American Thought Leaders - Unmasking J6 Lies: Panel on “The Real Story of Jan. 6 Part 2” Documentary in US Capitol, with Sen. Ron Johnson

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

“We haven’t even begun to be told the full story, which means the truth about January 6,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) at a screening of the new EpochTV documentary “The Real Story of January 6 Part 2: The Long Road Home” in the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 9, 2024.After the screening, I hosted a panel discussion with experts William Shipley, a 21-year DOJ prosecutor turned defense attorney who is representing a number of Jan. 6 defendants; national security expert and former national intelligence strategist Tom Speciale; Heritage Institute Oversight Project director Mike Howell; Sarah McAbee, the wife of a Jan. 6 detainee who’s been separated from her husband for years in the wake of his arrest; and Epoch Times senior investigative reporter Joseph Hanneman, host and writer of the documentary.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the speakers and panelists, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Hello everyone. Welcome to this. This is the in-person world premiere of The true story of, the real story of January 6th, part two, the Long Road Home. For starters, I wanted to thank Senator Johnson and his office for sponsoring this event and helping us host it here in the U.S. Capitol. I think it's a highly appropriate place to do this. So very, very briefly, we're very, very proud to be letting the people know right now

that the Epoch Times, by paid subscribers, has become the fourth largest newspaper in the country. And I think that's a test. This type of reporting that we have here, led by Joe Hanman, who I'll be introducing later after the show with a kind of star-studded panel of some of the key players in the documentary itself. It's this kind of reporting that has led us to this success. We started off in July of 2022 with the real story of January 6th part one okay that has been our gangbusters most popular documentary we found a lot of original footage we totally broke the conventional narrative around January 6

with that documentary that was followed up by, in August, we published the January 6th tapes. And by the way, this is all Joe Hanneman leading in his reporting. And then we found further, we got exclusive access to the J6 footage, and we developed a deeper understanding of what actually happened on the ground. Now, this film is a little bit of a different approach. January 6th fundamentally changed America, I think, in a lot of ways. And what we're looking at in this film, in part two, is what has actually happened to America? relationship with law enforcement change? What are some of the people who were on the site and committed misdemeanors, for example, which was the vast majority of the people who were charged with anything, how have they been treated by the system? And once again, we have Joe Hanneman leading us in that. So without further ado, Senator Johnson, he's been one of the very few

congressional members that's been following this issue very closely, following it publicly, I might add, which is, of course, greatly appreciated. And he's going to say a few words now. Thank you, Jan. Thank all of you for attending. Thank you, Epoch Times, for being the kind of publication that the free press that our founders actually envisioned that is just crucial to maintaining

our freedom and our democracy. Let me quick read the words of the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That's the first freedom in the First

Amendment. But then, right after that is abridging the freedom of speech. The next listed is or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and a petition of the government for a redress of grievances. I mean, to me, the First Amendment is so applicable to January 6th. We haven't even begun to be told the full story, which means the truth about January 6th. They always say, to the victor go the spoils. The victor writes the history. And unfortunately, in November of 2020, Democrats had the full sweep. They had all the levers of power. And they wrote the history of January 6th. But there are so many questions that haven't even been asked, much less answered, to get the full story, to get the full truth. But one of the questions I had, and I asked my staff if we could put this together, is I remember hearing the mantra

of thousands of armed insurrections. I'm the guy, by the way, in the hearing in February when we had FBI witness Jill Sanborn ask her okay, we hear thousands of armed insurrection so most Americans when they think of arms they think of firearms and I know you can use other things as weapons and they did but most people think of arms as firearms so I asked the FBI how many firearms if we had thousands of armed insurrections how many firearms did the FBI cops get in January 6th I had no

idea what the answer would be. But the answer was a mic drop moment when she said zero. So when you piece it all together, the first use of the term that we could find of armed insurrection was Nancy Pelosi on January 6th. That was followed by a press release by Leader Schumer quoting that again, that this was an armed insurrection. Democrat congressman from Pennsylvania, Connor Lamb, then talked about a briefing where potentially 4,000 armed patriots

might disrupt the inauguration. That was on January 12th. On January 14th, Representative Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, was the first person to say that President Trump organized, baited, engaged, encouraged, and unleashed thousands of armed insurrectionists who laid siege to our nation's capital on January 6th. So there you go. Within eight days of January 6th, the narrative was set. This was an armed insurrection. Later in February 7th, Senator Schumer said, there's no debate to be had here. January 6th was an armed insurrection. And unfortunately,

we had Republicans parrot the exact same phrase. Leader McConnell, on February 8th, it was a violent insurrection. Now, I came back and I was highly criticized shortly after January 6th by saying, I was never afraid on January 6th. I was there. They sealed down the Senate building for, the Senate chamber for about 10 minutes, then Capitol Police came and God bless them,

and they ushered us out and I walked back to my office. And then I witnessed on the TV the violence, and we all condemned it, by the way, right? None of us condoned the violence. We condemned it. We want to see those people prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But I also saw on the TV camera these supposed insurrectionists stay within the rope lines. Now we're seeing more and more videos that, unfortunately, the defense attorneys, the defendants, haven't had access to to help defend themselves. But again, the narrative was set.

This was an armed insurrection. We've been battling that now for three years. And I would say nothing could be further from the truth. One of the reasons I said that I was afraid on January 6th is I knew who most of those people in the crowd were, not personally. But in Wisconsin, where Battleground State, I went to a number of Trump rallies. And the people I saw attending Trump rallies, and I knew the vast majority of people that

came to January 6th, were patriots. People that are God-fearing, country-loving. They fervently love this country. They respect law enforcement. They would never even contemplate committing a crime or engaging in acts of violence. The vast majority of people that came on January 6th fitted that profile. I mentioned the hearings that I was no longer chairman of the committee, so I couldn't control them.

