Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/14/22 Ken Bensinger on the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot and January 6th

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Ken Bensinger of Buzzfeed News returns to the show to follow up about the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Although the plot made national headlines when 14 militia members were arrested, Bensinger and fellow journalists dug deeper to find a large presence of FBI agents and informants involved than had gone reported. Further, some informants had apparently played a role in instigating the entire scheme. Bensinger explains the details and developments in that case, and he gives his thoughts and observations about the riot at the National Capitol on January 6th. Discussed on the show: The Terror Factory by Trevor Aaronson Ken Bensinger’s latest reporting on both cases Ken Bensinger is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and the author of Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal. Follow him on Twitter @kenbensinger. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, guys, I'm giving speeches. I'll be at the Connecticut Libertarian Party State Convention on January the 29th, and then February the 26th at the state convention in Utah in Salt Lake City there. So, I don't know, look it up. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute. editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan,

and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scothorton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show.

All right, you guys, introducing Ken Bensinger from BuzzFeed News at BuzzFeedNews.com. And this is a follow-up on the Michigan kidnapping plot of 2020 of October 2020. It's called, the FBI knew exactly what its double agent was doing, says a defendant in the Michigan kidnapping case. Welcome back to the show, Ken. How are you doing, sir? Very good. Thanks for having me back. Happy to have you here. I really appreciate you covering this important story for us here. And, of course, we did a previous episode where we covered your original great reporting on kind of the background of the story here and the different groups involved and how they were infiltrated by the FBI and everything.

So is it possible maybe to do a little thumbnail of that? Is that within the realm of even being conceivable that you could kind of give us a thumbnail that before we get this update here? Yeah, sure. So this is a case that made a big, big, splashy news everywhere on October 8th, 2020, which was the morning after the FBI arrested a bunch of people that we learned the following morning were being accused of conspiring to kidnap the sitting governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. And, you know, it's a really big story coming less than a month before the presidential election. And with growing fear, it's about right-wing militias and about political violence from the right. So it touched a lot of hot buttons. And starting sort of after January 6th, when we saw a lot more of what appeared to be political violence,

myself and a colleague got interested in digging deeper into the Michigan case. And so we spent a long time looking. into it to sort of look beyond just the press releases from the DOJ and really pull apart the case. And I think our original intention was to sort of understand what makes these, you know, guys who would do something as kind of horrific as plot to kidnap and potentially even murder, sitting governor, what makes them tick and where those feelings and anger comes from. But as we began to spend time looking into the documents and looking into documents in other cases and interviewing tons of people and finding all kinds of other materials to

review, a more complicated picture. I wouldn't say a different necessarily picture, but a more complicated picture emerged, which we found out that the FBI, you know, far from just being a passive observer sort of on the wings watching these people develop this plot, was in fact very heavily involved in sort of every step of the way. And they used a lot of informants, at least 12 informants, and a couple of them, two or three of them were very heavily involved in a lot of the planning and organizing of events where, according to the federal prosecutors, major sort of plotting events happened and surveillance was happening and all of this. And as we dug further, we realized that many of those were sort of instigated by government representatives, agents of the government who were working as confidential informants. so that came to late and that's we wrote a big story about that in july just sort of to what

degree the government was it who had his hands in the whole in you know the whole business um and that's what that's what led us to talk the first time and now there's been quite a bit that happens since then too well it's very hard to quantify that is as we talked about i think it's from your reporting we got the number was it 12 out of 15 were federal informants is that correct well that's that's not quite right there's 12 informants but there was and it was 14 people charged in the case, but it doesn't mean 12 of the people, 12 of 14 charged were informants. That means there's 12 informants and separate to them, there were 14 additional people who were charged. So I've seen people... Oh, I'm sorry. So it was what, 12 out of 24 or 25 then,

or what was it? Well, it's hard to say, because we don't know the role of all the informants. We know some of them pretty well what they were doing, but there was all kinds of the people if the government's calling informants, or they were informants, but they might have had a more than gender relationship. There might have been at one meeting or they might have you know, been in one series of phone call. So that's actually what I was getting at, right? It sounds on the face of it, man, that many informants. The whole thing was cooked up.

And we know how the FBI do. It's the terror factory, as Trevor Aronson, the great journalist, Trevor Aronson, calls him in his great book. And yet, also people are individuals and make decisions. And I guess you could have that many informants and have people not necessarily completely entrapped. Maybe the most guilty here were the ones who were not. the informants. Maybe the informants were just observing and along for the ride rather than instigating,

but I don't know. You tell me. Well, I don't know either. We'll know more of a time. What we have seen is that the informants played, and certainly two of them that we're aware of, you know, we're very much recruiting people, putting people together in rooms that never had met before, or people who later were being called by the government as sort of co-conspirators, There's people who cooked this up together to, you know, people that didn't know each other before this. It's very unlikely they ever would have met, but then were put into the same, I think I used the word crucible in one story. They're sort of mixed, put in the same melting pot together where sort of bad things, you know, may have happened. So one of the things I've learned in this and one thing that's tricky is that the government has a lot of flexibility from a legal standpoint when it comes to this kind of case building, right?

