opened the doors from the inside by using the emergency release mechanism, because there are two sets of doors.

00:13:07.460 The 10,000-pound bronze outer doors, called the Columbus doors, are supposed to be locked with a padlock, but they were unlocked and swung open.

00:13:17.240 I don't have a good answer as to why that happened, and that's no small detail, because those outer doors being swung open visually give an obvious invitation to enter the doors.

00:13:29.440 That's a ceremonial entrance.

00:13:31.400 You don't swing them open unless there's a reason.

00:13:33.660 And in that protest moment, many people, and myself included, thought perhaps they're allowing people to come up to the doors or even walk through the Capitol, particularly when there were so many people, not a stage, no other crowd control measures.

00:13:51.280 Where are these people supposed to go?

00:13:52.840 What are they supposed to do?

00:13:53.700 So over the course of time, it seemed that, okay, either they're going to have more police come and say, please leave and go this way, or they'll open the doors and have people walk through, which is what ended up happening.

00:14:05.620 Now, they're saying that they didn't allow that and all the other things they're saying, but of course, you know, that's not the honest reality of the situation.

00:14:12.120 But in the moment, that turning point, I'm crushed up against the doors, the crowd around me.

00:14:17.600 I'm simply trying to keep Dr. Gold upright and safe and praying, literally praying and hoping, okay, cops are going to come and disseminate the crowd in an appropriate manner.

00:14:26.920 And instead, they attacked the crowd, whipped them into a frenzy, and then allowed the doors to become open inside.

00:14:32.840 The crowd flushed through, and I was pushed inside.

00:14:36.240 I mean, I could not have just stayed there.

00:14:37.820 There was an avalanche of people behind me pouring in those doors.

00:14:40.980 Dr. Gold actually stumbled over the threshold.

00:14:42.600 There's video showing that I keep her from actually being trampled, pick her up, move her straight forward away from that melee.

00:14:49.760 And then what happened next?

00:14:50.900 I mean, you see two uniformed officers go right past us.

00:14:54.340 They could have said, hey, go this way or that way.

00:14:57.300 They went right past us to other people.

00:14:59.240 We just proceeded calmly straight ahead, found ourselves in the rotunda with red velvet ropes.

00:15:04.860 And then we stayed within the red velvet ropes, essentially, for the rest of the time we were in the building, just wondering, how do we appropriately get out of here?

00:15:15.480 So when you talked afterwards, Rolling Stone said you sent a private text message after January 6th that said, we stormed the Capitol.

00:15:29.380 It was insane.

00:15:31.140 What do you mean by that?

00:15:32.060 Yeah, they love that text message.

00:15:35.080 That was at trial.

00:15:36.380 Thanks to Rolling Stone for crowning me Maga Zoolander.

00:15:40.220 That was the best marketing campaign I could have ever asked for.

00:15:43.200 That's right.

00:15:44.120 I love it.

00:15:44.940 So consider them friends.

00:15:46.920 But yeah, I mean, that was just naturally what was in my mind.

00:15:50.380 But I'll explain why I said the words.

00:15:52.100 First of all, the analogy about the Super Bowl is the exact same idea here.

00:15:56.960 So I always ask people, when you get excited that your high school or college football team wasn't there an underdog and somehow they had an unbelievable fourth quarter comeback in the last 10 seconds, they score the last touchdown and they win the game that they never should have won.

00:16:13.820 What happens?

00:16:14.620 You stormed the field is storming a violent act.

00:16:19.520 Of course, not that kind of storming.

00:16:21.900 Obviously, we didn't mean we stormed the Capitol like our troops stormed Normandy. 0.97

00:16:26.580 They had guns and they intended to kill people with them.

00:16:29.360 That's a violent storming.

00:16:31.500 When you storm the field in excitement, it's not violence, it's exuberance and it's a celebration.

00:16:38.180 So the storming term really was more appropriate in that sense of things.

00:16:43.980 No one had guns. 0.83

00:16:45.040 No one was intending to assault anyone or certainly overtake the building or the government because that's just ridiculous.

00:16:50.540 But to say you stormed in all at once in a crowd moment of excitement is what ended up happening. 0.52

00:16:57.260 And I mean, it was insane.

00:16:59.360 Right.

00:17:00.280 Hang on just a second because I'm trying to put these two storylines together.

00:17:05.100 Before you write this, you are in the Capitol.

00:17:09.240 You just told me you were kind of pushed in.

00:17:11.180 You were just trying to get out.

00:17:12.820 And it sounded like an insane situation.

00:17:16.180 Totally.

00:17:16.840 You're also by explaining storming, you're also saying you were excited and it was a victory.

00:17:22.440 So what was the victory?

00:17:24.300 What was the excitement that you were feeling?

00:17:26.140 The excitement and the victory was really what I understood before I even got there.

00:17:33.600 When Dr. Gold was first booked to be a speaker at this event and she said, should I do it?

00:17:38.260 And we knew that there would be a large crowd assembling because her mission wasn't political.

00:17:42.740 It actually was nonpartisan advocating for medical freedom and not wanting to get into the politics.

00:17:46.800 But because of censorship, we had to go where people collected in person to hear.

00:17:51.260 Otherwise, we were silenced.

00:17:52.640 So we said, absolutely, we're going to go.

00:17:55.460 But I knew in the back of my mind that this was a historic moment forming.

00:17:59.320 I had no idea what was actually going to happen with January 6th as we now see it, of course.

00:18:04.320 I couldn't have known that.

00:18:05.820 But instinctively, I knew it was historic.

00:18:08.560 And of course, I was proven right even beyond my wildest imaginations.

00:18:11.540 As all of this insanity was happening, confusion, weirdness, walking through the rotunda and all of that history and it just you're in awe of the 250 year experiment of America and realizing because, again, the context here is the illicit election.

00:18:29.820 That is no small detail and a really serious part of this story and of our history.

00:18:34.940 We were aware of that.

00:18:36.440 And the million people that showed up that day, whether they made it inside the building or not, they had to take time and expense of their own when it was really unpopular to do so, to push back because no one wanted to. 1.00

00:18:47.700 You were considered an idiot and a radical and a lunatic if you challenged the election. 0.99

00:18:52.360 Now we can see that's actually what happened. 1.00

00:18:54.460 But it wasn't popular or credible, so to speak, to do that at the time.

00:18:58.140 And I understood the history of the moment in the sense of a million people showing up being brave enough to do that.

00:19:05.320 And that's what I thought was the victory, that they stood firm in their convictions and they exercised their First Amendment.

00:19:11.680 So at what point did you feel like this could be trouble?

00:19:17.760 I could be in trouble here, that I could face prosecution.

00:19:21.000 Did that happen at all on January 6th when you were in the Capitol?

00:19:24.320 Did you have any feeling that this could become a problem?

00:19:28.140 No, not in the sense of I personally being prosecuted, not on January 6th, maybe the next day.

00:19:36.600 But even the next day, my but my basically my my instinct or my frame of reference is the fake.

00:19:44.960 We call them fake news for a reason.

00:19:46.380 Right.

00:19:46.860 They're constantly distorting and lambasting and hyperbolizing.

00:19:51.640 And just it's insane.

00:19:53.180 So the next day I'm thinking, OK, they're trying to make this sound like a terrorism event or whatever they're calling it, insurrection.

00:19:59.460 What does that even mean?