I was just a member now. I asked the FBI witness about how many armed insurrectionists, but I also entered in the first hearing the written testimony of J. Michael Waller, who taught at the War College, a very trained observer, went to January 6th to observe. Wrote his 14-page testimony, observations, without ever looking at any news media. I entered that into the record in our first dual committee hearing. I was immediately called and attacked by Senator Klobuchar as being a conspiracy theorist and having entered a conspiracy theory into the record. Well, that testimony by J. Michael Waller

has pretty well stood the test of time. He talked about, first of all, no police presence at all on the west side of the Capitol. None that he could see. He talked about four distinct groups, he called them provocateurs. I would call them agitators. I think what you're going to see here in the video that Joe Hanneman has provided in this documentary, that that is a pretty good description. There were people at the front. Didn't attend the speech at the Ellipse. They were there. They were there to agitate, to create violence. That's the truth. We need to know more truth about January 6th. So to kind of wrap up here, I talked about, you know, all the questions haven't even been asked, much less answered. I had a long list.

I want to hit the key ones. First of all, why was there such a shocking lack of security? You know, I've written this in my oversight letters, I mean, are there standard security postures for different events? You know, I was there during the Brett Kavanaugh hearing. I mean, we were briefed in terms of what to expect, you know, where to go, you know, what security is going to be out there. There was no briefing before January 6th, and yet there were estimates of potentially more than a million people attending, which is way more than people protesting the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

What was the security plan? We still don't know to this day. What did Pelosi, McConnell, Roy Blunt, Zoe Loughran, these are the individuals, these are the leaders in the charge of the Committee of Security, what did they know? Have they ever been interviewed? You know, there is a huge discrepancy in terms of the crowd size. Why? You know, the Secret Service estimates were, and I think January 6th could be the Democrat, the highly partisan committee, they're saying, you know, 10, 20,000. And yet, talking to Joe Hanneman, he's talking

about 250,000, maybe even more. It's a huge discrepancy. Why is that? I would ask how many people actually committed acts of violence? You know, what we do know, and by the way, we know exactly why they have this narrative of thousands armed in this direction. We just saw President Biden use it at his first campaign speech of the year. He said, since that day, more than 1200 people have been charged with assault in the capital. Nearly 900 of them have been convicted or pled guilty collectively to date they've been sentenced to more than 840 years in prison.

That sounds like a pretty serious event, right? Do those people really deserve 840 years in prison. That sounds like a pretty serious event, right? Do those people really deserve 840 years in prison? Some of them deserve real prison time. But what is the justification for these SWAT rate arrests? Okay? So again, there are just so many unanswered questions. I just have to thank Epic Times for being those journalists there to you lot utilizing our First Amendment right to freedom of the press freedom of speech being the honest broker in terms of trying to expose and tell the

American people the truth and all I can ask of anybody here in the audience or listening in a later videotape is please try and find out what the truth is discern it you know look up sites like epic times subscribe you know learn the truth and spread the truth be evangelists for the truth because that's the only thing they're going to save our nation from the radical leftists that have infiltrated every institution of this country. They are the danger to democracy, not the patriots, the vast majority of patriots that showed up to exercise their First Amendment rights on January 6th. So again, thank you, Epic Times. Well, hello everyone. You just watched the real story of January 6th, Part 2, The Long Road Home.

And I'm here with an incredible panel, many of the people who, of course, were in the film. I'm going to start over to my side here. This is Joe Hanneman. Of course, he introduced, everybody's been introduced a little bit, but I'll just mention, you know, Joe, when he first started doing this beat of January 6th, he had actually been looking at, you know, COVID, looking at vaccine injury, different things before, really into human interest stories.

He did not have his mind made up at all about what happened. He was just, he was inquisitive. He saw something wasn't right. And as he says in the film, he uncovered, you know, that just most of what we've known officially just simply doesn't make a lot of sense at all. So we're going to talk about that. Beside him, we've got Tom Speciale. Of course, he's a national security expert, former senior collection strategist for domestic terrorism at the National Counterterrorism Center at ODNI. So, you know, knows a little bit about this topic. Okay. We've got Mike Howell, Director of the Heritage Oversight Project,

launched in January 2022. This is Heritage's investigative and oversight arm, and I'd actually like to know a little bit more about it for the benefit of us. I actually just came from an event at Heritage run by your colleague Jay Richards on another issue, which is so-called untouchable, which is gender ideology.

Heritage has been doing amazing work. And we've got Sarah McAbee, whose husband is behind bars as we speak, as part of this whole action that we've witnessed here. So thank you for being with us, and thank you for being able to speak here. So thank you for being with us and thank you for being able to kind of speak here. And beside her, of course, we have William Shipley, defense attorney, 21-year federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice in California and Hawaii, and also with a very interestingly made Twitter handle, Shipwrecked Crew, which some of us have been following for some time about other issues a lot of good insights from him okay so let's start with Joe I wanted Joe tell me this okay what what is the most what is the most there are many shocking things across these three documentaries that you've made until what would you say is

the most kind of shocking thing to you was the biggest I can't believe this happened moment for you it's probably the use of force by the federal government no and how widespread it was the intense use of tactical squads going in, oftentimes on just misdemeanor charges, which is pointed out in the film, that's previously unheard of, in going in and acting like they were in danger. And I heard that from many, many defendants

that said they looked in the eyes of the tactical agents that were coming in and they felt like they possibly were going to get shot and killed and that they were the ones who were in danger. And some of these homes, like the month's oldest daughter, had small children. Two daughters who were separated by the SWAT team, were not allowed to hug or hold each other's hands, separated between a tactical officer, while they watched their mother being handcuffed and let out of the house. And interestingly, she looked over at her daughter and she said,

It's okay. I'm going to Washington to help President Trump catch all the bad guys. That registered with her her and she was satisfied with that answer. But I think the heavy use of SWAT, and in so many cases, appears to be designed to frighten and intimidate. We just profiled a Minnesota family that was SWATed twice. And the second, 60 agents, they actually were flying drones

into the chicken coop. Although I understand no chickens were apprehended, but it's just the lengths that this has gone to. And even though there is more and more publicity on this, it's not slowing down. And in fact, if anything, the more it's exposed, the worse it gets. So I'm going to start by asking a question to each and every one on the panel, and then we'll make it a little bit more of a free for all, whoever wants to jump in to answer. But to Tom, so there's this theme that emerges here, right?

And one of them is you know, the First Amendment feels like it's being, I'll just say, endangered. Okay. And what is your take on how the FBI is dealing with the First Amendment right now?