That's saying that ultimately the only thing the government has to prove is that somebody is predisposed to commit the crime. And the government has a long track record of getting convictions on people when it does similar things, when it brings them into situations they wouldn't have been in, when it gives them money, when it gives them other things to sort of assist in these plans of the government itself more or less streamed up. And all it requires is showing to a jury that the person, you know, knew what was going on and was willing to do it. Whether or not it was their idea originally, whether or not, you know, they ever would have been capable of doing this themselves ends up being less material than whether they would have sort of pushed the proverbial button when the time came. Also, the difference between whether they can get a conviction, especially a plea bargain to hide guilty plea versus whether we have to consider it legitimate or simply BS put on PR show for, you know, the way they did in the Bush and Obama years with, all the fake terrorism cases, but those are also separate things, right?

Well, but no, it's a good point. And the more I spend time of this, the more connected I see it, which is that, you know, that there is decades, I mean, going back, excuse me, to the 60s, the con tell pro, or maybe in the late 50s, you had FPI programs involved involving heavy use of informants and undercover agents infiltrating groups that were considered marginal or suspect or dangerous, and often promoting people into crimes that they otherwise, it's hard to imagine to ever would have to commit it. This is not a new technique.

It predated 9-11. It was going on for many years. We think groups like the Black Panthers or the weather underground groups on the and then what we would consider kind of the left, right? But it's also happened a little bit with groups in the right. And then it happened very heavily after September 11th when they were going after a Muslim group.

So we have cases like the one in Newburgh that you've probably heard about or there's the one outside of Miami that recently was I think a front line. documentary, you know, where they take these kind of people that are basically kind of dummies, right? You know, people that are sort of like, you know, maybe like, maybe not like the cream of society, but kind of people who are a little bit hapless, people who don't know what's going on, people who are easily led, and they lead them down the path and they get them to, you know, to be willing to do the bad thing. And then they, these people end up in jail for a long time.

And those same techniques seem to be in play in this case. What's different about this case is that the defendants are not, you know, dispossessed 19-year-old Muslim men who immigrated from another country or something. These are sort of, you know, corn-fed American guys living in the upper Midwest. And because of that, they've, you know, people are asking harder questions than they were when the person's name was, you know, Muhammad or something. Yeah. I was just going to say, although then I decided to bite my tongue, but what the hell you brought it up again? Good for Frontline for finally covering the Liberty City 7, what, 15 years later, these poor schmucks were entrapped into this thing, you know,

point the camera at them and give them $20,000. Say you love Osama and then lock the guy away for life. And, you know, it's funny because I have a friend from Miami who writes for us at anti-war.com. And she said, if you're from Liberty City, that is the ghetto in Miami, the Sears Tower is not the same Sears Tower that we're thinking of in Chicago. It's a three-story building there in the ghetto. in Liberty City, the Sears Tower.

And that was what the FBI tricked these guys into saying. And then they put that on TV, that these guys were going to bring down the biggest skyscraper in Chicago when there are a couple of numskulled nobody's completely entrapped from beginning to end by the cops there. And then it's true. And as Trevor Aronson,

see, I was going to write a book about this, but couldn't find a publisher and sort of all fell through. But then Trevor wrote the book for me anyway. And there's 250 of them or something. It just goes on and on. And I won't go down that rabbit trail because I like it so much. But I just wanted to point that out that, as you said, people then, they didn't even pay attention.

In fact, you're the one who's doing this. I mean, I think you're giving the other rest of the media too much credit about asking good questions about this because these guys are, you know, corn-fed white guys from Michigan. The way I remember it was, oh, my God, they caught some Nazis, everybody. Oh, some Nazis slash kidnapper slash Trump supporters in October right before the election. The same FBI that framed him for treason with the Kremlin are the same ones that framed these guys for plotting to kidnap a Democratic governor. Yeah, right.

To me, and maybe to you, but as you said, it took you a little while to catch on here. But for the rest of the narrative on TV, I mean, this was a success. As far as the public relations department at the FBI is concerned, I mean, they scored a major win here. And this may have been quite a few percentage points in this state and that one, you know?

Well, I mean, so I agree with that something that I can't go as far, nearly as far as you and that stuff. I mean, I'm sorry about that because I'm editorializing and you're reporting here, but yeah, I can't go. I haven't seen no evidence that this was a politically motivated operation by the FBI. I also, there's been a lot of people, particularly this, the guy who runs revolver news, who wanted to say that this is a, was a training, like a sort of a test program for what happened in January 6th. I have seen zero, let me repeat, zero evidence connecting what happened in Michigan to January 6th, and I don't, I'm, I remain unconvinced that there's a connection. And I don't, frankly, to be very clear, do not believe that January 6 was an undercover

false flag operation by the FBI. I just have never seen any evidence to suggest that. Well, I want to ask you about Stuart Rhodes and your other piece and those questions in a few minutes, but go ahead. But I've never seen so evidence. But what I do believe is that sometimes people are motivated by very prosaic, you know, boring things. And it reminds me of the great book, finality of evil. Sometimes people do things that, that in retrospect, don't look great, not because they're evil schemers, but just because they're looking to advance their careers or they're looking to impress their boss or whatever the case may be, FBI agents are there to bring good cases.