00:20:00.240 But it just didn't sound credible because I was there, Glenn.

00:20:04.120 I was in the crowd.

00:20:05.900 I saw and felt it.

00:20:07.140 So it didn't make sense to me.

00:20:08.440 But because you were on the other side of the Capitol with the Columbus doors, you also wouldn't have seen the people that were breaking the windows and and fighting on the stairs.

00:20:19.780 So you had a different vantage point.

00:20:22.500 When did you realize that stuff was happening?

00:20:25.160 I started to see those vignettes the next day and probably by January 8th.

00:20:31.880 Yeah, probably by because the first day cells were still down.

00:20:35.060 It was hard to get much content.

00:20:36.220 I was just sort of debriefing with my immediate team that was around me.

00:20:39.160 But the next two days, then you started to get a sense that, wow, OK, there were some more violent moments that happened that I was unaware of.

00:20:47.500 Of course, now I understand how those actually occurred.

00:20:51.000 And I and I firmly believe the evidence clearly.

00:20:54.500 Hang on, hang on, hang on just a second.

00:20:56.480 I want to come back to that.

00:20:57.980 I want to get to that.

00:20:58.940 OK, I just want to take it first chronologically and then we're going to take it apart and what we've learned since.

00:21:05.200 So so when did you when did they come to arrest you?

00:21:10.420 How did that happen?

00:21:11.800 When did you when did you know, OK, this this is something that involves me now.

00:21:17.340 I could go to jail.

00:21:20.700 So I didn't have any sense of it the day of, like I said.

00:21:24.500 The next couple of days, we realized this was being portrayed at least as much more.

00:21:30.300 I had people actually the next day they sent me an FBI Most Wanted list poster and I was in the top row, Glenn.

00:21:38.360 Wow.

00:21:38.760 You never forget you never forget your first time being on an FBI Most Wanted list.

00:21:43.840 I bet you don't.

00:21:45.520 I hope not to find myself there, but I bet you don't.

00:21:48.480 You have it framed.

00:21:49.480 I hope as well.

00:21:50.680 Hope as well.

00:21:52.040 It's still framed at the top of the FBI's Twitter profile, Glenn.

00:21:56.660 Oh, I'm not.

00:21:57.660 Four years later, my mugshot is a cell phone camera of me and my trademark Maverick aviators and black leather gloves, you know, standing by Dr.

00:22:08.440 Gold as she's trying to preach the message of truth and medical freedom to the world that will listen in the rotunda. 0.98

00:22:13.500 Um, but that picture is still pinned to the top of the FBI Washington field office X profile.

00:22:20.520 It's insane.

00:22:21.960 So a couple of days I got that picture and I got the sense that, okay, they're clearly working this up into something much, much bigger.

00:22:30.660 But again, because I was there, I saw what I saw and because I know who I am and what I did and what I didn't do, I know I didn't do anything unlawful.

00:22:39.800 I know I had no criminal intent.

00:22:41.960 I know I was scheduled and invited to be present and I was doing my job in my official capacity and that's the only thing I did.

00:22:48.360 I had a rock solid alibi, regardless of what anyone else may have intended to do or otherwise.

00:22:53.540 I knew I was completely innocent.

00:22:55.520 So I had no intention of saying or proceeding otherwise.

00:22:58.400 But we did have advice like you should probably get out of DC.

00:23:02.080 Um, we just stuck to our travel schedule.

00:23:03.820 We were there another couple of days and then back to Florida for other speaking events and then back to Los Angeles.

00:23:07.900 So 12 days later, January 18th, the irony is not lost that it was Martin Luther King day.

00:23:15.860 And on a Monday morning on MLK day in a quiet two bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills, where we had a headquarters for the organization at that time,

00:23:25.540 we were on a conference call with several colleagues and our lives were forever shattered by blood curdling, screaming yells so loud that my head literally vibrated as did the walls.

00:23:36.760 We could barely register the shock and wonder, are we under attack by criminals when our door was pulverized by a battering ram, literally, and flooded into our apartment.

00:23:48.100 20 off armed officers and black tactical gear and machine guns and red laser sights bobbing on your chest like a Jason Bourne action movie.

00:23:57.120 It was terrorizing, uh, it was abhorrent now that I think about it, even in the moment shortly after the shock wears off, I realized this is the U S government, uh, assaulting peaceful citizens in a major city in the U S as if we were terrorists.

00:24:15.600 This is backwards. This is so wrong. And, uh, you know, I've only since then been able to contemplate and really measure the impact of that trauma, not just on myself, but hundreds and hundreds of J six Americans have had this, have had this assault. 0.99

00:24:32.460 So did they call you at all and say, Hey, can you, could come in for an interview? Hey, here's this wanted poster. We know where you are. You know, where we are. Can we just talk?

00:24:43.080 There was none, no communication. And did you think about reaching out and saying, Hey, I'm on your wanted FBI, most wanted poster. I mean, should I come in?

00:24:52.620 Uh, Dr. Gold actually had the, uh, Washington post reach out a few days before our arrest and say, would you do an interview? And she wanted to be forthcoming about what happened. So she said, well, sure. Why not? And yeah, I was there. I was invited to be there. I gave my speech. That's what happened. I did nothing wrong. So I don't really have anything else to say about that. And that was days before.

00:25:13.080 But no, the FBI, the U S government did not advise us or request a meeting or, or say, come turn yourselves in or anything. They just broke our door down on a Monday morning and clearly intended to terrorize us, demoralize us, silence us, and really send a chilling message throughout the community and throughout the country that the U S government is in charge.

00:25:36.340 Yeah. I, I, um, and we'll get into this later. I, I, I think they were trying to send the message that it's, it's not necessarily even the outcome. It's the whole process that we'll put you through that, uh, should scare you and everybody else. So what was the process like? They pick you up, they take you to jail. Um, you get an attorney. What are you charged with? What do they say?

00:26:01.280 Man. So your point is exactly right. Glenn, the process is the punishment and they plan to punish you. I mean, at every juncture, at every possible nook and cranny of the bureaucratic machinery, they will weaponize it. And I mean, that goes down to the last detail. Like for example, um, first of all, I explained the raid and the assault, which was just egregious.

00:26:31.280 Um, and I was disappeared for four days without a phone call. I mean, that's so outrageous. Dr. Gold had to hire a private investigator to find out what had happened to me and to force the government to allow the bond process to happen to bail me out of jail. They should have bailed me out within hours, obviously, but they chose not to for whatever excuses they love to pull. Cause they can do whatever they want. They're the government. I vanished. No family member, no lawyer, no, no one knew where I was for four days.

00:27:01.260 Until we press the issue there. Then when I get out, then I'm, you know, given a public defender and arraigned and explained, this is what we're charging you with. And it was, I could hardly understand what they were even saying. Obstruction. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. When you got in there, you know, you have a right to a phone call. Did they deny you your right to a phone call?

00:27:22.460 Yeah. I, I, I, I, I can't, I mean, the, the first, so they dragged me into a jail, processed me, threw me in a concrete cell, ignored me until the next day. Didn't answer a single question or give me a chance to talk about anything. Drag me into a car, drove me across town to another jail, then processed me in this little, like two foot by two foot room with a screen COVID rules.

00:27:48.640 So that I could see the magistrate who then said, whatever he said, I was so disoriented. I could hardly understand. Uh, he said, I'm not letting you bail out. Then I got dragged away into an isolation unit in the MDC.