First of all, I want to say thank you to Joe and to Epoch Times because you are literally the champions of this and getting the message of this out. I think it's really, really, we appreciate what you're doing. It is a direct assault against the First Amendment. It is literally a direct assault against the First Amendment. The FBI, as was shown in the documentary,

the FBI knows that it cannot arrest people for their thoughts. They want to. They want to be able to arrest you for thinking things or saying things, but they can't because of that pesky thing, and literally I heard this from FBI agents and senior agents, because of that pesky thing called the Constitution and the First Amendment. It stands in the way of them saving us. It is literally a direct assault to say

that we need a federal domestic terrorism statute in Congress. That is what they are asking for. Because with that, then they can literally surveil anyone in the country they want at any time to try and prevent someone from committing a crime. That would be literally the absolute destruction of the U.S. Constitution if they were to get a federal domestic terrorism statute that would allow them to circumvent the entire Constitution, not just the First Amendment, but they would be able to use it against everything. And so it's an absolute direct assault against the U.S. Constitution to advocate for a federal domestic terrorism statute. And the truth of the matter is,

they did not expect to get caught doing all these things. I think that the counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump, the Trump campaign, is a really, really glaring example of that. Because that's really what they did. They basically ignored the Constitution to try and get their man. They were willing to break every rule because they didn't think he was going to win. And then when he did, that's when all of the evil and the corruption was revealed. So it's a direct attack against our constitution so mike of course i could ask you you know what you think about this as well but

what why don't i uh maybe defer that for a moment and just simply you know there's been considerable investigation that's been done by congress into this whole issue? I mean, we've seen it on TV, you know, some huge amounts of money were put into it. How would you grade Congress's investigation into understanding what really happened on January 6th? Not very well. Pass, fail, fail across the board, but let me back up and say thanks for having me. Joe, that is an awesome documentary. Everyone should watch it. Going into this Congress, there is so much talk about doing what the Democratic House had done, the previous Congress and the establishment of a massive, never-seen-before type of committee, which was the January 6th committee, complete with TV producers on staff, witnesses

that were now discovering they had flipped and changed their tune, working with the Department of Justice along the way, capturing the media narrative for years and a lot of perjury along the way for my estimation. So that was the attitude going in when Republicans took the House and flipped it. That did not happen. People were promised that it would, but nothing close to approaching it has happened yet. I think the biggest example of this is, you know, the argument for the establishment of a church-like committee, the famous 1970s super committee to investigate the intelligence agencies, which, you know, really captured the nation's attention, led to a lot of

reforms. That's what people were talking about. Well, instead, what happened was a new subcommittee, not a regular committee, was established, and then it wasn't even really staffed out. And it's the weaponization committee that's been, you know, was up in the documentary. And so the expectation was that, you know, the House of Investigators pouring over the tape, combing through the records that the previous Democrat-led committee had that never materialized. And what we've seen since is a lot of patriots have filled the void. I mean, we're just now getting some videos released. Had it not been for the constant agitation of, I'm sure, everyone in this audience and others up on Capitol Hill pushing and demanding and fighting and scheduling,

being denied and scheduling again, being denied again, that stuff wouldn't even be coming out. And so I credit all of the news that has broken not to Capitol Hill, although there are some pockets of heroes, whether it's Senator Johnson, Representative Massey was here earlier, he's done great work. There hasn't been any sort of formal effort at this at all, and I think that's a political decision, frankly. In fact, I don't think.

I know for a fact I've been told. It's just like many other things that people thought should have been investigated and focused on, whether it's election fraud, whether it's the intelligence community's abuse of the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, or January 6th, all those kind of topics were put into a category to decide, we're not going to talk about those things. We're going to forget about them. And there's always been this disconnect from what I think people expect to tap and what has happened. I'm just glad that patriots, including, you know, you guys in this documentary steps into that void and are actually answering questions for the American people. Is Mike Johnson going to move this thing any faster? He's only been there a

little bit, but he's got a year. So any faster is a relative term, right? So that's an easy one to answer. You can't go any slower. So that is my out, and I'm happy to pass the mic on. But not much. Sarah, thank you for joining the panel at the last minute. And of course, your husband, Roland, or Colt, has been behind

bars since August of 21 and you know you mentioned the documentary when you first tried to see what does that look like now and basically what is the state of affairs with him yeah so well thank you epic times and Joe he's done a wonderful job of covering my husband's case and a lot of January 6th defendants' cases, just looking at the facts of it. My husband is still behind bars here in Washington, D.C. October 11th of 2023, he was found guilty in front of a jury of not his peers. And he's going to be sentenced February 29th. It's an everyday thing of getting up, saying,

how am I going to get out of bed today and have the strength to get through today. It was a year and a half before I laid eyes on my husband again after being apprehended by the FBI and it was just legal things along the way that you know you're in this fight for their life because of January 6th but then you have all these little battles that you have to fight along the way and it's only because of the general public putting pressure on congressional members and Epoch Times and media outlets like that to get this video evidence out, because within five minutes of his first bond hearing, the government had withheld exculpatory evidence. And that's a violation of our constitutional rights, but it doesn't seem to matter here in Washington, D.C.

And so, you know, this fight is far from over, but I do feel like the tide is turning because now this video evidence is coming out proving that what the Mockingbird media has put out is an insurrection and absolutely wasn't an insurrection. And we have always had the truth on our side. I've never once heard a January 6th defendant act like a victim. But they are the victims in this. But we have to rally around them. And like the work that Joe has done, is to put out the true facts of what has happened that day.

Thank you. So Bill, so many questions I could ask here. But the big question in my mind is, you know, we've seen this change in, or it seems like a change, but it's almost like we've forgotten that things worked differently back in the day, both in the FBI and in the Justice Department in general. You know, for example, one of the shocking things in the film for me was when you say there was nothing like a SWAT team or a perp walk for a misdemeanor. That's just crazy. I mean, I'm paraphrasing here a little bit.