Prosecutors are there to bring good cases. If prosecutors bring a good case, they have a good chance of getting out of the DOJ and getting a job at a white shoe law firm and making a million bucks a year. FBI agents, if they bring good cases, they get a lot of tension, stand a chance of getting promoted, going up the chain, and when they retire with a full pension, opening a security firm and bragging about all their exploits in the FBI and getting big contracts. To me, some of the evil motives or the conspiratorial motives we assign to things are actually more easily explained by simply the fact that we all do want to, you know, we all want to advance ourselves in different ways. It's the reason that people on social media

often say outrageous things because they want the cloud and they want the cliques, not because necessarily they're thinking of some grand conspiracy, but you keep chasing that cloud and those clicks and pretty soon you're in pretty weird territory. And I think the FBI can go on the same way. Well, motive aside. I mean, framing a guy is framing a guy, right? Well, the next question is, do they think they're framing themselves?

Because, of course, framing them. You know, sometimes people, I mean, I will tell you that there are prosecutors who really believe that people did these things. I mean, I think it helps them get out of bed every morning. They actually convinced themselves they did it. And I think it's also important to remember that these guys in Michigan, it's not like they were the nicest dudes you ever met in your whole life, right? These guys were, even before the FBI got involved, talking nasty talk about killing cops.

They were sharing memes that were not, I mean, perfectly protected by the First Amendment. Don't get me wrong, but not particularly nice about sitting of elected officials, Gretchen Whitmer and others, right? I mean, you know, rape, fantasies, violence, killing, pretty nasty stuff. These are not, like, necessary to do it, you want to get a cup, I could get a beer with at the bar. But I also firmly believe in this country, you can have strong opinions because that's what the First Amendment protects with that, you know, and that's, that should be allowed. It doesn't mean, you know, you're, you're a terrorist, and it doesn't mean you should be

put into a drag net trying to push you into being a terrorist. So, you know, I would say. And look, all things being equal, too, if somebody's threatening the, life of an elected official, then the FBI's got at least look into that. And I guess it makes sense that they should maybe lay out some bait and see if some guy will take it and take the next step, maybe. But they seem to take it quite a bit further than that here, right? Yeah, I mean, I think this is beyond what we think the FBI. I think the general public consensus of what law enforcement should be doing in terms of looking at for bad actors. This seems beyond it. This is

not observant report, right? This is getting involved in the mix. So I just I mean, I don't want to hammer the point too hard, but I want to say there's a bit of a, there's a bit of a, there's, they are no angels kind of thing to the, these are not, these guys are not super awesome, wonderful, upstanding people. They have strong political beliefs and they talked a lot about violence and they're, you know, and, but I think there is a larper element to it, which is that they talked a lot more when they really were able, you know, were able to do it. They don't have, I don't think any of the defendants in this case with maybe one exception, have any kind of history of any kind of, criminal background that involves weapons or violence or anything like that, right? I mean, you know, one of them was a junkie and got arrested for, like, stealing from his uncle and another, you know, had a lot of moving violations and got caught with an open carry in a car but wasn't using it. So mostly, you know, they have criminal backgrounds. They're not terrifying and they're mostly stupid kind of stuff.

So that's the guys. Yeah. Ken, from your point of view, knowing the case as well as you do now, I mean, in your familiarity with the different people involved in the alleged plot. here and that kind of thing. I know it's hard to explain it all because there are quite a few people involved in all of this. But with your level of familiarity, does it look to you like the kind of thing that this would have or could have happened at all without the feds facilitating it? I think there's elements that would have happened anyway. One of the famous elements

of the whole case, which is only sort of tangential of the case, but it seems important and it's been talked about a lot, is that in the spring of 2020, men with long guns. and you know and boogaloo shirts and um and sort of tactical gear on stormed the michigan state capital and lansing and we're walking around the hallways with with long guns and the hallways of of that state capital and then after january 6th the parallels seemed kind of shocking and many of the people who were in the building that day ended up being people who were uh charged in this in this conspiracy case um that said and so i brought that up because i don't think i don't think that event was of the FBI's manufacturer at all. I think that was going to happen organically

anyway. But also, the FBI doesn't hold up ultimately as part of the kidnapping conspiracy, right? That was an event that they didn't necessarily, you know, weren't able to gin up, so to speak. The other events, you know, we'll see a trial, which is coming up. You know, if you hear the feds tell it, on September 12th, you know, to 2020, a dozen dudes drove up to Northern in Michigan and drove around the lake where the governor lives and they were they're casing it out and they're making plans to blow up a bridge and then how to extract the governor from her own and get her out to Lake Michigan and then get her out of the state and try her for treason. That's how the fed feds tell that night and the defense has a different story and everyone agrees

that they did go up there and they did drive around but the defense will say they were confused about why they're going up there the guys who ultimately end up being feds or you know informants orchestrated the whole thing. None of the defendants really knew what was going on. Some of them thought they were driving around looking for pedophiles because they were chasing some kind of a Q&N crazy conspiracy. Others were just kind of out for a late night ride, not really sure what was going on.

