American Thought Leaders - New Jan. 6 Scandals: Julie Kelly on Destruction of Evidence and the DNC Pipe Bomb

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

“Think about this: If you’re going to do an investigation into January 6, who’s one of the first people you would call to testify, even behind closed doors? FBI Director Christopher Wray—they never interviewed him. They never interviewed Steven D'Antuono, who’s in charge of the Washington Field Office who oversaw the entire January 6 criminal investigation.”In this episode, I catch up with investigative journalist Julie Kelly to get an update on what we know, and still don’t know, about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.“Why did the January 6 Select Committee—why did they destroy evidence that they collected? Why are they hiding transcripts from witness interviews at the White House ... and at the Department of Homeland Security? How possibly could text messages belonging to more than two dozen Secret Service agents and officials, including the director, just vanish?”What are the charges defendants are facing? What was the level of government and law enforcement involvement? Why hasn’t the mystery of the D.C. pipe bomb been solved?“If you would have told me that two years later—I think that was when we recorded that interview for the [Epoch Times Jan. 6] documentary—that we would still be talking about people being rounded up, investigated, arrested, charged, and convicted now in early 2024, even I would have had a hard time, I think, grasping that that would be the reality. But here we are, in February of 2024. The Department of Justice is now on pace to arrest one January 6 defendant a day this year,” says Ms. Kelly.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Think about this. If you're going to do an investigation into January 6th, who's one of the first people you would call to testify, even behind closed doors? FBI Director Christopher Wray. They never interviewed him. They never interviewed Stephen D'Antuano, who was in charge of the Washington field office, who oversaw the entire January 6th criminal investigation. In this episode, I catch up with investigative journalist Julie Kelly to get an update on what we know and still don't know about what happened on January 6th. Why did the January 6th Select Committee, why did they destroy evidence that they collected? Why are they hiding transcripts from witness interviews at the White House and at the Department of Homeland Security. How possibly could text messages belonging to more than two dozen secret

service agents and officials, including the director, just vanish? Here we are, February of 2024. The Department of Justice is now on pace to arrest one January 6th defendant a day this year. So this is not stopping. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Julie Kelly, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. So good to be with you again, Jan. Thank you. Julie, you were, of course, one of the people featured in our first January 6 documentary that Epoch Times published. We actually have a second one now that focuses a lot on what's happened to some of the defendants. I think they can only be described as significant abuses of power against people who committed misdemeanors in some cases. How has the state of knowledge

evolved since the time that we had you on last. Yes, so I was so grateful to be part of that documentary. It was so important and so well done. And Joe Hanneman, who is the January 6th reporter, still to this day is doing amazing work. Even I would have had a hard time, I think, grasping that that would be the reality. But here we are, February of 2024, the Department of Justice is now on pace to arrest one January 6th defendant a day this year, trying to bring the

total caseload to 2,000 defendants from now existing caseload of 1,300. So this is not stopping. Let me just jump in. You know that they want another 700 defendants? Yes. Matthew Graves, who is the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, a Biden appointee, told the Washington Post in 2022, shortly after he was put into that office, that he believed the caseload would exceed 2,000 defendants before he was done and the statute of limitations would run out. And that's certainly a promise that he intends to keep. What is the typical charge that we're looking at here? So right now, the overwhelming charge, believe it or not, are a couple of misdemeanors, parading in the Capitol and being

in a restricted area on Capitol grounds. One of the most common felonies, a nonviolent felony, obstruction of an official proceeding, more than 320 January 6th defendants have been charged with that felony. And of course, then you have assault on police officers, interfering with police officers. A few hundred people have been charged with that as well. So that's basically sort of an overview of the most common charges. But then you have the DOJ using very rare charges like seditious conspiracy that has typically been applied to foreign terrorists tied to Islamic terror cells. But the DOJ has dusted that off for the first time, charged and resulted in the conviction of multiple people tied to both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Seditious conspiracy, really a count that's sort of tantamount to treason. Well, and so, you know, there's few