And then there's also this sort of in the Justice Department, let's call it creative use of, you know, legal statutes, some of which has been used in, you know, hundreds of years to, you know, get what seems to be a desired result. So if you could just kind of speak to that shift. Well, first let me say thank you for having me. And let me also add that when I'm given a microphone from a crowd, I generally don't stop for about three hours. I once went ten hours over two days, but I'm planning on doing that tonight. Somebody got off the hook here, Joe, who got off the hook for the sins of the FBI as a department of justice. When an indictment is returned or a prosecutor signs an information

which, you know, an indictment comes to a grand jury, information is signed by the prosecutor. When an indictment is returned by the magistrate judge, he asks the prosecutor, not the FBI, do you want a warrant or a penal summons? A penal summons is a notice mailed to the defendant at their address giving the date and time they are to come to court to acknowledge in an initial appearance that they've been charged. It's the prosecutor who tells the judge, I want a warrant. The warrant is a court order that the FBI does not have the discretion to ignore that tells the FBI or other law

enforcement agencies go get that person at their house, drag them out of bed after 6 a.m. and bring them directly to the court. What is, in my experience, I joined the Department of Justice in July of 1992 and left in May of 2013. In my experience, not only in the cases I handled, but in all of the cases I knew about, in the two offices I worked, we never asked for an arrest warrant in a misdemeanor case. You didn't ask. You sent penal summons. Send them something in the mail. Tell them what day they're supposed to come to court.

And, you know, oftentimes in that kind of circumstance, you'd already made some communication with the defendant that they had a lawyer, and the penal summons would often just go to the lawyer. That was ordinary business. When I began to see in these cases that FBI was using tactical units to make dynamic entries for misdemeanors, and even for some felonies. I mean, I routinely had penal summonses issued for felonies. It's not automatic that a felony arrest requires a dynamic entry. That's generally reserved for defendants who are thought to either likely to flee or that they're simply there's a risk that they will not come peacefully. So this whole weaponization of

the FBI and militarization of the FBI in connection with January 6th defendants, particularly misdemeanor defendants, that in my view is on the head of the prosecutors. Because if they don't ask for the warrant, you don't get these doors kicked in and people drag out of bed in the morning. So in that sense, I'm not excusing the FBI. I'm telling you that the way the system works, once the prosecutor asks for the warrant, the wheels are set in motion. The FBI doesn't have a choice. So much has changed since I left.

I mean, it was ten and a half years ago that I left. It doesn't seem like that long ago. But as I've been doing these cases, 26 months now, had many opportunities to discuss with former colleagues of mine, people my age who've also left the department and gone on to other things, or retired FBI agents. I mean, I count among several friends, several former FBI supervisors up to the level of SAC. They're all deeply troubled by what they see

the Bureau doing now, which is so contrary to the way we did business in the 90s and 2000s, even into early 2010s. It's just different. And there are reasons why it's different. I want to actually mention also the question of a domestic terrorism law. You know why there's never been a need for domestic terrorism

law and why it's always just sort of been brushed aside? Because existing statutes cover all of the crimes. You don't need it. You can prosecute domestic terrorists for violations of other statutes because they're doing things that are illegal. The domestic terrorism designation right now only exists in the FBI's coding of its cases. I think it's 260, they call it 265, is domestic terrorism. That is a stat designed to get the FBI more money.

So that's at the base, that's all of it. It's all about getting more resources. The dynamic entries, the same thing. We need more SWAT teams because last year our dynamic entries were up 47% over the year before. These are all numerical metrics that the FBI evaluates all of their field offices in. And you know what those numerical metrics come down to? This is so ban management. That's it. That's at the heart of all of this. Bonuses and promotions for FBI management. So I definitely want to touch on that. I see this theme across many, many different areas that I've been doing reporting on which is

this kind of bureaucracy taking over you know the running of whatever area let's say the Department of Justice that's very interesting what I want to touch on first and let's you know anyone in the among you can answer this question another theme like this that I've seen across many, many disciplines now is this idea that it's becoming acceptable to other, other rate, make some group of people or some people, you know, the sort of the untouchables, right? In this case, we watched in the film, of course,

anyone who was at J6 would be a candidate for that, ultra-mega, whatever it is. We saw it among the unvaccinated. It was okay to view as morally repugnant people. That's what we were told. We see this in all sorts of other areas, you know, detransitioners and so forth. I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts

on this broader phenomenon. If someone would like to handle that. Tom, is that you? I think that the, probably the best way to answer this is to say that on January 5th, I was in front of the Supreme Court, and we were at a rally, and some women walked through our rally, and they were sprinkling something on the ground. And I was with Virginia Women for Trump, I was the national spokesman for Trump at the

time, and these women are sprinkling something on the ground. And the Capitol Police shut the rally down and pushed everybody back away from the stage so that they could investigate it for a biological weapon attack. That's what they told everybody, is we've got to make sure this isn't a biological weapon attack. Well, the crowd went nuts. The crowd is yelling and screaming and hollering in the face of these five police officers who are just, they're just trying to do their job. So I went, I talked to the chief of the police that was standing there. I said, how much time do you need? What do you need?

He said, I just need like 20 minutes. We'll get out of your way. We've got the people in custody. And so I went back to the crowd and I got in front of the crowd and I said, we don't do this. Don't fall for the trap. Don't fall for the trap that the left has set for us because that's what they want. They want you to fight the cops so that then they can label you and brand you in a way that they want to brand you as an extremist. And I said that on January 5th. So to answer your question, I would say that there was known to be potential threats of violence by leadership of the Capitol Police, within the military.

There were known threats. I believe that there were people on the left. I believe that there were people on the left, and I believe that there were people on the right who hoped there might be violence. Hoped. They didn't plan violence, but they were prepared for violence. Then you get the agitators and the instigators in there, they create the violence. But who were those agitators and who were those instigators?