And then a month later, a month later, they're shocked to discover the government was calling that surveillance. And they pointed out they couldn't even find the home and they were confused and lost and it was raining and dark and then what happened. So, you know, whose story do you believe? Do you know the story that they had a plan of surveillance? and they were just kind of a bunch of dudes goofing around in the woods. You see that based on the evidence, the government can construct one case and the defense

can construct another, but I can certainly say that it is not crystal clear that this was this beautifully formed conspiracy that these guys were enacting on step by step. All right. So tell us who is Stephen Robeson. So Stephen Robeson is one of the two primary confidential informants in the case. And when I mentioned earlier, what we had found leading up to our Big July article, We knew about him. We wrote about him a little bit, but a lot more has happened with him since then. He's what you might call a recidivist criminal. He's someone who's been getting busted for moderate to serious crimes dating back to the 1980s. Everything from, you know, theft to receiving stolen

property, to forgery, to sex with a minor, to assault and battery, a lot of, sort of a hodgepodge of every kind of crime. I think he bail jumped a few times as well. And throughout that whole time, he's managed a way to get to lessen his sentences by being an informant. So he was documented evidence that he was an informant in the 80s for local prosecutors, the district attorneys in Wisconsin where he's from. And he did it again in the 2000s. There may be other instances we don't know about. He seemed to serve as a jailhouse snitch. And then he pops up In the end of 2019 meeting in 2020, on Facebook message boards, reaching out to people with pretty strong critical views of the government, people who remembers the Patriot movement,

some anti-government or at least anti-current government views. And he's talking to them and recruiting them to go to different meetings. And he becomes one of the principal orchestrators of some of the key meetings. He's traveling from Wisconsin all over the place to try to gather at people in Michigan and Ohio. Virginia and South Carolina trying to get them to join the national movement of three percenters, which is a constitutional, sort of a constitutionalist-based right-wing movement, similar but different to the oathkeepers. And he claims to be a leader of them. He's naming people commanders of different regiments of three percenters, and the civil war is coming,

and they're going to be at the forefront. So he plays this role. He's very heavily involved. He's talking to the defendants, some of them, or the old. ultimate defendants, I guess in the time there were suspects, talking to them almost on a daily basis, visiting many of them, et cetera. Only later does it come out that while he's working for the FBI, he's also committing crimes under the FBI's nose without permission, without their knowledge. So he's a multi-time convicted felon. Of course, in this country, felons can't own

firearms, but he's buying and selling firearms all over the place. I'm aware of, I think, four or five different firearms he buys while working for the FBI. Ultimately, the FBI indicts him for one of these firearm purchases, and he cops a plea deal, which is an incredibly favorable plea deal, which they give him no time, no additional time, and like a $200 fine, something really minimal and some probation, which for him, it's like no cause, it's like water off the ducks back because he's already a convicted felony. He hasn't lose anything by getting another felony in his record. And now it's recently come out that he also defrauded, appears to have defrauded a couple in Wisconsin by claiming. that they were donating, he convinced him to donate a SUV to a charity that was supposed to protect children that he runs, but it turns out that the charity was a lie doesn't exist, and he was just basically stealing their car by a fraud. So this is the kind of guy that's out there on the front lines of the FBI investigation, trying to convince these people to take part in a criminal plot to go after a governor and maybe other stuff in other states. That's Robeson in a nutshell.

Give me just a minute here. Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the liberal Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors, and who wants to stand in line all day at the post office? But stamps.com? Sorry, but their website is a total disaster. I couldn't spend another minute on it. But I don't have to either, because there's easyship.com. Easeyship.com is like stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible. Go to scotthorton.org slash easy ship. Hey, y'all, Scott here. You know, the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books. Mine, Bulls-Arand, enough already, and the great Ron Paul, too by our executive editor Sheldon Richmond, coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each

other. And of course, no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late-great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute. Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent voluntarious handbook, edited by Keith Knight, a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons. collection of essays by Will Grigg and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagonen and Brad Hoff and his co-author Zachary Wingard. That's

Libertarian Institute.org slash books. And then the Department of Justice is saying oh man well me and him broke up a long time ago and so we're prosecuting him and he's not a protected informant. He's with the rest of him and as

you're reporting here he and his lawyers are saying well that's not true. They gave us all this free reign for a purpose, and now they're stabbing us in the back. Do I have that narrative right there? The two sides of it. No, that's right. The government now desperately wants to wash its hands of Steve Robeson because he's become a big problem for them. He's not credible. He's a bad witness for them because he's clearly a liar, but they should have known that beforehand because his past criminal convictions involved multiple crimes of what you call moral turpitude, meaning fraud and lying and kiting bad checks and that kind of stuff

that doesn't play super good against a jury, right? So they brought in a guy knowing he had that history, and now they're saying, well, he's a liar, so he can't take the stand, which is a little bit like wanting to have your cake and eat two with them. They just don't want him anywhere near the courtroom. The trial begins in March because they're very worried

that he's going to describe things about the investigation that they don't want out there about to what degree. There was instigation to what degree he and others were pressured to push the case beyond where it should. Recently, it's come out that there was an FBI memo from, I think, April 2021. So this is months after the investigation concludes, or at least the takedown happens, in which the FBI agents are saying, this is a guy who went beyond, you know, he did not just observe and report. He went far beyond and was pushing things and seemed eager to try to push things

beyond where they belonged. So there is internal FBI communication and chatter worried that this guy was an instigator, and I think they want to keep him off the stand. So they've, there's trying to just own him, they're calling him a double agent, and they're washing their hands of him. Yeah. The double agent charge is ridiculous because, you know, we've seen enough spy movies. A double agent is someone who you think works for the U.S., but actually is a Russian spy, right? Like he's, he's, but that implies sort of to, that in this construct, if he's a double agent, it means he actually did want to, you know, kidnap the governor. And there's no evidence whatsoever that he actually wanted to kidnap the governor. He was doing what the FBI wanted him to do, which is to jam up

a bunch of guys and prove it they were they were bad dudes who wanted to commit terrorism and the truth is the only double agency he did is he was out for steve robeson and he was out to cover up his own crimes and to commit crimes um wall under fbi i protection um so so he's he's a huge thorn to the side of the fbi now but they used them and they're really trying to clean the record of him yeah all right forgive me for reading part of your article out loud here but i have to because of how much i like it okay all right actually it's two paragraphs prosecutors argue the defendants were predisposed to take action but they've also asked the judge to sharply limit the evidence

that can be admitted into court when the trial begins March 8th they have for example said that they will not call three lead FBI agents in the case and argued that many of the statements those men made during the course now we're not that didn't say informants unless your editor screwed you up there. You said three lead FBI agents in the case will not be called to testify, and the statements those men made during the course of the investigation should not be allowed as evidence.