people that kind of know the breadth of this whole picture as well as you do. What happened that day, as far as you can tell, based on everything you know right now? So what I say about January 6th overall is that it was a lot of different things happening at different times at different locations. So you had quite a bit of violence on the west side of the Capitol that started right before the joint session convened at one o'clock. You had police officers, as Joe Hanneman has reported and has been in the documentary, police officers assaulting the crowd outside, using munitions that are supposed to be non-lethal. And that really, I think, initiated a lot of the confrontations that people have seen between protesters and police. On the east side of the building was a little bit calmer, but that is where the Oath Keepers entered.

That was the Columbus doors where people got inside the building. But I think the bigger question for a lot of people is why the Capitol grounds and the building itself was so intentionally vulnerable and unsecure. And I think that that raises questions in people's mind that this was purposeful, that they wanted to leave the building and the grounds unprotected to draw in tens of thousands of Trump supporters where Congress was going to be debating the election results. And I think in many ways, they got the outcome that they wanted, which was using the violence that day, using people going into the building to shut down the proceedings. And then when Congress reconvenes, the plans to debate the outcome and swing states, contested states, basically ended and they certified the election on January 7th.

Other people call it a fedsurrection. We know what this government is capable of doing to Donald Trump and people tied to him. And the idea that they had no involvement, despite what we know now, intelligence warnings, they had multiple police departments on the ground that day, uniformed and not uniformed, undercover. They had FBI informants run into these so-called militia groups. So if they had all of this foreknowledge and they had informants and you had officers, why did this happen? Your argument here is that given there was a deep level of involvement and knowledge of multiple agencies, yet the vulnerability was stark. And that suggests to you that there's some level of intentionality there. Do I understand that right? Yes, I believe that that is true.

I mean, these situations like this are volatile. You don't know really what's going to happen. We have Russiagate, right, to show us the great lengths that people who really shouldn't be doing such things will go to attack a political candidate and then a sitting president, right, and to kind of slow them down. So we know these types of things exist. We've had an astonishing level of censorship. We've been learning more and more about the contours of this disinformation industrial complex that has emerged again with all sorts of state and NGO and it's a whole kind of conglomerate with obviously government involvement. So we know

these types of things exist. Right. Right. But the idea that, you know, that they had the plan to entice all these people into the Capitol, it just, it still feels, it still feels far-fetched somehow, doesn't it? It really does. Yeah. And I think that, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy just said this a few months ago, and he said, if you would have told me three years ago that I would be calling this an inside job, I would have told you you were crazy.

But there's so much emerging evidence now. And now more than three years removed, you have to ask, well, why is the government continuing to conceal evidence about what happened that day? And more importantly, beforehand, why did the January 6th Select Committee, why did they destroy evidence that they collected? Why are they hiding transcripts from witness interviews? Why are they hiding those interviews, those transcripts at the White House, Biden White House, and at the Department of Homeland Security? How possibly could text messages belonging to more than two dozen Secret Service agents and officials, including the director, just vanish. They were purged and never recovered. I'll tell you the biggest coincidence, and that is the ties to the FBI entrapment scheme to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. We now know from those trials that this was a complete,

this was a plot conceived and executed by the FBI. And a lot of that was run out of the FBI Detroit field office in Michigan. The head of the Detroit FBI field office, a man named Stephen D'Antuano, was promoted by Christopher Wray, the FBI director, to take over the Washington field office a few months before January 6th. Now, why was he moved after successfully executing this FBI entrapment operation? The arrests were announced right before the 2020 election. This was a big issue the last few weeks on the campaign trail. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer were all blaming Donald Trump for inciting his supporters to try to kidnap and kill Gretchen Whitmer.

Well, it turns out this was another FBI plot. This was Russiagate. This was something to interfere with the election in a key swing state of Michigan. So this FBI director is then moved to Washington. We know that there were FBI informants, as I said, run into various groups. We know there were informants on the ground on January 6th. And Stephen D'Antuano then led the criminal investigation into January 6th and then suddenly retired in November of 2022 after Republicans won the House because he himself had become a target, sort of a subject.