Because those are the people that put a noose on the Capitol grounds and then disappeared. And we don't know who did it to set it up as an oppo picture to say that these people were there putting nooses up in gallows. This to a great extent, all of this was designed, I believe, to some level to defame conservatives. This was about the destruction of the conservative movement in the United States to make every, that's why we have these conversations about 50% of the American people are all domestic extremists. And we need this domestic terrorism federal

statute so that they can go after and investigate and swat conservatives. Because that's what they want. They need, in order for them, and that's why they use the mental health crisis, the gun violence argument, the militia movement to try and argue to take away guns because there is a movement. There is a movement. We all know it. They know it. There is a movement in the United States to disarm Americans so that we the people are no longer in charge of our own destiny. They want to take power away from the

American people. They want to limit freedom. They want to reduce freedom. And they want to, and I would argue that a lot of these swats, a lot of this abuse of the warrants versus just having somebody come in is done on purpose to intimidate the American people. or a conference actually said, what if we get a domestic terrorism federal statute that we're not going to actually use, but we can get people to just be silent, to basically intimidate them. These SWATs, these arrests, all these misdemeanor charges, all of that is done to intimidate you into silence, to take away your, to intimidate you and basically cause you to be fearful of expressing your freedom of speech in the United States

against the leftist ideology that ultimately has given birth to this cultural revolution that we're facing in the United States. That's what I believe is the real root of all of this. So another thing that just really stuck out stuck out to me I want to build on me to Joe you mentioned this but I've heard this in various forms a number of times that the people describe the situation that these FBI agents that are doing the dynamic entries appear to be afraid that some something's gonna happen whereas in you know the at least every scenario that I've ever heard of it's sort of it's

sort of it seems silly that they would be yet they seem genuinely fearful and does anyone have a sense of where that might come from is that is that correct or is this is it a show or is it what what what is that about or have they been convinced that these people could at least the children are separated because they might do something you know Bill's gonna jump in here I think you know that I think a lot of the agents are in fact unhappy doing it. Cuz it dramatically increases the risk. And it's sometimes unpopular when I point this out, but

something that the general public is not aware of. Is that the second week of February 2021, one month after 9-11, two FBI agents were shot and killed through the front door of a home in Florida attempting to serve a search warrant in a kiddie porn case. And they went to the front door, knocked on the door, identified themselves, they weren't wearing, you know, it was not a dynamic tactical entry, and the individual who was the subject of the warrant had a ring camera.

He was able to see on his ring camera exactly who was outside the door, using a high-powered rifle, shot four or five times through the front door, killed the two agents standing in the front door. One month after 9-11. I understand, what I've been told is that the FBI changed many of its policies regarding dynamic entries at that point to focus on, you know, one of the things they look for is does the subject have a concealed weapon permit? Are we likely to find a firearm inside?

And I in fact know that one of my clients subjected to a dynamic entry. Both he and his wife had concealed carry permits in the state of Ohio and that was reflected in the FBI's investigation leading up to their search. They tracked down that information and that goes into what their threat assessment is. That doesn't explain all of it because they are doing these dynamic entries just across the board. They're not making an individualized determination anymore as to risk level. They're just saying the risk level every time we kick down have a weapon inside and you come in guns drawn and kicking down doors, you are ratcheting up the likelihood of an adrenalized response. And that adrenalized response is what creates the possibility of a threat against the agent. So they know when they go in this way, they are actually increasing the risk to themselves. So that's why you see all the tactical gear,

the police shields, the, you know, all of the things they do to take down that threat level. It's like we know what we're about to do could make things worse, so we're going to plan for the worst in advance. And that's me. That's incredibly helpful, actually. Thank you for that. It explains a lot. Did you want to follow up? Yeah, just another quick observation. I thought that was a really interesting part of the movie, and I've kind of been thinking it through.

And the one thing I've arrived at, in addition to what Bill just went through, is the average new FBI agent, you know, I'm talking about zero to five years, is fundamentally different than I think any historical conception of what an FBI agent is. These are not the G-men, your traditional clean-cut former military or law enforcement person that goes into the FBI. They're recruiting from a variety of professions. They're meeting their DEI quotas. Their fitness standards have gone out the window. They don't even, in many cases, have to comply with them anymore.

And so you do not have the grizzled, fearless types that are in the FBI. If you were to meet your average new agent, I think you would recognize them or would be kind of surprised by it. And so I think the fact probably is simple in some cases, is that these are just not the alpha people used to being in these types of situations. I think we have a very unimpressive cast of characters that are populated in the FBI. And I think by the time I get to your age, no offense, I'm going to look around and not recognize any of the FBI as being, you know, these grizzled crime fighters. Let me speak to that exact point, being grizzled. when I joined the Department of Justice in 92 it was six months before Bill Clinton was elected and what happened after Bill Clinton was elected he had the peace dividend because of the collapse

of the Soviet Union he you know hollowed out the military in the aftermath of the Iraq war George Bush did the same thing you draw down the four sides well one of the Iraq war, George Bush did the same thing. You draw down the force size. Well, one of the things that does is a lot of young officers essentially lose their careers. There's no place for them to promote anymore because the higher officer ranks are being shrunk. The FBI traditionally has recruited heavily in the military, state and local law enforcement. That stopped in 2010. The Obama administration adopted an overt policy that the rank and file of the FBI needed to mirror the rank and file of society. It was no longer a question

of having the best and brightest. It was no longer a question of finding experienced crime fighters to step into the federal role. They went to college campuses. What did we find on college campuses today? It wasn't that different 10, 12 years ago. You have all of these new soft social science majors coming off of college campuses into the FBI. It's been going on for 12, 14 years. So the people that were recruited into the FBI, and I know FBI agents from that time frame who watched this happen and couldn't believe their eyes. They had people coming up behind them that in their view, these are experienced FBI agents,

had no business in the job. And what's happened is, and I've told this story many times, Who knows how you get promoted in the FBI? No. First level promotion management? Raise your hand. It's volunteer. Okay, so you have squad agents. The squad agents can be from one year experience to 25 years experience working in a squad.

The first level management is who wants to go to Washington and go through the 18-month management program. Oh, you raise your hand, you're picked. You go. Who raises their hand, by and large? Lousy agents. The agents who don't want to do the squad work. The agents who turn out to not be very good at interviewing people. The agents that are looking for a way to stay in the bureau without having to actually be an agent. You become a paper pusher. And so you put that dynamic at work over time and before before long, your quality squad agents are being supervised by your not-so-quality management agents.

This creates within the Bureau a dynamic of management versus squad, which is what happens to Kyle Serafin, Steve Friend, and Gerrit Oldworth. They become a threat to management by taking the steps they took. And as a result, they get squashed. Sarah, I wanted to actually do a directed question to you. From the perspective of families, since right now it's January 2024, has the outlook changed? You presented a pretty dire scenario, right?