00:28:03.060 That's the FBI's federal facility in Los Angeles banging on the door. Can I have a phone call banging on the door? Can I have a phone call for three straight days? No, no, no, no help. No response. No phone call. No, nothing.

00:28:16.180 Four days later, strand, pack up your crap, get out on, you know, get out of here. And they dumped me on the street. 0.97

00:28:22.460 And then thank God I found where the public defender's office was walked to there and said, could you please help me? I have nothing to my name. And then someone found me and picked me up off the street four days later.

00:28:33.280 Wow. Okay. So, um, I wouldn't want a public defender with all of this going on. You have a public defender. Um, what, when, how long did it take it from this point to the trial?

00:28:50.180 And did you have a sense like, you know, uh, Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite movie makers, filmmakers, because it's always the innocent guy who's like, wait, I can't believe this has happened to you. You know what you just described happened in North by Northwest, uh, his movie. And, and you have to believe as his characters always do. Okay. This is just a mistake.

00:29:17.080 This is going to work itself out. Justice is, I'm going to get to somebody reasonable. Did you have that feeling and did it ever go away or when did it go away?

00:29:29.260 I mean, in this opening week or so after the January 6th event and the arrest, it was so fascistic. I really don't think there's a better word to describe it. It was, it was fascism, weaponized government, uh, pointed at a citizen for a politicized purpose.

00:29:46.460 And, you know, after the first few days of the shock of January 6th wore off in terms of the narrative that they're selling about it, it was obvious to me, of course, this is political. Of course, this has to do with Trump and the election and, and, uh, the uniparty attack on American populist resistance.

00:30:04.480 That's what this came down to. So I've understood that ever since then in those opening couple of weeks, it was so, um, tyrannical. It was so totalitarian that I didn't really expect justice or reasonability at all, because I couldn't even get any, I couldn't even get anyone to answer my basic question about how can I have a phone call to reach my mom or my attorney.

00:30:27.620 Um, and, and, and after a few days of that being completely ignored, you start to lose hope that reason has any part of this equation. Um, once I got bailed out and took maybe a few weeks or so to, you know, get rid of the public defender and find an appropriate attorney, convene with my, my co-defendant now, who's my colleague, Dr. Gold and the whole organization, the nonprofit we work for in our team,

00:30:51.440 and then absorb what was actually going on. Then you realize, okay, this, this is a whole new ball game in America. We are squared up against the entire might of the federal government currently weaponized and controlled by the Biden administration generally.

00:31:07.840 And, uh, you know, uh, you know, your question became a recurring theme. Will we ever find reasonability? Will we ever find the rule of law still functioning? And at every turn, Glenn, at every turn, we found it completely hijacked, completely, um, inverted, uh, and utilized in a two tiered system where they continue to mouth the message of rule of law.

00:31:35.220 Nobody is above the law. Nobody is above the law. They say per prominently above you as they swing down a sledgehammer.

00:31:41.720 Right. I, I, uh, as a, I mean, I'm not a journalist, but I mean, I work with journalists and, and as we were trying to find out what was happening, um, we, we couldn't find out anything. I mean, I called congressmen, I called senators, where are these people being held? How can we talk to their attorneys?

00:32:03.900 We, we, as, as, as members of the press, we couldn't break this wall of silence as members of Congress and the Senate, they couldn't break the wall of silence at the beginning.

00:32:14.720 This was it, what you did, you were just almost in a China like way disappeared. 0.99

00:32:21.020 Yeah. Our, our, our families and our attorneys couldn't break the wall of silence. If your direct attorney cannot reach his client, what country are we in?

00:32:33.340 Correct. Correct. Okay. So let's go to the trial. Now they're charging you, uh, with obstruction of our jury tampering or obstruction of justice with both of those.

00:32:45.120 Well, so everyone calls it obstruction of justice colloquially. And they use that, that term obstruction of justice to basically say you're obstructing what duly should happen and, uh, blocking the government from performing its duty.

00:33:01.920 So in that general sense, it sounds like, well, that's not good. We shouldn't allow citizens to do that. But the, the exact title of the parent statute obstruction of an official proceeding, right.

00:33:14.300 Is what they say. But I was charged specifically with title 18 U S code 15, 12 C two and 15, 12, the title of that statute is tampering with a witness evidence or informant witness evidence or informant.

00:33:36.300 Okay. Now that sounds like a trial. Also, if you go back to where the law came from and this matters because in our system, legislative intent actually matters. It's not acceptable to just take English and, you know, scrabble it into a weapon to your fashion and your liking.

00:33:56.840 Right. What the legislators intended matters when the legislature passed 15, 12 into law. And you know, this because the president at the time, George Bush said this, when he signed it, he said, this should never be mistakenly used against political protesters.

00:34:13.340 He actually said that it's on record. Wow. And the purpose of the law clearly was to close a accounting loophole that ensued from the Enron energy corporation scandal.

00:34:27.740 And they basically said, Oh, it was our attorneys that shredded documents that tampered with witness or evidence. So you can't prosecute us for it. So they closed that loophole and said, if you delegate your, your tampering of a witness evidence,

00:34:43.340 or informant to a third party, the third party can be liable. What does that have to do with protesters that are complaining about, uh, illicit election and gathering at their house of government to redress, you know, ask for redress of grievances per the first amendment. What does that have to, it obviously has nothing to do with it.

00:35:02.260 Which, which, which, which, which is how the Supreme court ruled, which, you know, uh, got you out of prison after only a year in prison. Um, let, let me, yeah, let me go. Let me go now to, um, they charged you, they convicted you. What, what, what is it like standing as a, an innocent man?

00:35:24.860 Um, and even, even, even at your worst, if, if you would say, okay, well, I was in the Capitol and I can, you know, this parading thing, I can understand how you give me a ticket.

00:35:37.920 Maybe, maybe, okay. You give me a ticket for something, or I get a slap on the wrist when they came at you and said guilty.

00:35:47.160 And the, uh, the judge said prison.

00:35:52.280 What was that like?

00:35:54.860 I mean, it was serious, Glenn. I'm not going to say otherwise that that's, that is a sledgehammer. Prison is a sledgehammer. Um, I, I describe it in my book as, uh, watching a freight train in reverse, like in slow motion, that's coming at you because I knew this was coming before it happened, but I'm, I'm kind of slowly moving ahead towards it.

00:36:21.980 Uh, the, from the arrest to the trial was over a year and a half. It's a long time.

00:36:29.960 A lot of stuff happened during that period of time. Terrible stuff. Uh, civil rights abuses, persecution, exhaustion, defamation, uh, constant assault from the media, betrayal from friends and my family.

00:36:43.020 I was digitally assassinated for my entire career that I had really spent my life and put my life or, or I, I taken a lot of risk in my life, um, to do what I've done, putting myself out there to, to, to be an actor and a model in these things that are very difficult to try to achieve.

00:37:00.500 And I had all of that was, I was digitally assassinated in a heartbeat on January 7th. None of that existed anymore. And then suddenly I was propped up by Rolling Stone and everyone else as this target come and destroy this guy. And they spent a year and a half destroying me before I even got to court.

00:37:17.340 It's pretty amazing. And of course, I've lived some of that. It's, it's, it's remarkable, remarkable. It really is. Um, and so that there's more to that story details in the book that people really should dig into.