A person of interest or something like that. Thank you. Person of interest that Republicans wanted to talk to. So, again, odd coincidences. You know, talking about coincidences, when this this you recall the DNC pipe bomb. Of course, you've been doing work on these pipe bombs yourself. Key cameras pointed at exactly that spot suddenly pan away at the critical moments where you would want to have that footage. Again, it's hard to believe that's a coincidence because they don't pan away normally, as far as I know. I mean, maybe you could actually speak to that scenario.

And why don't you actually remind us about the whole pipe bomb situation and its implications and then now what we're seeing. Yeah. So this is another angle of the narrative that at first was a really big deal, that someone, presumably a Trump supporter, had planted pipe bombs outside of the DNC and RNC right before the joint session convened. And the idea was that this was a Trump supporter who was trying to blow up these buildings, kill people, but then coordinate the first breach into the Capitol. That's what our top officials, such as Chris Wray, told us. Well, then all of a sudden, the interest in the pipe bomb story kind

of dissipated. And the media, who was once all over the subject, sort of left it. Well, why? Because we found out towards the end of 2022 that unbeknownst to anyone, Kamala Harris, a sitting U.S. senator, by the way, who should have been participating in the events of January 6th, or at least soaking up all the glory about what was going to happen, incoming vice president, was not at the Capitol. In fact, she was there and then she left and oddly went to the DNC headquarters. She remained there for almost two hours while we are told a pipe bomb was sitting right outside the building and only evacuated after it was discovered. So that raised a lot more questions.

How could her security, her secret service security detail, because she was the incoming, she was the vice president-elect, she had secret service. How could they possibly have missed a device that's not buried somewhere sitting outside between two benches? How did other law enforcement officials miss it? How did the security guards at DNC miss it? And then as new video is coming out just recently, as Darren Beatty at Revolver News has reported, when they did discover it, their response was really inexplicable. They were lackadaisical about it. You didn't see them rushing around and trying to get her out of the building. It was almost like they kind of knew themselves. They didn't seem scared at all. We're led to believe that there's a credible

pipe bomb threat, yet the security services don't seem to notice. I'm just sort of imagining what would happen if there's a bomb somewhere. There would be a, hopefully a quick response. And it wasn't. And I think that that's what Darren kind of pointed out is look at how these officers and Secret Service agents were responding to the detection of this device. Furthermore, Jan, what I found recently watching the surveillance video is that a bomb-sniffing canine was within feet of the explosive device, we're told, at least twice that morning. How did a bomb-sniffing dog miss what we still are told to this day by the FBI is a viable explosive device that could have detonated and killed people. Now, if you have a trained dog who's supposed to find these explosive devices, how did the dog miss it twice that day?

Tom Massey and others are promising to open another investigation into the DNC pipe bomb. How did they miss it? And again, going back to Stephen D'Antuano, he told Congress last year that the cell phone provider they thought was the suspect who planted the devices the night before, that the data from that cell provider is corrupted and they believe that that belonged to the suspect they said planted the devices the night before. So how could the FBI continue to sweep up more than 1,300 individuals using facial recognition and all of the invasive surveillance tool investigative tools that they have to get a grandma from Florida and arrest her for trespassing. But you can't find someone responsible or who

could have killed Kamala Harris and her staff, Secret Service agents, on January 6th. She's never mentioned it publicly either. So again, another angle of January 6th that just does not add up. And then, of course, there's the issue of the cameras now, we know, panning away. And so there isn't the actual footage to show what really happened when they were dismantling it. I understand it's the when the bomb squad arrives. That's the part that's sort of missing. Well, and the whole fact that there's not more cameras that are in that vicinity that could show exactly the pipe bomb sitting there. We've only seen the video from Congressman Massey and then Darren Beatty who showed this quick zoom in of this device

