Morning Wire - Embedded: The FBI Agents Inside January 6th

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

The FBI acknowledged the presence of plainclothes agents at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Investigative reporter Steve Baker joins the show to analyze the admission and his experience at the infamous rally.  - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Today's Sponsor: Lean - Get 20% off when you enter MORNINGWIRE at https://TakeLean.com - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The FBI is back onto the national spotlight after recent admissions about the presence of hundreds of agents deployed to the Capitol on January 6th. The scrutiny comes as Director Cash Patel seeks to reform the Bureau and regain the confidence of the American people. In this episode, we sit down with investigative journalist Steve Baker to discuss what new details have come to light about the FBI's actions during J6 and how the Bureau can earn back the public's trust. I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. By the time the average person reaches 60, they've likely cycled through numerous fad diets, collectively losing and regaining several hundred pounds over the years. All that yo-yo dieting increases your risk of diabetes, liver problems, and heart issues.

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And it helps your body convert fat into energy instead of storing it. I say it all the time, I was skeptical. But I tried it anyway, and before I knew it, I was down a pants size and I was going to the Daily Wire kitchen way less. If you want to lose meaningful weight at a healthy pace and keep it off, add lean to your diet and exercise lifestyle. Get 20% off when you enter code morningwire at takelein.com. That's code Morningwire at takelein.com today. Steve, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Good to see you again. Look, you too. We've recently had what many consider a bombshell admission from the FBI that not only did they have plain-closed officers in the crowd at the Capitol on January 6th, but they had hundreds of them, 274 to be precise. First, how significant an admission is this? The first thing that must be really explained is that, is it really? plain-clothes officers there?

This is a very important distinction about what was actually on the ground and what was deployed. There technically is such a thing as a plain-closed FBI officer, but a plain-closed FBI officer would only be in truly plain, unidentifiable

attire if they were either there as counter-surveillance, actually doing the job of serving and protecting, making sure nobody's hiding a bomb in the crowd or, you know, doing anything otherwise nefarious, or they're actually undercover, which is a completely different distinction altogether. That's an actual operation when they're on an undercover operation. These agents, though, are operating in a new day. It's no longer Jay Edgar Hoover's FBI. We don't have that FBI anymore.

There's no national dress code standard any longer. So when they come up to your door and do a knock and talk or something like that, they could be wearing flannel shirt, t-shirt, jeans, khakis, whatever. But they always either have their badge on a lanyard, or they might have a logo on their shirt, or they might have a jacket with an on. But when they are called specifically to a crowd control scenario, they will, at the very least, go put on their tactical vest,

like a ballistic vest, which will have the FBI logo on it. They wear their badges, you know, maybe a ball cap with FBI on the ball cap. They're clearly identified even though they're plain clothes. The second thing is these are not the 274 that everybody wants to say we're already embedded in the crowd in acting as agents provocateur and inflaming the passions of the MAGA crowd to go and storm the Capitol. These were people that were at home. They were off duty. They were on leave.

Maybe they were in the various offices around Washington, D.C. and in the capital district. but they were called in and that call didn't go out to them until, you know, almost two hours after the violence actually began. The president was still on the stage at the ellipse when that famous Ray Epps Barricade breach happened. And then the violence escalated from there. And so with those facts in play, we don't know exactly what the timeline was where the call went out. And it actually emails were sent out to the agent saying, you need to go. go. Some of them were saying deploy. Some of them were saying self-deploy. Some of them were saying, no, don't self-deploy. Wait on your group commander, wait for your supervisor to tell you what to do.

There's a lot of confusion. Then we get into the situation about crowd control. The FBI's not trained for crowd control. There's a lot to unpack here. And there's a lot of questions still to be answered. Like you said, timeline, not exactly clear. The 274, let me start here, the 274 that they confirmed were on the grounds, you know, somewhere around the Capitol. Is that the number that were actually called into action or the ones that actually made it there, arrived there? Like you said, there was conflicting orders at times. Were they all actually on the ground?

I actually have video from my own camera of some of those 274 arriving after 6 p.m. that night after the National Guard had already been deployed. They were arriving in various stages. It wasn't just like, oh, gosh, we got the call and they were there to assist. First of all, they never stood the line with the Capitol Police and the Metro Police. They never protected the building. And even if they were 100% plainclosed, the first thing that they would do would go up to the line and they would identify themselves to law enforcement and then turn around and assist them.

It never happened all day. Myself and Joe Hanniman, my partner in crime at the Blaze, who writes these stories together, we've done more work on January 6th and just about anybody. but the one thing I can tell you that we have done more of than anybody else on the planet, and Joe and I have had more access to Capitol CCTV, the actual viewing room there that the Congressional Committee allows access to than any other journalists. And for our first reaction when we saw this tweet from Patel saying that they were out there doing crowd control, Joe, we erupted in our private DMs.