And last week they said that because of his misconduct statements by Robson should also be kept out of the courtroom. This is one of the primary instigators of the plot, who, as you said, is pretty clear he wasn't trying to kidnap any governor. He was doing this for them. and they want to exclude his whole story from the prosecution and the three cops who led the case to say it ain't so. So I'm glad you read that because that stuff really stood out to me as well. It's, you know, you can't, I think there's pretty good case law. I'm not a lawyer, so someone else should check this.

There's a fairly good case law that an FBI agent or a confidential informant working for the FBI is essentially an actor for the government. He's a representative of the government. And what that person is doing, to some degree, is this is the actions of the government, the speech and the acts of the government. But the prosecutors in this case want to disown not only this confidential informant, but also, you know, these three FBI agents. Now, it's interesting because they haven't made the same arguments for their other confidential

informant who they seem to love and are eager to get in the stand. His actions seem to, and his words do seem to represent the government because it's convenient to them. But the three FBI agents, they want to wash their hands of them as well. And the reason is because these three FBI agents have lots of problems. One of them, who actually, despite a lot of reports, had a fairly minor role in the whole case as a fellow named Trask. And he made a lot of headlines in July or, sorry, late summer, because he got caught beating up his wife. It's a pretty nasty domestic violence situation.

And he, I guess, involved in a swinger scene or something. They had a drunken fight, and he was beating her head against a nightstand. pretty gruesome. He got picked up and charged and ultimately fired by the FBI, and he in December pled guilty to a misdemeanor in the case, and he's no longer an FBI agent and can't be involved in professional law enforcement in Michigan anymore. So the feds weren't going to call him anymore. And then another FBI agent was charged or accused in another case with perjury. Now, some lawyers who have looked at the charges think their accusations think they're thin, but nonetheless, it's hanging over his head, this question of whether he perjured himself on the stand in a

different case. And apparently it was worrisome enough for the feds and they decided not to have him testify either. And that's the guy who testified in a related state case already, but he's not going to testify. They don't want him on the stand. And then the third agent, who truly probably would call the lead agent in the case, we revealed in late August that he in 2019 secretly opened a security company with apparently without informing anyone at the FBI who's doing it, which goes against FBI policy. The FBI requires its agents to get permission to do sort of extracurricular business activities and things like that. I mean, I think even if an FBI agent wants to go to a trade show and promote something, they've got to get permission. And

he did this without permission. It turns out, in fact, that it appears he got into business with an internet troll who's famous for very loud and nasty anti-Muslim vet. It rhetoric, anti-democratic rhetoric, anti-Antifa rhetoric, just a continual sort of found of really nasty speech on Twitter. He appears to have gone into business with this person and this individual appears to have been tweeting about the Michigan case before it went public, which is a bad look, because it's a private, it's a secret case until they bust people and here's this person tweeting about it in these kind of veiled ways. And then subsequently we found out that he in the past have been promoting his business with a resume that included mentions of cases he done in the

past and some active cases. So it looks like the potential for a conflict exists with this guy because he seems to be trying to make personal profits off his track record as an FBI agent, which could lead to the idea of an incentive to bring more cases and to bring more cases and make more headlines because that could help promote his business more. But none of the three agents here have their behavior in this case in question. It's all side issue stuff. Is that correct? Well, we don't know.

I mean, again, with this case, we have this internet troll tweeting about the Michigan case. So it suggests that he's maybe got loose lips and telling his business partner, whoever this person is, about the case while it's happening. So that doesn't look very good. and their conduct in this case is questioned more along the lines of the entrapment claims by the defense, which is that these guys were specifically directing the informants and others to push the case further, right? So there's text messages and voice recordings of them saying, you know, try to get that person involved, invite that person, and we want this to be as broad as possible.

And there's now a notorious text message sent by the one I was just rattling on about the FBI agent with the security firm. in which he says mission is to kill the governor specifically, right? So he's directing the informant to tell the suspects that that's what they should be focused on is killing the government, which governor, which smells a lot like directing them rather than sort of letting them take their own decisions. The government wants all that kind of talk out of the case. They don't want the defense to be able to bring it up. And so the motions, you know, are pending to whether or not the judge will permit those things in court.

part. Yeah, we'll see what happens there. And now, I think you said there were two major informants and Robeson was one of them. So who's the other guy and what's his status here? The other one is an informant whose name I know, but we've decided not to reveal, and he's known in court records only as Dan, or sometimes Big Dan. His code name with the FBI was Thor. And he's a army veteran who served in combat in Iraq, in some of the more intense fighting in Iraq, in sort of the second surge and that kind of stuff. And by all accounts had a pretty intense traumatic role to play in the infantry. And he came back. And according to his testimony, you know, years after being out of the service, doing working different odd jobs and security and things like that, big,

Big Second Amendment guy, he's on the internet looking for Second Amendment groups to hang out with and chat with. And according to him, gets invited to join this group called the Wolverine Watchman. This is in March of 2020. So it's a private group. He applies to join. He answers their questions. And he passes through one level of sort of vetting. And then there's a second one to get into their encrypted wire chat.