Obviously, you speak with other people. Has the outlook changed? How is the hope-faring that Joe is alluding to at the end of the film? Yeah, a great question. I think that with more stuff coming out, it gives families more hope, but the fact remains that their loved ones are incarcerated still. You know, with McCarthy coming in as Speaker of the House, and we're gonna But the fact remains that their loved ones are incarcerated still. You know, with McCarthy coming in as Speaker of the House, so we're going to take care of this, everybody had this hope that,

okay, things are going to turn around, the truth's going to be told, and there's no reason to keep these guys incarcerated anymore. But that fell flat. And then Mike Johnson comes in, they're going to release all the footage, well, now it's on hold because we're going to blur out people's faces. But the fact remains that there's people that are truly innocent behind bars or there's people that are overcharged and overpunished serving their time that fall into these categories that this doesn't change for them. Every day there's people waking up, there's children waking up without their fathers, spouses waking up without each other, people waking up

without their parents and their children. And so it really goes back on to true investigations into what happened that day. And so yes, I think that with this stuff coming out, with these types of documentaries and the media kind of changing its tune, it does give them hope, but they need action behind that hope. Because we all know what the truth is, but we can't do anything about it. We need people that can actually hold somewhat of power going in and looking at the facts of truly what happened. Take all the emotion out of it and look at the facts of what happened that day. In terms of the next investigations, I think everybody up here might have thoughts about this, but what are the most important, maybe I'll start with you, Joe, because you've been

uncharacteristically quiet. No, but in all seriousness, what are the key, and let's get a few people to come back here. The key things that need to be investigated pronto, first, to flesh out this whole true picture that we're looking for. I think a serious look needs to be taken at how many agents, informants, call them what you will, agitators, were there on sponsorship or on direction. How many were there on their own? We have a large number of suspicious actors, that's how we charitably describe them, who committed vandalism for all sorts of cinematographers standing right by to capture it. The first breach of the Capitol building itself was a two-by-four,

and that was launched like a javelin by a man we only know as a hashtag, red on red glasses. Bag of shirt, red cap. Three years later, nobody knows who Red on Red Glasses is. And this is a guy who was all over the grounds causing trouble, trying to kick in the doors of representatives and senators. He was in the hallway where Ashley Babbitt was shot. He was standing right next to her when she fell.

And he didn't even look down at her. He stepped over her and disappeared. So, and there's a lot of those. Lemony Kickett, Brad Geyer were here, he could rattle off 50 of these nicknames. But it's

serious in that they haven't been identified. Now the government knows who they are. They have done their facial recognition and due diligence, but why aren't they? This is maybe kind of the Ray Epps syndrome. Why have we gone this long? And people that did worse than Epps. I mean, real violence.

Or we're inciting. We have video evidence of a metropolitan PD undercovers, inciting people, telling them to go into the Capitol, helping them over barricades. These are the kinds of things, if you're a defendant, that a judge will give you more time for doing, that they can ratchet you up, maybe even make you into a terrorist.

So that's where I see our investigations going. I mean we are making efforts to try to find, try to find these people. It's much more difficult when they blur the faces on the video. That's a reckless act in my view. I'm hoping the speaker changes his mind. He's gotten very bad advice at least I hope that's what it is because we had plans to use artificial intelligence facial recognition by the man who actually holds the patents for it and to scan everything something that I think quite frankly Congress should be

doing and to look for those patterns and use geolocation, like Dinesh D'Souza did in 2000 Mules. Where did they come from before they got here? Where did they go after? Oh, by the way, were they at any of the protests in the Summer of Love? Were they involved in any of those things? Those are key questions that have not been answered, but we're determined to try to move the ball forward on those things.

Anyone else want to comment? For me, I think that there's some really big questions about who built the gallows and who put the noose up. It was watched on video by the Capitol Police, and nobody even went down and bothered to ask them why they were building a gallows at 6 a.m. in the morning. And that's all on video. And in addition to that, I think that there's, to me, as a professional intelligence analyst, it's very strange to me that someone would emplace two very obvious pipe bombs in the open. A person dropping

a pipe bomb puts it in a paper sack, puts it in a backpack, hides it in a bush, they drop it among a crowd. They don't leave it sitting by empty park benches at 8 o'clock at night with a 60 minute timer that apparently both failed the night before anybody might even come by and sit on that bench. It's too contrived to me. It doesn't look like anybody that actually wanted a pipe bomb to go off and hurt anybody and they were put in both the DNC in front of the DNC and the RNC but the strange part to me is is that the pipe bombs were reported to the Capitol Police within minutes of the Ray Epps breach, which that report to the Capitol Police at that very moment is strangely timed because then they would have to pull Capitol Police away from the Capitol at a moment when the first breach is taking place. Right now the FBI does not know who built the gallows. They don't know who put the pipe bombs down and we've been investigating pipe bombs

for 25 years since 9-11. I said to you long before this, we're experts at this and we can't figure out who did this even though that they were placed in plain sight the night before with facial record. There's something fishy about experts at this and we can't figure out who did this even though they were placed in plain sight the night before with facial record there's something fishy about this i don't know what it is i'm not leveling any accusations against anybody i don't know who did it but clearly somebody did and we need to know who that is and i think that that needs to be right at the top of the investigations because we've got to know who did those things because it's too suspicious to me.

Those are all great ideas. My suggestion is a little outside the immediate fact pattern of the day, but it focuses on a lot of the work I do in terms of lawsuits and investigations. And it stems from the fact that I believe that January 6th, for the left, the weaponized agencies, however you want to term it, really provides the fulcrum event for mass muscle movements of the government, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, or the acceleration thereof, to really reorganize and reorient the system towards their targeted audience.

And the fact is, the demand for domestic terrorists, or especially those of a white supremacist bent, far exceeds, there's far much more demand from them than there is a supply. And so what we see now, as Tom was talking about in the documentary, is, to put it simply, a fudging of the numbers, the invention of new categories. If you saw, I think, Adave is the new one the FBI is using. Incels, we uncovered a document that's an FBI counterterror document we put out there. It's two pages from the counterterrorism office saying, look out for these words these kids use on the Internet, whether it's red-pilled or based,

because that means they're an incel. If they're an incel, that means they're probably a domestic terrorist. And then, you know, to follow up on the First Amendment discussion, they're slapping a First Amendment kind of caveat on all of these documents. So their lawyers are very cognizantly aware of the fact that this is violative of the First Amendment clearly on its face. And the FBI is just on all this activity, putting on the bottom of the page, nothing in this document is meant to construe an attack on the First Amendment and so we're seeing the the legal system the targets of focus everything the messaging from the White House on down in the media they're

shifting the system and the justification for that their prime justification is really pointing at January 6 as evidence of we have to you know go full- full bore against these people because that could happen again. That thing could happen again. So speech, you know, that could turn into January 6th. So we have to focus in on the speech. And these are the documents we turn up day after day.