00:37:30.480 And that we should really talk about in our country, as far as being honest with ourselves, what is happening, what we've allowed to happen and how we get guardrails back on because the guardrails have become swords in the hands of an enemy that is, that is, uh, stabbing us with them.

00:37:44.760 So before we get to those solutions, let's pause here for a second. And before we get to what they did to you in prison, talk about anything that you feel needs to be addressed here on that.

00:37:55.960 Um, so we have to reclaim the essence of innocent until proven guilty, right? We just had Daniel Penny sacrificed on the altar of DEI and BLM garbage insanity. And it's going to take a lot of reverse engineering to sort of give him a reasonable life back. 0.76

00:38:18.240 Um, and, and, and, and, and, and people like that, I don't think you ever do. People don't understand. And this is a baby comparison to you. Um, but you know, uh, for 10 years, the media and powerful people came after me with all their guns a blazing and, and, and did everything they could to destroy me and paint me.

00:38:41.820 And I will never get that opportunity with maybe 40% of the country to ever be anything other than that. And that's a big deal. You know, when, you know, you don't, you don't, you don't notice when you have that, everybody has that, you know, the opportunity to just be somebody and, and have people address you and take you for who you are.

00:39:08.360 As long as you, as long as you are displaying that, um, you don't understand what it's like to walk in where lies have been spread about you and you have 40% of the room who will hate you forever, no matter what you say.

00:39:26.400 Yeah. And it's a new era. You cannot unring that bell. Absolutely. Glenn. That is true. I, I, of course I can tell that you understand this.

00:39:36.620 You empathize because you've experienced it yourself. So anyone that does personally experience it, it will be a lot more real, but, um, this new era with technology and the speed of, you know, the speed of lies, um, and, and just the incendiary nature that they just catch on fire and burn your life to the ground in an instant.

00:39:53.940 And you can never have that life back. Um, it is a huge thing. So the loss, you know what it is, is the, the loss of honest people and honest questioning.

00:40:06.540 You know, I've always believed in the system of justice we have here because I've always believed that an innocent person could be caught up in something, but there would always be someone in the system that would go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:40:19.940 You got to give them the chance to be heard. And we don't just, we don't have kangaroo courts. This was a kangaroo court. And, uh, when you lose the ability as a society to, to find honest people who may disagree with you, but go, wait a minute, hang on just a second.

00:40:40.780 Uh, I disagree with him, but he has this right. We have to do it the right way. When you lose that, you have nothing left.

00:40:50.100 That's right. Yeah. Disagreement does not mean, um, yeah. Dishonest. Right. So when there's a, doesn't mean, doesn't mean because we disagree, it doesn't mean you lose your rights. You're still a human being as valuable as I am. You know what I mean?

00:41:05.820 Yeah. Um, okay. So you're, uh, you're convicted, you're sent sentenced to prison. What, what is the sentence you're given 32 months? So almost three years of my life in a prison facility, along with three years of supervised release and continued government abuse after that.

00:41:26.080 So another six years of my life on the hook to be annihilated beyond the two plus years at that point that had already been chewed up in the government blender. Um, and what, so what we failed to talk about was you get this sentence because they try to make a deal with you and say, well, if we can make all of this go away, um, you know, we'll stop destroying your life. If you just admit, I mean, this is very 1984.

00:41:55.440 Four, just two plus two equals four. Um, and you wouldn't, you wouldn't admit when you're standing there and you realize I've had three years in prison. Uh, did you ever have a second where you went? Oh my gosh, what have I done? I should have taken.

00:42:12.980 Not one second. Not one second. It was so clear to me, Glenn, at the very, you realize how odd that is, right?

00:42:21.860 I do. And, and, and that was somewhat the point. That was kind of the point. I mean, fundamentally, Glenn, the real point, like I said, is that we have to have clarity on what right and wrong is. We have to have, it is our duty and it is, uh, it is essential, uh, in order to preserve our future and preserve the integrity of our system.

00:42:46.460 Uh, which without integrity, it will, you know, it will devolve and destruct like you, like you mentioned.

00:42:53.880 So to preserve that integrity, we have to have total clarity on what is good and evil and what is right and wrong.

00:42:59.520 So some things are not moral, some decisions, there's not an obvious right answer, but sometimes there are.

00:43:05.560 And when there's an obvious right and wrong answer, and particularly when it's really uncomfortable to make the right choice, that's when it's so important to do so.

00:43:14.740 Yeah. So when you get to prison, you know, you, you think of prison as a couple of things in America, you think, okay, you might've got shafted by the system originally, but the prison system is a completely different system.

00:43:32.200 And now it's got its own problems. You know, you've got the violence in prison, you've got all of that, but you don't expect the, you wouldn't expect the same kind of punishment for the same reasons to be happening in prison.

00:43:48.640 Do you know what I mean? If, if, if it's, unless it's a fascistic country, you don't expect the prison to take out political vengeance on you.

00:44:02.200 But that's not what you found, is it?

00:44:05.120 No, I found precisely the opposite. I found that the prison system has been hijacked like every other part of our government and, and all these, all these institutions have been bent and fashioned into weapons to serve the violent will of those in power who demand that they keep it.

00:44:25.340 So, uh, one, I mean, man, the, the trial, like you said, so many lies, so many in your face, distortions and manipulations and, uh, just violations of their ethical and legal duty.

00:44:39.620 Um, for one thing, it was very clear that the jury was going to convict me because they're from DC, they're, they're Washington, DC residents, 95% voted with full open hatred against president Trump.

00:44:53.380 Obviously they're going to not just convict me. They were looking to crucify me. And it was, you know, uh, and it was enjoyable for them.

00:45:00.560 So the prosecutor didn't have to openly lie about evidence. He could have just said he was there and he's one of them and, you know, take it from here.

00:45:08.240 But no, they spent all this energy lying, manipulating evidence. The, my website and book shows all of this in great detail. It's shocking actually. And it's something we really need to dig into. It didn't just happen to me. Um, and it's part of that kangaroo court. When we say kangaroo court, Glenn, we're not exaggerating. It is fully, truly that.

00:45:27.740 Um, and then in prison, especially in Washington, DC, um, in prison. And I was not in a DC prison. I was in a federal facility, uh, starting in Florida, but I have paperwork from the BOP that, that acknowledges that the reason that some of their rules were rearranged in order to clearly torture me psychologically,

00:45:57.740 and in horrendous physical conditions and in super isolation, meaning totally cut off from all contact with, with, with my family and attorneys for an extended period of time. That was, that was happening because of the fascist fingers of the department of justice, specifically the FBI and the AUSA assistant U S attorney's, um, office, which I believe traces back to Mr. Jason Manning,

00:46:24.700 the actual federal prosecutor who prosecuted me at trial and put me into that prison in the first place.

00:46:33.380 So what rules did they rearrange for you? What happened to you in prison? I was pulled aside in this office with no one in it with a gentleman who worked for the security division of the prison who basically said, do you know who I am? Cause I know who you are and I'm watching you.

00:46:53.580 I said, I don't know who you are. Um, I'm not surprised that you know who I am because that's become pretty well known at this point. Uh, and he said, well, let me, let me break this down for you. You know, I know you are all big on constitutional rights and talking a big first amendment game and this and that. Um, but this is, this is my kingdom and I rule here. So you better get that straight real fast.

00:47:15.220 And, uh, clear intimidation, but I'm sorry. The constitution applies to prisoners as well, sir, but go ahead.