Wire is a encrypted messaging platform like Signal or other ones like that. And he gets into the group, and what he quickly discovers is these people are talking about killing cops and doing really nasty things. And so he has a friend who's a cop. He tells the friend, and the friend tells the FBI. And within a few days, he's meeting with the FBI. And they're asking if he'll stay embedded in this group and be served as an informant for the FBI.

So that's what he does. And he begins recording hundreds of hours of tape of these guys, you know, as they allegedly planned to build this plot to kill the governor. or to kidnap the governor, excuse me. And he, more than anyone, is close to a lot of the guys who have been charged in the case. Evidence has since shown that he also went way beyond the Wolverine Watchman and was talking to other people in Michigan, people in other parts of the state, and ultimately people in other parts of the country, people in Virginia and Maryland and elsewhere.

He becomes one of the people who's constantly on them trying to get them to, you know, join up in this group or join other conspiracies to take violent action against the government. me crazy all right well so i guess we'll see then whether the judge goes along with the government's plan to use him as their star witness instead of the other guy and completely exclude the other guy robeson now well i mean the government doesn't want to call robeson and they've been very careful in in all the evidence they've presented in the different charging papers and affidavits and having they put out there, they've never mentioned, well, they've ultimately, lately they've been mentioning it, but in the charging stuff, the stuff they talked about what happened

in the case, they didn't cite his evidence, evidence he was gathered or mentioned that he was gathering. That is, they always had backup other informants who could provide the information they needed. So they've kind of written, they tried to write him out of the story, essentially, because they had other people who had made their recordings, they had other people that rely on, and they didn't want him to be part of the official story. The other informant, Dan, is another story. His fingerprints are all over the case. You can see references to him. They call him CHS 2 frequently. CHS stands for confidential human source, which is the FBI jargon for what we call a confidential informant. So CHS 2 is Dan and their stuff mentions about him all throughout the court

record and they quote him heavily. And he, the Michigan Attorney General, trotted him out for a full day of testimony last March and he testified for a full day about the case in the state hearing. So he's, the government has pushed him forward as the guy they, you know, they, they, they want people to pay attention to. And I'm, I have little doubt that he'll, he'll be one of their star witnesses. The other star witness, of course, is a guy named Ty Garbin. Ty Garbin was one of the men arrested on October 7, 2020. And he flipped. He pleaded guilty and flipped in January 2021. So very relatively soon after the arrest, he agreed to cooperate. So he's been a cooperator over the government. And the government has indicated that he's likely testified. So that's a pretty serious arrow in the quiver for the government is to be able to trot out one of the guys that was originally accused and say, look, don't just trust us, trust this guy. He was part of the group. He was part of the Wolverine Watchman. He was friends of these guys. And he's here to tell you that there was a conspiracy and they didn't want to do it. So that's almost certainly. All we had to do was all the supermax sellover is Ed. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's there's some reasons why he might want to say that. But again, you know, I mean, that's, it's, it's kind of a playbook, right? Yeah. I mean, that's what, you know, you get, you get some people to flip and. And that's, for instance, your case. Now, I think where the government's been really surprised in this case is they thought everyone else would flip. I think they thought very few people would go to trial, maybe one or two guys. Instead, they're facing all but one going to trial.

In other words, I think that's... The defense lawyers are pretty confident here, you're saying? I don't know if they're confident because I think the defense lawyers are also realistic about how judges feel about this. And, you know, judges tend to favor prosecutors in criminal cases, and particularly in these kind of cases. So, you know, whether the judge will limit evidence is, it remains to be seen, but the prosecutors are sort of like maybe 50-50 on that. They're hopeful that the judge will let these things fly, but you may not. And, you know, they're certain to appeal in that case. If the judge doesn't let them bring in this evidence, they're going to say we weren't allowed to mount a good defense.

Are any of the defense lawyers, you know, the Johnny Cochran type, you know, famous, you know, tassels on their jackets kind of guys who get up. there and well they're not you know it's funny i mean i've been um following the uh some of the july 6th cases particularly the oathkeepers cases and there you have a weird hodgepodge of kind of like very quiet but down public defender type people and then very attention grabbing uh kind of guys who when they're not defending oathkeepers they're like filing completely insane lawsuits against like the federal government you know and every single sitting sitting member of congress So you have a lot of those who are filing just completely nutty briefs in motion to the court. I guess I was thinking more like Dick DeGaron, who's not a nut that is very flamboyant and attention-seeking,

but also is probably the most successful defense lawyer in Texas at that same time. He may be retired now. I don't know, but you know what I mean. Well, those kind of people are real, like, are like real serious lawyers. Now, this case has attracted a mix of fairly quiet public defenders, a few of them, And a lot of what we call panel attorneys, which are attorneys in private practice who are also part of their business is picking up criminal cases that the public defenders, for one reason, other can't take. You know, there's a conflict or because they're short-staffed or whatever. And so there's a bunch of those guys. And for the most part, they're pretty buttoned down, not too exciting, not too flamboyant, definitely not like hunger for the, hungry for the TV camera kind of guys.