that was propped up really, it was very visible. It was outside, it was in between two benches where people could sit. So we did see the camera zoom in, but that's really the only camera angle that we have of that specific area. So I think there's a lot to the DNC pipe bomb story that could unravel bigger questions about January 6th, which is why the media is completely ignoring the new scandals related to the pipe bomb. Yeah, the silence on this issue is completely deafening, I guess, right? Yeah, what's fascinating to me, you know, as we're recording here, I see a new narrative

developing. Some people have dubbed it Russiagate 2.0. And we have FBI whistleblowers who have come forward and said that agents are being taken off of, say, child trafficking, child pornography cases, important crimes and investigations to hunt down January Sixers. We also know that the Department of Justice is pulling assistant U.S. attorneys from offices across the country to come to D.C. to help prosecute these cases. Well, if you're pulling assistant U.S. attorneys away from, say, the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago or other areas where they're really dealing with crime issues, so you can come here and prosecute someone for obstruction of an official proceeding or parading in the Capitol, what is the impact of those areas where these prosecutors are being moved? They're being

taken off not just investigating, but prosecuting serious crimes. We talked a little bit about how there's media silence around this issue, but it certainly wasn't all silence. I mean, there was this whole committee, which you mentioned, destroyed evidence. And actually, it would be great if you could kind of remind us what exactly happened there. What do we know happened there with that? But for quite some time, there was quite a bit of media coverage. With your view, what was that January 6th committee? So the January 6th select committee we know was solely targeted at Donald Trump. It was the predicate, really, to criminally charge him. Special Counsel Jack Smith basically lifted most of his 45-page

indictment against Donald Trump for January 6th from the committee's report. Much of it is regurgitated from the committee's findings. Think about this, Jan. They promised that they were going to get to the bottom of January 6th to make sure it never happened again. Yet they gave short shrift to intelligence and law enforcement failures. They put that section in an appendix of the report so they could only fixate on Donald Trump, his associates, and what they did. In fact, there were people after the committee disbanded who complained to the media that members, especially Liz Cheney, wanted to make that report and its findings only about Donald Trump. So that was the basis of the January 6th committee and to fuel this narrative among the public that Donald Trump was responsible for January 6th, that it wasn't law enforcement, it wasn't Nancy Pelosi who really is responsible for securing the Capitol or Capitol Police or the FBI or anyone else.

Think about this. If you're going to do an investigation into January 6th, who's one of the first people you would call to testify, even behind closed doors? FBI Director Christopher Wray. They never interviewed him. They never interviewed Stephen D'Antuano, who's in charge of the Washington field office, who oversaw the entire January 6th criminal investigation. So why did they overlook those two individuals so they could interview Donald Trump's campaign manager? What about this evidence that was destroyed? Explain to me what happened there. What do we know factually? So Representative Barry Loudermilk, who is heading up a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, is working with, he's trying to locate all of this evidence that the committee collected. Well, in the interim, he has discovered, and this is Benny Thompson, the former chairman of that committee, has admitted that they did not archive or preserve any of the video recordings of the 1,000 or so witnesses that the committee interviewed. All of those video recordings are gone.

Furthermore, there are hundreds of transcripts that the committee said that they would make public that still have not been made public or available to House Republicans. Again, going back to the Secret Service text, those are gone too. They've never been recovered. When it comes to these, you know, presumably still existing documents that aren't being handed over, what justification is there for that? Some of it is security issues. So there are transcripts that we know are being concealed at the Biden White House and the Department of Homeland Security. And the justification now, more than a year later, is that they are undergoing a security review to make sure that any personal or private information is not given to House Republicans and that nothing would jeopardize national security.

So that's one excuse. As far as destroying the video recordings, what Benny Thompson said was, well, you have the written transcripts, you don't need the video recordings. Well, that wouldn't work in most criminal trial proceedings, but it has here. And not only is it impacting House Republicans trying to figure out what that committee did and January 6th, it's impacting Donald Trump's trial as well and other January 6th criminal proceedings because those defendants want access to what the January 6th committee got access to that they don't have, which is technically could be exculpatory, certainly discovery evidence. So this is a cover upup of a massive scale. Again, does the media care? No. They covered wall-to-wall whatever the January 6th Select Committee did, their hearings, but now that there's evidence that they have destroyed or hid their evidence somewhere, the media, again, is nowhere to be found.