00:47:22.320 Oh, it's supposed to. Um, but you know, the, our founding fathers called the constitution, a parchment barrier.

00:47:29.580 And, uh, there's a reason they use that terminology. Uh, it's only going to hold so far as the men holding that parchment have the integrity to understand what it means and how it's supposed to be applied.

00:47:41.360 Yeah. Um, so, so he threatens, he basically threatens you.

00:47:47.800 Oh, absolutely. Well, I told him, I said, sir, I am not looking to cause trouble. Uh, I know you're in charge here and I want to abide by whatever your rules are. Please just explain them to me. But I do have a first amendment and I plan to continue exercising it. I don't have a bone to pick at this point with the prison. I wasn't there to complain about prison.

00:48:07.660 And I was there to continue highlighting the fraud of January 6th, the corruption of the DC court system. Um, and the fact that I'm innocent and so are many other J sixers who I need to continue to advocate for. And I'll do that from prison. I don't, it doesn't matter. I'm here to do a job. 1.00

00:48:22.400 Um, so I explained to him that me being in prison from my point of view was deployment in service of my country as a political prisoner. And, uh, he was maybe agnostic on that, but basically said I'm in charge.

00:48:34.520 But he seemed to indicate like, okay, we can manage that. Uh, but he wasn't honest with me. And, uh, I was basically entrapped into supposedly breaking their rules about some technicality about the phone system, even though they broke their own rules by failing to give me the written rule book that explains all of these details. And then later said, well, you broke this rule from page such and such in the rule book. And I said, what rule book? And they said, we didn't, we give you that on day one. Cause the policy stipulates, we must do that. Nope, no rule book.

00:49:03.800 I had no idea about this rule. The rule you told me was you have to submit the people you want to talk to on the prison communication systems, controlled and monitored. Of course I understood that. Submit those people. And if, if we approve it, then you can talk to them. Well, I did that. I talked to them and then they said, you broke the rules. You're going in the hole. And then long story short, they disappeared me for four straight months of horrific isolation abuse. I can barely explain.

00:49:33.800 I heard about you at this point. Um, I mean, what you were going through. I heard that you were in, um, solitary for four months. And again, we tried to get senators and congressmen to give us any details, what's happening. And they were blocked at every, every corner as well. What is solitary confinement like?

00:49:57.940 I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very suffocating. Uh, it's, it's, it's just very harsh and it's very, um, desolate. So I think maybe that's a good word to describe that. In addition to being very uncomfortable and very intimidating,

00:50:24.060 there is this element of total despair that creeps in very quickly, but continues to gradually build. And you realize you're being strangulated by this sense of despair that you can't quite see or identify, but there's no remedy for it.

00:50:42.260 You have nowhere to turn. You have no one to talk to. You have no honesty or logic or rationality in an explanation of anything. Most of the people there ignore you or are rude to you. Um, so it's, it's like being in a, I describe it as imagine you were on a submarine Glenn.

00:51:02.120 So, you know, like I said, I'm on deployment. So this is a military mission. I'm trying to take it seriously. Uh, but I know I'm in a war and there's people that are against me or whatever. I'm on a submarine and suddenly someone trips me and I fall into this closet. The door swings behind me. I jump up, but the door's already locked. I'm banging on the door. And then I suddenly hear this sound as the submarine I could tell is dropping to the bottom of the ocean. And then it hits the bottom. No one is coming. You keep banging on the door. No one is answering.

00:51:30.060 And then after a few minutes, you realize I am stuck in this concrete closet in the bottom of the ocean. And I don't know if anyone knows or cares that I'm here and if they'll ever come and get me. And then another day goes by and then another day goes by and physically you are miserable. And that pain is compounding with every day. So it's, everything is compounding by the hour, by the day, by the week. You're supposed to have a phone call.

00:51:59.180 Do you have a, do you have a window? Can you see time pass?

00:52:05.140 One sliver of a window. Uh, so yeah, I could see daylight in the day. Um, well, at least in one solitary unit and another solitary unit, it was so dark and the window was so slim that actually I couldn't see day.

00:52:16.900 So different solitary units have different conditions. The one I was in that I spent the most amount of time in was a concrete square hut with various isolation units.

00:52:29.580 I couldn't see these people, but the inmates were savage, like animals screaming, yelling constantly, almost never stopped throughout the course of the day at night.

00:52:42.900 They would be exhausted and fall asleep. But during the day it picked up again.

00:52:46.400 And I hyperventilated at one point because I just couldn't get away from this cacophony that sounded like the dark corners of hell.

00:52:55.400 I mean, I, it was hellish in that sense, very literally.

00:53:03.240 Did you get to go outside at all? Did you, cause I've, you know, I have to, you have to have an hour or something outside, right?

00:53:13.980 So the policy says you must have an hour of recreation per day.

00:53:20.000 And when people hear recreation, they think you get to stand outside. You get to dig your toes in the grass.

00:53:26.780 You are human on a planet. No, no. First of all, they ignore that rule half the time.

00:53:33.460 So I was in a concrete shoe box for about 164 hours a week, but for the two or three hours that I might actually get the rec time,

00:53:42.220 they just dragged me to a different part of that concrete building where they had taken the ceiling off with a cage above it.

00:53:49.860 So you could see the sky through the cage.

00:53:54.080 You're in a dog cage inside of a concrete building where you can see a piece of the sky.

00:54:00.920 That was their recreation.

00:54:02.320 Four months, four months, four months like that.

00:54:10.460 And they're supposed to give you, they're supposed to give you a phone call, Glenn, even in isolation, the rules stipulate a phone call at a minimum every seven days.

00:54:22.260 And when you are in those isolation conditions, that phone call is the difference between life or death.

00:54:29.080 You will scratch their eyes out to get that phone call.

00:54:32.440 I was ready to scratch my own eyes out just to hear the voice of my mom or my girlfriend or my attorney or someone.

00:54:39.880 Tell me we're still here and we're going to get you out of this hell.

00:54:47.040 They violated that. You didn't get it every week.

00:54:49.420 Nope.

00:54:54.680 It took almost three months before a lawyer got through a call.

00:55:00.380 And it took four months before I was finally taken out of solitary.

00:55:05.440 And that was only because of Congressman Matt Gaetz bringing the fire in Congress and bringing the weight down on the BOP to realize they better start changing some things.

00:55:13.320 So they whisked me out of the middle of the night to spite him because he was going to come and visit on site.

00:55:19.420 Middle of the night whisked me away before he could get there to take me to a different facility.

00:55:23.600 And I was finally taken out of solitary.

00:55:28.000 You were put in general pop?

00:55:30.920 In a different prison, yes.

00:55:32.460 I was finally put in general population in Oakdale in Louisiana.

00:55:36.760 And that's where I wrote the book.

00:55:38.040 Was that a Martha Stewart kind of prison?

00:55:43.700 No.

00:55:44.860 No, definitely not a Martha Stewart prison.

00:55:47.880 Slightly less terrible than Miami.

00:55:50.540 Still a terrible place.

00:55:51.760 I detail that in the book as well because I had six months there to kind of learn how quote-unquote normal prison works.

00:56:02.200 And I had at least the opportunity to have a shower every day.

00:56:06.000 I had the opportunity to kind of structure some of my own time to process what I had just gone through the previous six months and to wrestle with a lot of questions with God and with myself and with what I believed my country to be before this happened.