There's one defense lawyer in the state case who is kind of stands out because he's very, very, it's like quite far right and has like a full like, some people call like a militia beard, like he's got a full, a very, which is pretty unusual to see among buttoned down lawyers. He's got like the beard down the middle of his chest kind of thing and basically only defends like far right defendants. But other than that, it's not, it is not a, it's not a savor rattling group. Yeah, Jerry Spence, that's the name of the one I was trying to think of with the tassels on his jackets. Yeah, it's not like that.

No, it's not like these guys who swoop in on cases like this. I suspect some of those guys tried to get into this, but there hasn't really been a lot of movement around attorneys in this case. It's been pretty quiet. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group. And I'm going to start posting stuff over there more. That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton's show. Thanks.

Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute, shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertasbella.com. You guys, check it out. This is so cool. The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this thing for years.

And I admit, I haven't read it yet. I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War. Nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61. And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in say 1964 through 1974 through 1974 but how do we get there? Why is this all Harry Truman's fault? Find out

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do you have time? We're already over half an hour but I got more questions for you if you want a few more yeah and then a guy scoot okay so you got this important story about um stuart roads being arrested here so i want to say that uh i interviewed darren beady back a few weeks ago yeah and from revolver news who you mentioned earlier and i'm not i'm not familiar with his coverage of the michigan case but we talked about this and what was clear from the video and from his pieces was that there's you know five or six or eight guys who really know what they're doing that day.

And we don't know whether they know each other, all of them, and whether they're, you know, who all arranged what, but, and that much is clear. And then secondly, they seem to all be getting away with it. The ones who were maybe the most guilty of kind of being the ringleaders seem to be getting away with it. And the Department of Justice wants us to forget about some of them, apparently. And so it was still, you know, open-ended and speculative. You know, he wasn't coming to, you know, crazy conspiracy theorist conclusions, but he was saying, sure looks like these guys might have been agent provocateurs in this case, you know.

But then it seems like something's really changed, and I haven't had a chance to follow up with him since then. But they went ahead and indicted a lot of guys. Of course, they would argue they were about to anyway. He might think that, well, maybe he got a reaction out of them. We'll see what happens with the case. But it seems important, right, that Rhodes is being prosecuted. Does that mean that he definitely wasn't an informant? Because I've got to say, it seems like a guy who talks that big for this long about providing an armed alternative to the current state's power would be either in prison already for something, wire fraud or male fraud or something, or he would be working for the FBI.

And so I wonder if you can comment on whether you think it's certain now that, no, they're really going after. and you're pretty sure they were going to do this anyway. And maybe Darren Beattie just jumped the gun here on what was taking the DOJ so long. It was just because these were maybe more significant charges for them to bill those cases. Although Epps is still not indicted, so I don't know. But anyway, I'll turn it over you now. See what you think. Okay.

So I want to say, I don't know Darren Beattie and never really dealt with him with. Oh, you know, sometimes tries to roll me on Twitter and I just don't respond. I don't I don't think what he's written has very much proof in it and it is a lot of conjecture I've read some of this stuff not all of it but I've read the number of pieces and he is not connecting dots he's showing you where there's dot lines between things and saying that proves it and it doesn't prove it not arresting someone doesn't prove that they're an FBI agent and and you know and the Ray Epps thing I don't like that's another example. I mean, I'm sorry to say, I don't, I don't support those theories. I think that Stuart Rhodes

took a long time to indict because they're ultimately indicting him for seditious conspiracy, which is a very serious charge that is very rarely used and also very rarely successful. The government has got its fingers burned a number of times over the years trying to get people on sedition and it failed. And I think they're extremely hesitant to do it. And we're going to take their sweet time, you know dotting every eye crossing every team before they considered doing it the facts of his case are different than the other oathkeepers charge because he did not physically enter the building he was outside and he did trespass onto onto the grounds which is itself a misdemeanor but he didn't go in the building and they were reticent i think would have a difficult time saying he was part of

that same conspiracy because he wasn't in the building um the fact that they took you know a year to charge him, to me, he doesn't prove that he's an informant or that it's a cover-up. And when B.D. says things like that, I think it's because he's moving the goalposts. Because for the longest time, he said clearly he's informed it because they haven't charged him. And then they charge him. So now he's got to find something else to explain what he said before. Otherwise, his whole story falls apart. Did he really say clearly? I mean, I think it was this seems to be a strong indication, right? But it isn't the realm of speculation? No? Why is it wrong? I mean, look, you know me enough to know I base things on facts. I don't just

right speculative things. I think pure speculation and just asking questions can be quite dangerous. It's a way that sometimes people get, you know, slammed for committing crimes and never committed. I got to say, I got to say, I would, I would put his journalism in the same category of actual journalism and not truthorism with you. I think what he does in those in those Ray Epps pieces is he shows a lot of evidence that these men were not just kind of strolling around between the velvet robes. These few men removing the fences and picking specific fights with cops at specific times and urging the crowd forward in this way that they clearly had, if not something going on with each other, there was something going on that, you know, behind that. And then the question

was, why are they not indicted? And one of the possibilities is because they were actually working for the FBI and doing that in one form or another, which I agree with you, there's another very plausible explanation, and that is just the DOJ was preparing much more significant charges against some of those people, although I'm not sure, you know, if it's every single one we're talking about here, but when I talked to him, I didn't get the idea that he was just a truther and saying, we know that they did it. He was saying, you know, essentially there's a history of co-intel pro type ops. And, seems suspicious that it's been a year and they're not indicted yet so what gives which i think was

fair i don't think that's much different than what you do you know it's not like prison planet where you go aha here's what we know based on just total speculation look i if you read his articles on when he talks about the michigan thing his reporting involves reading my articles and and pulling information from it he's not getting new material he's not finding new information he's drawing other people's reporting, and then using that to make speculative questions about what that might that might mean. And that is a big difference for what I do. I'm interested in original materials, original sourcing, interviewing people, looking at documents, and pulling information from those to present actual facts. I'm not interested in speculating on what things mean.