We're like, this is not true. because if we had seen them at any one point during that day, we would have made note of it. It just never happened. So what is going on there? You know, this is a pretty serious accusation. You're leveling at FBI director Patel that he's mischaracterizing what they were there to do. What do you think is going on there? Does he misunderstand what happened?

Is it possible that you're wrong? The first thing is, is that, yes, according to the after-action report, they were, and the testimonies of those 274 agents. They did receive email saying, you're going out to do crowd control, which, by the way, is not something they do. It's not something they're even trained for. All right. So they were ordered to go out and do crowd control that day. What they did not do was crowd control. Right.

So that was the directive, but they did not carry through. They did not carry it out. And they're not trained to do that, as you said. Right. And any control that they ostensibly or may have done would have been later after the tactical squads, including tactical. units from the FBI because they were in the building early. And that was the first time we saw FBI in the building at all. It was their tactical squad. Then we saw the SWAT team helping escort Congress members out of the building. We've seen video of that escorting them into the tunnels.

But we don't see these plain close FBI agents ever assisting Metro Police or any of the other Capitol police or any of the other uniformed law enforcement that did respond. It took over four years to get this admission that there were an additional 274 FBI agents directed to the Capitol. Why was that admission so slow and coming? If this is not a big deal, why wasn't that said up front? And do we have something like a perjury situation? Maybe with somebody like a Chris Ray because of this? Yeah, Chris Ray has his default get out of jail free card, which is, I'm sorry, we can't comment on an ongoing investigation. You know, that's what the FBI typically does and always defaults to that when they don't want to

answer a question. And as it relates to this, he was really pressured under great detail and focus to talk about the assets they had on the ground that day. And he wouldn't reveal the CHS's, the 26 confidential human sources, wouldn't talk about that. He wouldn't talk about any other deployment. But to your point, what took them 60 months or 52 months or whatever it was for them to finally tell us about these 274? And it took them four years to tell us about the 26 confidential human sources. But as of right now, there is no actual evidence that any FBI agent acted as a provocateur. Do I still believe that there were agitators, provocateurs, paid influence, over that crowd that day? 100%.

Are there any important elements of J6 that you feel are still being ignored by the media? What do you think are some of the biggest issues that are not actually being exposed? Well, if we're talking about being ignored by the media, we have to decide whether we're talking about friendly right-wing media or we're talking about the opposition MSM. Everything's being ignored by the MSM. They have a narrative. Nancy Pelosi directed them on the first anniversary of January 6th, and this is an exact quote. She said, we are going to establish and preserve the narrative of that day.

And that's what the point of that first select committee was to do, was to establish and preserve the preferred narrative of that day. And they have stuck to that. Now, what has happened, though, is as so many truths have been revealed and so many of their own lies have now come under scrutiny and they've been caught, that literally over that four years, period before Biden slept, you know, got out of town, he signed preemptive pardons for the members of that committee, including people that testified before that committee under oath. I think the most important work that I did since January 6th was the revelation that in the first oathkeepers trial two federal officers perjured themselves in that trial. We have the proof. I mean, we caught a special agent, ironically again, the lead team member of Nancy Pelosi's security detail, he lied in that

trial and said that he witnessed another officer, Officer Harry Dunn, having an antagonistic encounter with four oathkeepers just outside of Nancy Pelosi's office. The problem with that is that he was in another building at that time. That special agent was escorting senators into the Senate buildings a quarter of a mile away under and through the tunnels. And, you know, it's like it's one of those things you, you know, your gut instinct when you're watching a trial and you're watching a testimony and you're watching these two guys with this coordinated story and something doesn't feel right. So when I got access, I went straight to that. And we found special agent, David Lazarus, Nancy Pelosi's lead of her security detail.

we found him in another building at a time where he claimed he witnesses, witnessed the four oathkeepers. The final question, where does the Bureau go from here? What do you hope to see in the coming months and years in terms of some reforms, some moves toward better transparency, et cetera? Well, I'll be perfectly honest with you. The federal government needs a federal bureau of investigation. Nobody has better resourcing, nobody has better funding than the federal government. to assist law enforcement all over the country and indeed around the world. But we don't need a federal police force carrying guns doing swat raids on misdemeanor defendants. And really and truly, the only way that we're ever going to get the FBI right again is to bust it up. And that's going to take a lot of courage. It's exactly what Cash Bacell said he was going to do.

He wrote a book about it, government gangsters. he said he was going to turn the Hoover building into a museum of the deep state, but he's not exactly doing any of that. We'll see what transpires over the next few months and years. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. That was Steve Baker, investigative journalist at The Blaze, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.