00:56:22.660 And so I wrestled through those questions.

00:56:25.580 I read some books.

00:56:26.600 And then I wrote my own book while I was there in general population.

00:56:31.440 But I—

00:56:32.000 When you're in solitary, could you read books?

00:56:34.820 Did you have access?

00:56:35.980 Or is it just you and your thoughts?

00:56:38.480 There's a lot of you in your thoughts, but I did get some books.

00:56:43.340 Thereby, again, the rules stipulate they're supposed to provide books to you.

00:56:47.840 They did at times.

00:56:49.900 They don't always follow those rules either.

00:56:52.120 But I did get some books, and I had a few guards that were nicer than others.

00:56:56.160 So I had a few guards that tried to make sure I had a book and a Bible.

00:57:00.620 They blocked my U.S. mail.

00:57:02.640 Wildly illegal.

00:57:03.640 It's just not acceptable in this country.

00:57:05.100 There's no law that allows that to happen.

00:57:09.080 That is against the law, to block U.S. mail from a U.S. citizen.

00:57:13.100 But they blocked most of my mail for most of those entire four months.

00:57:17.400 But I did have a couple guards that would sneak some letters into me.

00:57:22.700 Okay.

00:57:24.020 So let's talk here about—I mean, there's so much more, but you can get it in your book.

00:57:30.260 But you're fascinating to talk to.

00:57:33.380 Okay.

00:57:35.100 Let me start with where I am, and tell me where we differ.

00:57:40.380 Okay.

00:57:41.540 I have a problem with people who were violent, and that is the police and people who were in the masks breaking windows and fighting.

00:57:57.080 But it's hard to tell who was a good guy defending themselves and a bad guy, you know, wishing intent on the cops.

00:58:07.060 And I think at this point, everybody would have spent their time in prison.

00:58:13.500 If this was a normal case, everybody would have already served enough time.

00:58:19.080 And I don't think it's fair to—you know, Donald Trump says we have to take it case by case.

00:58:25.380 And I understand that thinking, but when you know that something has been wrong with a prosecutor,

00:58:33.760 you don't just let the one guy that you know for sure has been wrongly prosecuted.

00:58:41.780 And if that pattern appears in other cases, you've got to let everybody go.

00:58:47.740 Right.

00:58:48.140 Fruit of the poisonous tree.

00:58:49.300 Something's—yes, you know something's wrong.

00:58:52.480 So just based on that concept and that law, every single person should be released because you can't go back and say,

00:59:01.920 well, this guy, you know, this guy wasn't as bad because you don't know.

00:59:06.460 It was the same people involved that did you, and we know that was wrong.

00:59:12.620 So how do we do anything other than say, everybody out?

00:59:17.480 Everybody's out.

00:59:18.280 100%.

00:59:18.660 Time served.

00:59:19.360 100%.

00:59:19.820 Right.

00:59:20.340 You are correct, Len.

00:59:21.220 You are absolutely right.

00:59:23.220 And I don't think there's a credible argument against what you said.

00:59:26.060 It is absolutely fundamentally clear that this process was totally corrupted.

00:59:31.980 It was irredeemably tainted, legally speaking.

00:59:36.460 Correct.

00:59:37.420 And people, I guess, would argue and say, well, but the violent.

00:59:41.100 But that's not the way it works.

00:59:43.680 We have this for a reason.

00:59:47.380 I'm not making up something new.

00:59:48.920 I'm not asking for something that hasn't been done before.

00:59:52.060 This is our rule of law, is it not?

00:59:55.880 Exactly.

00:59:57.060 That's the term I wanted to say.

00:59:58.500 When we say the rule of law, what does it mean?

01:00:01.620 It means there is a pre-established rule by which we comport our behavior, by which we comport our review and investigation, by which we comport our administration of justice.

01:00:13.620 And that rule says that if the government is shown to be nefarious or corrupt or even just derelict, you must throw it out.

01:00:26.200 And it's very simple.

01:00:28.060 Why, Glenn?

01:00:29.200 It's very simple.

01:00:30.280 Why?

01:00:30.880 The founders told us, I believe George Washington, when the people fear the government, there's tyranny.

01:00:38.160 When the government fears the people, there is liberty.

01:00:40.400 And George Washington also said, government is not eloquence.

01:00:44.180 It is force.

01:00:45.480 It's a fire that will burn things to the ground if you don't keep the guardrails.

01:00:50.440 So Thomas Jefferson said, we must speak no more about the good intentions of man, but we must bind them down by the chains of the Constitution.

01:01:01.120 Correct.

01:01:01.560 Now, here's the thing on this, is when this rule has ever been enacted before, you don't get mad at the person, the judge or whomever that says, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

01:01:17.380 All of this has to be thrown out.

01:01:19.000 You're supposed to get mad at the prosecutors. 1.00

01:01:22.760 You're supposed to say, you morons have done this in a legal way. 0.99

01:01:29.540 You've let bad guys go and you've persecuted good guys now. 1.00

01:01:34.600 It's not the judge, or in this case, not Trump that is making this judgment. 0.98

01:01:39.880 This is the way it's supposed to be because you screwed up.

01:01:44.100 And without that slap on the face, not on the wrist, but on the face of the prosecution, you'll never change anything.

01:01:53.180 A hundred percent agree with you. 0.99

01:01:55.740 And I wouldn't call them morons. 1.00

01:01:57.500 I would call them knaves and scoundrels because they weren't stupid. 1.00

01:02:02.240 They knew what they were doing. 1.00

01:02:03.400 This was political, of course, and ultimately was evil.

01:02:06.240 It was highly unethical.

01:02:07.540 It was wrong.

01:02:08.480 It was a egregious abuse of their prosecutorial power and of their government issued positions of authority.

01:02:14.560 It was immoral.

01:02:16.620 It was wrong.

01:02:17.380 And it was gravely evil and has caused an incredible amount of destruction and even death.

01:02:21.620 So that's not an exaggeration at all.

01:02:24.620 But, you know, Glenn, we want to go ahead.

01:02:26.400 Don't forget.

01:02:27.340 Don't forget the before we get to the prosecutors.

01:02:30.420 The first step was not the prosecutors, but elements of the government that facilitated and instigated this.

01:02:38.920 There's a lot of evidence of pre-planning.

01:02:40.980 For example, the FBI operation, the Whitmer Fed napping hoax, well documented.

01:02:47.900 No really argument against this.

01:02:49.920 The FBI field director, Steve D'Antuono of the Detroit field office, oversaw that operation and then was reassigned to D.C. right before January 6th.

01:02:58.560 So a lot of interesting, credible evidence, but we'll put that aside.

01:03:02.360 We'll say for the sake of argument, without assigning negative intent or criminal intent to the government, we can see with our own eyes clearly what they physically did that was egregious violation of their duty and their protocols.

01:03:17.300 So that created the conditions and accelerated.

01:03:19.720 When you said you are upset about violence committed by people in black gear breaking windows, so am I.

01:03:26.280 But those people aren't in jail.

01:03:29.080 Correct.

01:03:29.980 I am not aware.

01:03:31.740 Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of the military-style tactical units, all dressed in black, which of course you can't identify them, who were the insurgents that first broke the windows to gain the initial access to the building.

01:03:45.360 That then allowed people to blunder in and then open the doors for me and I stumbled in.