It's throughout all the different agencies. Anyone who holds a gun, basically the federal government, and it's tripling down to the states very much because there's so much interconnectedness in the system now where local police departments are working with, holds a gun basically the federal government and it's tripling down to the states very much because there's so much interconnectedness in the system now where local police departments are working with you know on these joint task forces and then you have the interconnectedness with the the leftist NGO system or the ADL anti-defamation league or the southern popular law center etc are just pumping the system with stuff that is then used as predicate for investigative activity they've basically conquered the apparatus and a lot of the exercises i think that we're seeing

are is because the the left whatever we want to call this today i don't know what the right word is but they got the keys to all the kingdom right now and they're figuring out how to use these toys for the first time and you're seeing a lot of deep-seated ideological projection happening where there needs to be another group of you know bad guys or the other rage or the other whatever term we want to call it and it's out of control and I think it's going to be a really hard thing for this country to grapple with and I hope we do I think the excessive use of force that day by both the Metropolitan Police officers and the Capitol Police need to be looked into.

Because if you look at a lot, just like as you saw the woman standing there who was shoved by the either Metropolitan Police or the Capitol Police off the stairs for simply standing there, she was not a threat to them. Why they are allowed to get away with that, January 6th proves that the United States Capitol is no security in it at all. You have these untrained police officers that are roaming the streets and those police officers that were police officers on January 6th are still police officers still to this day. And they, Lila Morris, Michael Byrd, Officer Tao, all these people, these officers that use excessive use of force, they need to be held accountable for it. Final words, Bill.

Well, we're down to the last two hours? I don't even know what the final words should be. You know, when I was a prosecutor, I didn't send out a grand jury subpoena that got me back. what the final word should be. When I was a prosecutor, I didn't send out a grand jury subpoena that got me back, the cell phone records that showed 1,200 signal channels and 400,000 separate messages like I faced in the Oath Keepers trial. And that goes to your point,

the issue of essentially the ability of the federal government now through tech companies to mine data, to generate for their use so much more information at their fingertips than has historically ever been the case. And then when you turn that ability inward onto the political opposition, I've said and I maintain that the Department of Justice in large measure, I've said this in courtrooms, I've said it to juries, I've said it to judges, they are trying a narrative. They are not trying facts. They are trying a narrative, and they are getting away with bending a lot of rules in terms of the rules of evidence and a portion of the political opposition through the next election.

The government in the last three months has ramped up the pace of arrests and new charges. There was about eight months it seemed like it really slacked off, and I think that was because the court system was in effect saturated. It couldn't take any more. But then several hundred cases have been resolved, and starting back in about September, and I track this stuff pretty closely, I've got 40 clients so I follow this stuff pretty closely. Starting in about September we started to see 6, 8, 10 arrests a week. And that pace has been maintained all the way up to now. And I think the purpose is transparent. Matt Graves came out

and said, we're going to start arresting people who just were on the grounds, even if they didn't go inside, even if they didn't engage with police. Those are now, that's what we're dipping into now. And the purpose is to continue to have charges, indictments, arrests, trials, guilty pleas, and sentencings from now through November continues. And to keep up this picture for the electorate at large that this segment of the political opposition is really a criminal element and can't be tolerated or allowed back into power in D.C. element and can't be tolerated or allowed back into power in DC well I think with that very very disturbing commentary I think we're going to finish up and just does it maybe Joe actually why don't I get you to offer the final

final thought as the writer and researcher of this documentary. Back on, I think we said it was the 13th of December, when the Supreme Court agreed to take up a challenge to the obstruction of an official proceeding, the novel use of a corporate fraud statute, someone on Twitter posted, the tide has turned. And I looked at that, and I think that is correct. Not that I'm going to predict how the court might rule on that,

but that was the heart, that was the most often charged felony, more than 330. And if that falls, and there are other charges that I believe will be challenged in appeals, including seditious conspiracy, which many attorneys believe is unconstitutional, you start knocking some of those out on top of instances of perjured testimony in the Oath Keepers trial. There's got to be a comeuppance for that stuff at some point. And so I do think that should generate some hope that things are not going to remain static.

Things are going to go forward. I think this year is going to see a lot of explosive revelations, and hopefully we'll be in the front row to document it all. Okay, so we still have a little bit of time for audience questions. Hello, hello. I sort of have a multi-part question revolving around sort of the mysteries around these so-called agitators and instigators. Today is obviously a significant day with the sentencing of Ray Epps. A lot of build-up to this sentencing that he might get some actual prison time. In the end, he did not. with that said it's it seems as though a

lot of these Intel agencies are insulating themselves behind the idea of not revealing sources and methods so what is a way around that can Congress do something even in a classified setting to really get to the bottom of it as you mentioned earlier you know potentially using that AI facial recognition software in a classified setting to find out who these people are and attorney Shipley do you think that that story might actually change a lot of these cases is it worth going through those hoops I have said online and elsewhere that I would be shocked if there weren't a hundred or more undercover law enforcement officers in that crowd.