Is there some like laws against destroying evidence like this? There are laws against destroying evidence, but who is going to bring them? You know, unfortunately, it would fall to Attorney General Merrick Garland or Matthew Graves to open an investigation into House Democrats, and that's never going to happen. You know, one thing that we haven't talked about yet is, you know, how the treatment of some of these defendants, right? This is, of course, you know, big focus of our recent part two documentary. But just, you know, overall, can you give me just a picture of how they've been treated? And I guess, you know, it's this is more like an issue of, you know, what people would describe as unequal justice, right? It's like, if you're going to dish it out, dish it out equally for a so comparable offense.

The consequences for these defendants, their family members, is devastating and destructive. I mean, you have at least four January 6th defendants who have committed suicide under the torment of this DOJ. Others who have been convicted, as I said, 100% conviction rate for DOJ and jury trials, excessive prison sentences being handed down by judges, including terror enhancements for nonviolent offenses where they weren't plotting to kill or destroy anyone, kill anyone or destroy anything. So this is what they, what I call American political prisoners are enduring and they're continuing to do the same. It's happening every single day in the court, federal courthouse in the nation's capital.

A hundred percent convictions in jury trials. I mean, that could also be because the evidence is so strong, but like, why, why, also be because the evidence is so strong. But like, why? Why is that the case? Well, it's the case because you're putting Trump supporters before a jury made up of voters in a city that voted 92 percent for Joe Biden. I mean, Washington, D.C. is almost 100 percent Democrat. Furthermore, jury surveys indicate that the people of Washington have a far different view of the events of January 6th than people who live in other jurisdictions. They really view this as an insurrection, an act of domestic terror. They took this very personally, even though no one outside of the Capitol was hurt, and Trump supporters were the only ones who died that day.

I've sat in these jury selection proceedings and I hear what these Washington residents say about January 6th. And it's truly shocking. They still say that they are traumatized by what happened. Well, how could you possibly be traumatized if you weren't even there? It was over in four hours. Yes, there were pockets of violence, but this is what they're hearing, and they're returning their verdicts in record time. But people who say they were traumatized by the events are allowed to serve as jurists. Yes. That seems to not work. Right. Because then they will tell the judge, I can set aside my personal feelings and I can be an impartial juror. Well, of course they're

not. There was an interview done by one jury on the Oath Keepers trial, and she explained to the interviewer how she was desperate to get on the jury, that she was calling the clerk's office every day to find out what was happening with the jury selection process. They want to be on these juries. They want to help send these people to prison. And what's even scarier, Jan, is you have judges who are obligated to protect the rights of defendants. They have not done that at all. Now we're almost two years removed from the

first jury trial, March of 2022. DOJ has 100% conviction rate for J6 defendants, but yet judges refuse to move these trials out of Washington. Their due process rights are completely obliterated. So what do you think should happen now, if you were going to pick three things as we finish, that should happen now? Well, congressional investigation into all of this, including DOJ and these federal judges. So another J6 committee, basically. Yes. I think it's unfortunate that Republicans did not form their own January 6th committee. So I know that they're becoming more interested in it. If the Supreme Court, which they very well could, reverse how DOJ has applied this 1512 C-2 obstruction count,

there needs to be repercussions for the DOJ, Matthew Gray's line prosecutors, and more importantly, federal judges of both parties who gave their imprimatur to the unprecedented use of that statute to criminalize political dissent. There needs to be mass calls for resignations, retirements for these judges, and separate investigations into what DOJ and these prosecutors did to weaponize that statute. Well, Julie Kelly, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for joining Julie Kelly and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders here from CPAC. I'm Janja Kelek.