01:03:50.420 Well, I just know that I've never seen conservatives dressed like that before.

01:03:56.900 I've seen Antifa dressed like that. 1.00

01:03:59.140 I've seen the government dressed like that, but I don't generally see conservatives dressed like that or act that way.

01:04:04.860 But that doesn't mean they couldn't have been, but we don't know who they were because it doesn't seem to be any effort to get those guys.

01:04:12.040 My view on this whole thing is we find out that there's 26 informants, FBI informants that are there.

01:04:19.940 And those aren't necessarily good guys, you know what I mean?

01:04:23.800 They're informants.

01:04:25.460 But at the very least, that would lead one to the understanding, not to believe, to the understanding of the truth.

01:04:37.500 The FBI had 26 informants that were there on the ground.

01:04:43.240 That means, yeah, at least.

01:04:44.640 That means at least 26 FBI agents knew what was coming if it was planned, okay?

01:04:53.200 If it was planned by these, you know, this grassroots, you know, vigilante group.

01:04:58.500 That means 26 FBI agents knew that was coming.

01:05:03.160 So then explain to me how the National Guard wasn't there.

01:05:06.400 Explain to me how the police weren't alerted.

01:05:09.100 If you had the FBI knowing, this is the most innocuous charge I could possibly bring on the FBI is, okay, so you weren't involved, but you knew it was coming and you did nothing.

01:05:29.640 That's the best scenario.

01:05:32.220 What do you think happened?

01:05:33.500 I think we know for certain that Nancy Pelosi and Muriel Bowser are officially entrusted with the responsibility to protect that building.

01:05:46.860 They openly denied the 10,000 National Guard troops that President Trump had duly authorized and done his part to make it possible.

01:05:56.520 Right.

01:05:57.540 So there's a handoff there.

01:05:58.820 What do you attribute that to?

01:06:02.720 Just incompetence, hating of Trump, what? 1.00

01:06:08.040 No, I attribute it to, I mean, it's just not reasonable to think that these people are that dumb. 1.00

01:06:13.360 It's just, they didn't get to the positions of power that they are being dumb. 0.99

01:06:17.220 They're not dumb. 0.99

01:06:18.120 They're smart. 1.00

01:06:19.020 They're just very, very unethical and immoral. 0.81

01:06:21.800 And I think evil is really the accurate term.

01:06:24.920 Okay.

01:06:25.500 So clearly, clearly Pelosi and many other people benefited by creating the conditions for a violent event of conflict, which they could then misrepresent and distort and exploit in a myriad of ways.

01:06:37.600 This isn't a grand conspiracy theory like they had the map of the whole thing from the beginning necessarily, right?

01:06:43.940 But they've game planned and war gamed these things, as we've noted.

01:06:48.060 And they very clearly denied 10,000 troops that obviously should have been there.

01:06:52.360 Remember, my first thought when I walked up to the building was, I don't see the stage and why aren't there cops or crowd control here?

01:06:57.740 Because there's a million people coming to see a speech.

01:06:59.580 It's just objectively insane.

01:07:00.740 So, you know, the optics that they complained about were really the optics of making them look completely derelict as government officials.

01:07:09.700 But because they have the bully pulpit, the microphone, and all the government weapons pointed at us, they can just shout their story.

01:07:15.580 They can parade the January 6th Unselect Committee show trial, literally a show trial, for a year and a half on primetime television, gaslighting us all to death.

01:07:23.960 So that's how they get away with it.

01:07:25.800 But if you're calm and reasonable and objective and you go through the evidence and you're not taking Nancy Pelosi's side or President Trump's side or anyone else, just what actually happened here, it's not that hard to figure out what happened.

01:07:38.480 And it's not that hard to, you could say, speculate.

01:07:42.100 But we could speculate that Pelosi and company clearly had motives and they had an objective.

01:07:51.520 They had an agenda to advance and they had an opportunity to exploit by facilitating the conditions for an event of violence to occur that never should have happened.

01:08:01.360 And without the government's involvement, it would not have happened like that.

01:08:04.380 Right. So even with you, you are saying they allowed the conditions, they maybe even encouraged the conditions a little bit.

01:08:15.000 But we have cops on video taking fence down.

01:08:19.100 Yeah, right.

01:08:20.340 That doesn't explain like the pipe bomb or anything like that, which clearly that was, what was that?

01:08:31.740 I mean, that just seems planted by people who did have a master plan.

01:08:39.460 They may not have said, oh, this is the way it's going to happen at the Capitol.

01:08:42.780 But they wanted to make sure that something happened and those pipe bombs were put in with somebody with an agenda.

01:08:52.020 The vice president was moved to where one of those pipe bombs was for a reason.

01:08:57.080 And it seems to me they just didn't need that reason anymore.

01:09:03.140 And so just brush it aside.

01:09:05.680 Right.

01:09:06.440 Does that seem reasonable to you?

01:09:08.960 Absolutely. Contingencies, right?

01:09:10.620 Again, these people aren't stupid. 0.95

01:09:12.360 So and also, as we mentioned, there isn't one single quarterback of everything. 0.66

01:09:18.500 I mean, I don't think generally that you can say the grand conspiracy ends up with this person calling all the shots.

01:09:24.800 It doesn't quite work like that.

01:09:26.720 So there there's overlap and there's disarray to things.

01:09:30.900 But, yeah, there was there's just a lot of evidence and all aspects of it should be investigated honestly and completely by the incoming administration.

01:09:41.260 We have to have answers to this.

01:09:42.820 I had a meeting.

01:09:45.300 I didn't have a meeting.

01:09:46.760 But one of my one of my guys who was working for me at the time, he was kind of a right hand guy.

01:09:55.600 He had a meeting that was asked for by the Soros organization.

01:09:59.360 And so my right hand man met with the right hand man of Soros and we interpret it as clearly as a threat because it started with your your boss is going to stop saying these things about my boss.

01:10:17.340 And it only went downhill from there.

01:10:20.160 And I talked to somebody right after who knew George Soros, who had worked with George Soros.

01:10:25.560 And I said, what do you make of this?

01:10:28.420 And he said that was clearly a threat.

01:10:32.060 He said, now, Glenn, here's what you have to understand.

01:10:37.500 George Soros is not going to give the order to go kill you or disrupt your life.

01:10:42.700 He said he doesn't need to.

01:10:44.620 There are enough people that want his attention, want to be in his circle that will take it on their own and they would be willing to do something and then let it be known in that inner circle that, you know, I was the guy who took care of that problem for you.

01:11:00.900 There are so many there are so many interests that you don't have to have a central committee planning.

01:11:08.620 This stuff can happen organically on its own if, like you say, you allow the conditions to be right for it.

01:11:17.440 So we don't need to have a star chamber planning all of this.

01:11:23.040 Right.

01:11:24.140 And it's because of the reality of human nature, right?

01:11:27.100 I always tell people that the genius of the founding fathers was to recognize one singular concept with total clarity, and that is the fundamental, inescapable, unchanging reality of human nature.

01:11:39.140 It devolves towards evil and it collects power in one place in a totalitarian manner.

01:11:44.320 Power always collects in one place and people always seek it.

01:11:47.800 So that's why I keep saying guardrails, that constitution is guardrails to channel human nature in a productive direction and counterbalance it against itself.

01:11:57.380 Yes.

01:11:58.680 All right, let me ask you a couple final questions here.