I mean there's undercover FBI at the Super Bowl. You don't know it. You don't know who they are. You don't see them. I've walked in PGA galleries with FBI agents who are there for security purposes. I mean, any kind of large event like that, it goes with the territory. The Washington field office and the FBI was going to have people in that crowd. Now, that's a separate question from whether or not there were individuals in that crowd not connected to law enforcement who were there and caused trouble. Whether they be Antifa, BLM, or just people who get their kicks doing that. I, you know, I will say, I'm not going to identify anybody, but I will say that I represented more than one defendant

who when I looked at their criminal background and I looked at their criminal history, I concluded that guy came looking for a fight. One client who had already spent 18 years in Texas prisons. He didn't come to, you know, January 6th because he suddenly discovered the Constitution. You know, he didn't come because he was concerned about the Electoral Vote Act. He came because he figured there was going to be a fight. And a lot of, there were a lot of folks, small minority, small minority, but in terms of numbers, not a small number, who came thinking that they were going to be able to engage in fisticuffs with BLM or Antifa, that they would be there. And that is, in my view, and I know in fact for a couple of individuals, they were the ones that skipped the rally and went to the Capitol. They were

looking for trouble, and they started a lot of the trouble. Now, that trouble grew exponentially as the police reacted in ways that I think were ill-advised contrary to policies from the first, he had a great use of force expert in the first documentary. And that gentleman's explanations of the unlawful use of force

were dead on. And I prosecuted, well I was prosecuted, one of the things I did, I prosecuted unlawful use of force cases as violations of federal law. So what that guy was talking about, I've been through many times. So, see, this is how I get in closing arguments. I get spun off into directions I can't even remember where I was without notes. I'm not sure the answers to the questions about who some of these people were lead to some of the conclusions

that are the subject of, you know, popular opinion. I've never been convinced that it's going to trace back to some, you know, nefarious conspiracy by three-letter agencies. To me, one, they're not that good at that kind of stuff. They can't keep those kinds of secrets because of the number of people that would be involved. They just don't. Even within the FBI now, there is a cross-section of political opinion. And if this kind of nefarious conduct was at the heart of the events of January 6th, it would have already leaked out.

But there were just a lot of guys that showed showed up, dressed the part of a Trump supporter, and then did their thing in an effort to sort of speed the process along. Just to add a little bit of granularity to that, I'm an intel officer, I recruit sources, we vet our sources, right? From the intelligence community, what the FBI does with regard to their confidential human source program is an absolute abject dumpster fire. If you go look at the evaluations of the confidential human source program by the inspector general, you will find that they do not properly vet their confidential human sources. They run their confidential human sources too long. They have personal relationships with their confidential human sources. Their confidential human source program is not actually an intelligence program.

They pretend like it is, but from the intelligence community, and I will, I can tell you from experience, the CIA does not like to work with the FBI with regard to confidential human sources because of how poorly they manage their CHS program. The same thing is true of the Defense Intelligence Agency. They don't like to work with the FBI because they are dealing with American citizens who are voluntary sources, who are the case agents get a week or two of training in how to manage a confidential human source. To manage a confidential human source in the CIA or in the Department of Defense, you go through months of training on how to vet your source and make sure your source is not compromised and is not working against you. So all you have to do if you go and you look in the

report there's a whole section in my report on the broken confidential human source program of the FBI and I believe and I would argue that we have supposedly reported recently 200 undercover FBI agents or more were in the audience. I also know for a fact because I have personal friends who are in other agencies, federal marshals, the Department of Defense, other law enforcement agencies. We know that there were undercover officers among Metro PD and Capitol Police. So we're talking probably 500 confidential or undercover officers that were in the in the crowd potentially. But here's the last thing I will say and I

think that the thing that is the most concerning to me is that if you have 50 some FBI officers all around the country and they are all, and it's a requirement, they all have to cultivate confidential human sources. It's part of the agent program. They are required to cultivate confidential human sources within the community that they are policing essentially. If they are deliberately recruiting confidential human sources within every militia group in the entire United States, 50 some offices, thousands of agents. And that militia group says,

the confidential human source contacts his handler at the FBI, and he says, hey, my group is planning on going to the Capitol on January 6th. He says, are you guys planning any violence? And the guy says, no. He says, okay, well, keep me informed. But the FBI agents are running maybe half of the militia guys. So what I would argue is the most concerning is if he's a militia guy from Texas, and I'm a militia guy from Georgia, and he's a militia guy from Tennessee,

we are all looking for extremists in the crowd. We are all looking for who the extremists are. So I'm asking Joe here, are you an extremist? And he says, yeah, I'm an extremist. Are you an extremist? And then, so we all radicalize each other potentially because we're all looking for the most extreme person so we can call our handler and report them, okay. I call it the largest militia live-action role-playing game in American history. Potentially thousands of undercover confidential human sources, they're not undercover, confidential human sources, one caliber or another, went to January 6th,

all looking for the extremists. And they couldn't tell who's who in the zoo because in the Department of Defense and in the intelligence community, we de-conflict our sources. We don't put our sources in the same places. But the FBI didn't do that. They put them all in the same place, all at the same time, all looking for extremists, and they didn't de-conflict in any way.

And I believe that they potentially, even among themselves, kind of radicalized themselves on the ground that day when they were being pepper-balled and CS-gassed and shot with rubber bullets. So that's just some additional granularity from an intelligence officer that recruits sources and looking at the FBI problem and then bringing them all to D.C. for a special occasion, you have a recipe for disaster and potentially a very dangerous black swan. Absolutely fascinating.

Thank you for that. Well, I guess this is actually the end of our panel and let's give them another big round of applause. You've got a narrative out there that's very powerful. Do you think domestic terrorism is really as big a threat as it's being made out to be? Not that I've seen. I needed to dig deep to get

a true look at January 6th arrests and prosecutions. My job is to look at the darkest things happening in the world every single day. The real question is, were the acts of violence against police officers in the other riots taken just as seriously? How did that impact you? You were guilty. Shocking. It's clear that they hate me. I was so shocked when I heard the news, because this isn't the Colton McAbee that I know.

They're just going to identify you on video, arrest you, and then figure out what the evidence is after that. I get a facial recognition match, and these two people look nothing alike. You can't do that for any investigation. We came home we found this attached to our rotor. I'm gonna grab some photos of this. These are American citizens being held without due process having their constitutional, their God-given and their human rights violated. I'm not sure why anyone's suggesting I did something that's worth a 20-year refility. That's totally insane.

What kind of strain has this been on you and on your extended family? Your whole life changes drastically. It changed the whole way we approach life. You feel like Big Brother is watching. As soon as we were in the news, we had approximately 70% of our income cut within that first year. They told me that my security clearance was suspended and I was escorted from the FBI premises. If you are slapped with that label by the highest power in this country, it's not just name calling.

You have to stay away from the word patriot now because that's a terrorist organization. It's my right as an American and I'm going to fight for my husband. We have to keep fighting so that they have a hope and a future. This video is previously unreleased and was not shown to the defense. His own lawyers did not have it. It's going to change narratives no matter what your political perspective is.