The January 6, 2021, march-turned-melee at the Capitol happened when bad actors blew through police barricades to get inside while scores of others were allowed in by Capitol Police. The two-hour spasm of unrest and banshee-like behavior consisted of scaring the hell out of senators, injuring cops, sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s chair, and setting a political narrative that continues to this day.
Now comes confirmation that the FBI had spies inside one group that day. This revelation raises more questions.
“The existence of the informants came to light over the past few days in a flurry of veiled court filings by defense lawyers for five members of the Proud Boys,” wrote The New York Times.
The revelation came during a closed hearing for five of the group’s members who go on trial next month on seditious conspiracy charges related to the J-6 breach.
Attorneys for the five Proud Boys members want full disclosure of informants’ communications with the FBI because they believe the official record would show there was no conspiracy to storm the Capitol that day and absolve Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola of the charges. Indeed, their attorneys asked for charges to be dropped against the defendants.
The New York Times reported that a previous informant infiltrating the Proud Boys in Kansas City reported there was no conspiracy to storm the Capitol, though “as a relatively low-level member of the group it is possible that he was simply not privy to the making of such plans.”
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The informant revelation raises again the biggest questions never asked and answered during the January 6 congressional show trial. Why didn’t Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Police act on intelligence that there would be unrest that day and why didn’t the cops harden the target in advance? Nancy Pelosi also exempted herself and most officers from the query by the panel. Why? Was she too busy creating a movie about it with her daughter to be bothered, or was the breach a feature and not a bug?
Put another way: If they knew people were preparing to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, why didn’t they stop it instead of admitting the public to become victims?
The January 6 event has never made sense to me. The J-6 stuff as well as the Gretchen Whitmer “fednapping,” as reporter Julie Kelly calls it, have always struck me as one big put-up job. A psy-op. Both were run by the same FBI overseer and were conveniently rolled out at politically opportune times to reflect the worst caricatures the Left has of the right. We knew Enrique Tarrio had been an FBI informant and was barred from Washington, D.C. before January 6 for tearing down a BLM banner.
Kelly reported during the first Whitmer trial, in which two defendants were found not guilty, how one FBI informant “along with other FBI informants, posed as leaders of two ‘militia’ groups, at least one of which was created by the FBI.” So we know what the FBI is capable of and how much manpower they’re willing to expend.
The defendants were found guilty in a second trial but the questions piled up. If the FBI hadn’t been driving the conspiracy, would it have existed? As one of the public defenders said at trial, the FBI’s behavior is “unacceptable in America. That’s not how it works. They don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”
I’m no conspiracy theorist, but sometimes people really are out to get you — like the FBI. Maybe this is exactly “how it works.”
The Proud Boys FBI/informants story has moved a few more tumblers into place for me.
Let’s remember that Proud Boys started as a breakfast cereal-eating male bonding group. In Oregon, where they have one of the biggest groups of men, members of Proud Boys provide security at conservative events, and an offshoot of the group has held free speech rallies to dare, if you will, Antifa to try and shut them down. Overwhelmingly, the only violence committed by Proud Boys is if Antifa throws the first punch. If Antifa doesn’t start the violence, there will be no violence.
In light of this, storming the Capitol seemed wholly out of character for this diverse group. Indeed, Antifa and their political kindred in and out of government have had to concoct ways to smear them. Antifa calls them Nazis, white nationalists, and fascists, tropes that have been picked up by the woke crowd throughout the country. It is a mindset that permeates the seventh floor at the FBI.
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Proud Boys are no angels, but they aren’t the caricature depicted by detractors, either.
The feds’ behavior during the lead-up to the trial is also suspicious. As The Times reported, “prosecutors argued that hundreds of pages of documents related to the F.B.I. informants were neither ‘suppressed’ by the government nor directly relevant to the case of the Proud Boys…” but “because all of the material remains under a highly restrictive protective order, it is not possible to know what the informants told the government about the Proud Boys’ role in the Capitol attack or how that information might affect the outcome of the trial.”
Gee whiz, I’m no lawyer, but that seems kind of important. And many, if not most, Americans aren’t inclined to believe the FBI these days. We want to see what hand they’ve dealt to themselves, thank-you-very-much.
The Times and anyone who’s paid attention noticed that the feds have been playing games in the January 6 aftermath. To wit:
The dispute about the informants in the Proud Boys came on the heels of revelations that the F.B.I. also had a well-placed source in the inner circle of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, another far-right group that took part in the Capitol attack.
Last week, lawyers for Mr. Rhodes and four other Oath Keepers who are being tried on sedition charges planned to call the informant — Greg McWhirter, the group’s former vice president — as a defense witness, believing that his testimony would bolster their case. But on the eve of his planned appearance, Mr. McWhirter suffered a heart attack and the defense put other witnesses in his place.
Well, we’re very sorry that FBI informant McWhirter had a heart attack hours before his key testimony about another group that has never committed an act of violence.
Would Proud Boys ever have had a role in the breaching of the Capitol if FBI informants hadn’t been involved? Was there ever a planned breach? Was this a concoction — there’s that word again — by the FBI or was this a convenient way to sideline the antithesis of the Left’s beloved Antifa?
Moreover, why didn’t the FBI stop the breach before it happened on January 6 if there was a big conspiracy to carry it out and they knew about it in advance? There are a couple of possible answers to that question. Both make the FBI look even worse. Either they did nothing to achieve a ready-made “insurrection,” a word that had already been circulated and immediately seized on by the Left in the media and government, to “get” Donald Trump again. It’s a scenario in which Capitol Police let innocents inside to be victimized by these made-for-TV “insurrectionists.”
Or they’re framing these DOJ-labeled “extremist” groups for political effect.
If there’s another explanation, please include it in the comments below.
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