01:12:01.580 If you could go back and speak to yourself on January 5th, 2021, what would you say to yourself?

01:12:10.840 Man, it's an interesting question framed that way.

01:12:13.440 I can't imagine on January 5th that I would tell myself, go to the Capitol grounds on January 6th.

01:12:22.380 That would be, yeah.

01:12:23.820 I mean, God never calls us to do something painful on purpose for the sake of being painful.

01:12:28.580 That would be sadism and foolishness.

01:12:31.420 So God calls us to be wise.

01:12:32.700 Um, I believe firmly and, and, and honestly, I can tell you this from my heart that I was as prepared and wise in the moment as I was able to be at that time.

01:12:44.320 So I'm, I'm proud of what I did and how I did it.

01:12:47.060 And I conducted myself honorably.

01:12:48.560 I will answer to God for that.

01:12:50.080 And I am satisfied there.

01:12:51.740 But if you had told me on January 5th and I knew ahead of time, I would have adjusted, uh, you know, based on that information.

01:12:58.040 Of course, um, the, the last, uh, question, you know, I, I know, um, many of the players that are going to go into power here soon.

01:13:11.820 I, I know Kash Patel very well.

01:13:14.220 Um, and I have a lot of respect for Kash and Kash and I have had conversations on air long before he thought he was going to be in charge about things like the Epstein, uh, you know, uh, list, um, the ditty.

01:13:28.040 Uh, problem, this particular problem.

01:13:32.260 Um, and we are looking at, and people don't really understand this.

01:13:36.340 And I think you do.

01:13:37.380 We talked about Hitchcock.

01:13:38.720 People don't understand movies are not totally made up.

01:13:43.240 They do reflect real life.

01:13:46.260 And I've had times, and I know you have had times where you're like, I'm in a movie.

01:13:51.960 It's weird.

01:13:52.900 I can't believe I'm in a Jason Bourne movie all of a sudden.

01:13:56.220 Um, right.

01:13:57.980 Those, those movies would tell us when you have this much power, this much money, this many famous people with so much at stake, these things are never really fixed.

01:14:14.340 They're never, they never re the Epstein list will not be released.

01:14:18.800 The P Diddy, he might go to prison, but what about all the people that were there?

01:14:24.420 Will we ever know them?

01:14:26.820 Do you, are you optimistic over the next four years that this next administration with Donald Trump is serious enough, knows what they're facing and brave enough to do this and to take this all on and expose it?

01:14:43.120 So I love that question because it brings me right back to the book that I wrote while I was in prison.

01:14:49.880 I'm in prison going through all of this insanity and abuse and even, even despair.

01:14:55.640 And, and, and, and I realized, you know, this comes down to me in this moment and what I choose to do at the moment.

01:15:02.240 This comes down to the choices I make on how to respond to suffering and pain.

01:15:06.640 And I believe that our country is amazing because it, it calls us to remember the sacred, um, the sacred truth of the human spirit and individual sovereignty.

01:15:21.580 America is all about you and me as individuals.

01:15:24.340 So I am optimistic because it isn't just about president Trump and his administration.

01:15:29.660 Now I love president Trump.

01:15:31.240 I'm very proud of him and a valiant supporter will continue to be, but president Trump by and large,

01:15:36.100 also understands the reality that this is about you, the American.

01:15:41.060 And so if we remember that, if we reclaim that, and that's why I love to talk about a red pill revolution, revolution is the overthrow of an existing system.

01:15:51.440 Now we don't want to overthrow our constitutional system.

01:15:54.260 We want to reclaim and revive it, but we do have to overthrow the spirit of evil, the spirit of corruption, the spirit of, uh, selfish.

01:16:06.100 Self-seeking, centralized power and the lies that they use as weapons.

01:16:10.660 We have to overthrow that system so that we can reclaim the American constitutional Republic for ourselves as American citizens.

01:16:18.520 And if each one of us commits to doing that, there is no weapon formed against us that will stand.

01:16:23.420 I will tell you that that is exactly the answer I have come to.

01:16:28.060 I just wrote predictions on, you know, 2025 and I talked about Epstein and, and this kind of case and, uh, said, uh, I don't think it will happen this year, but it doesn't mean that it won't happen.

01:16:40.860 But the only thing standing in the way of it's happening, uh, is apathy.

01:16:48.240 If we realize how much power we actually have and we stand up and say, no, our children are being raped, our children, they are, they are bringing children in for pleasure. 0.85

01:17:04.620 This system is corrupt.

01:17:06.600 I want to know who is part of that corruption.

01:17:09.300 I want this, I want this, uh, uh, judge, the prosecutors, the FBI, uh, the DOJ.

01:17:18.080 I want all of it.

01:17:19.500 And I want the bad guys if in a fair trial, I want the bad guys to go to jail.

01:17:26.260 I want this to be clean.

01:17:28.020 And if we all stand up, it's the only thing that will, because nobody is, you know, Donald Trump has already risked his life.

01:17:36.580 How many people are really, truly willing to risk their life to expose this stuff?

01:17:45.260 Not as many as you would hope.

01:17:47.480 I mean, look at the number of FBI agents that stay quiet, uh, even though they know what's happening is wrong.

01:17:53.580 We have to be the ones that demand it.

01:17:57.700 And that has been great.

01:17:59.120 That is my, yeah, go ahead.

01:18:01.280 That is my Patriot plea, man.

01:18:02.920 The Patriot plea, right? 0.80

01:18:04.920 That's my call is that we need to raise up a remnant.

01:18:09.100 It won't ever be everyone, but the American revolution, this country, the United States of America formed in 1776 with 3% of the, of the colonists participating in that effort.

01:18:20.780 3% was the remnant.

01:18:22.080 And I tell a story in the book about Gideon, a Jew that God found in a wine press and said, you mighty man are going to save the nation of Israel from the hordes of Midianite marauders. 1.00

01:18:31.980 And he's like me, like, I don't have anything going on here.

01:18:35.160 God said, it's not about you.

01:18:36.460 It's about me and your obedience to the call, raise up those who are willing to exercise uncomfortable courage.

01:18:42.780 And it was, he had 32,000 Israelites that initially answered and God said, that's too many. 0.99

01:18:49.600 I want the remnant.

01:18:51.060 I want those who are really willing to stay strong when the going gets tough, who, when the government says, I'll give you a golden parachute plea deal.

01:18:57.780 And you know, that plea deal is a lie that's being used to crucify thousands of your American citizens and to propel totalitarian government forward.

01:19:06.740 And you say, no, God wants that remnant, but it's 3% or whatever percent it is.

01:19:11.760 It's a, it's a minority, but it's the tireless minority that Sam Adams spoke lighting fire brush fires in the minds of men with truth and the opportunity of courage.

01:19:21.780 We just have to exercise it.

01:19:24.820 John Strand, the name of the book is Patriot Plea.

01:19:29.500 You can find it by going to johnstrand.com, johnstrand.com.

01:19:34.640 John, as always, thank you.

01:19:37.320 God bless you.

01:19:38.000 No, thank you, Glenn.

01:19:39.100 Honor is mine and God bless you and our great country.

01:19:41.180 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

01:19:54.360 Thank you.

01:19:55.360 Thank you.

The Glenn Beck Program - January 11, 2025

Ep 240 ｜ Should Pardon ALL Jan. 6 Defendants？! ｜ John Strand ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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