It's just a different kind of journalism than what I practice. That's part A. Part B. Well, I guess I didn't mean to say that you speculate. Forgive me for that because what I really meant to say was that I think that he's honest about the parts we don't know. I think he can say, seems like maybe this is one of the answers that maybe you wouldn't say that. But I don't think he says, we know that this must be the answer when it's not clear yet. You know what I mean? I mean, there's also a history of him with Stuart Rose. You know, he, he, they both were at the Bundy standoff in Nevada in 2014. Rhodes famously left, high-tailed out of there when things got icky, which is a very,

very classic Rhodes technique, right? Roads likes to bring people with a lot of bravado into tense situations. And when, you know, the stuff hits the fan, he likes to be the first guy out of there because he doesn't want to get in trouble. I mean, he's a crappy leader. I met him one time, and that doesn't surprise me at all. He's a crappy leader because he gets people fired up. He exploits them financially or emotionally or all kinds of other ways. And then when it's dangerous for him, he's out of there, right? He didn't go to the Capitol because he was smart enough, or he thought he was smart enough to know that he would get in trouble. It worked out. He got in trouble anyway. But that's the kind of guy he is. And the story goes that Bidie was very angry

were Rhodes for high tailing out of there and was upset that he abandoned the movement and that there's been a garage match between them since 2014 because of that. And that he has a personal axe to grind against Rhodes. But there's lots of people who were in D.C. I mean, Ali Alexander hasn't been, you know, hasn't been charged. Is he a FBI informant? You know, there's tons of people Roger Stone was in D.C. And he didn't get charged. Was he an FBI informant? The fact that someone wasn't charged is not, you know, necessarily even midway

strong evidence that they are an FBI informant. I said earlier in the program, I don't believe, and I've seen zero evidence to show that this was an FBI set up January 6th. To me, January 6th was a complete total failure of federal law enforcement. of the U.S. Capitol police, which I think is a ridiculous organization on so many levels, extremely overfunded. You tell me why they have an office in Tampa and one in San Francisco. What does that have to do in protecting the Capitol? I mean, at least the guys, especially in the post-9-11 era, you would think there's some kind

of ready team in case a mob tries to storm something or another, the Capitol or anything else in D.C. But no, apparently not. We'll just sit around. But they're just, to me, they're a classic example of like bureaucratic bloat and like people dip in their and lack of accountability and dipping their hands in the public trough. They're answerable only to Congress. They're not even, the FOIA laws don't apply to the US Capitol Police. They don't have to tell anyone anything what they do. They have a budget larger over the Detroit Police Department to protect two square miles.

They already had the opposite in San Francisco. And then for these reasons I still don't understand after January 6th, they convinced Congress to fund them opening office in Tampa. I mean, that's a ridiculous, bloated organization that was ill-prepared for anything. And what is that so they can learn counterinsurgency from the Special Operations Committee or the Centcom? There's something down there. What is it even supposed to be the benefit of that? I don't know.

It deserves more poking, and I don't want to speak out of school, but it just seems ridiculous. So you have an ill-prepared, kind of ridiculous organization. You have bad communication in the National Guard and U.S. Capitol Police. you have a series of like a comedy of errors of stupidity and your preparedness right and um and you know it all it all leads to a crowd that has been in my opinion incited but also it's one of these organic things that something small gets way out of hand and different elements were all required for it to happen you needed groups like oathkeepers there because they have they offer a bit of organization and a bit more aggressiveness but they don't get in without the crowds and the crowds don't get decided

riled up enough unless you have the lovekeepers there. And it all comes together in a way that, you know, I don't think was some massive plan either among the crowds or from the FBI we're trying to run some secret op. You know, I'm a very much of an Occam's Razor kind of guy. The simplest, most clear explanation is generally the truth and not some incredibly contorted. That applies to my analysis of Michigan as well. I don't think that the FBI was trying to undermine Trump by doing this. I mean, some of the agents appear to have maybe democratic

tendencies, but some of the agents are very far right wingers. So I don't see that kind of political motive, but I see much more boring and prosaic motives that lead people down the primrose path. Sure. Well, I mean, it's the same thing in both cases, at least potentially, right? Like, here

you have, especially as you said, coming into the case, he said, well, I want to find out what's with these militia notes that they would do such thing, and they go, oh, a lot of informants. So you look at the Capitol and if you found a bunch of informants, you'd probably go, huh, a bunch of informants with about the same level of shock, right? I mean, maybe not to put that whole thing on, but maybe, and this is something that I think has been a problem, as we just described with Robeson here, and it's certainly been a problem with the FBI in the past,

is they have somebody who's an informant who goes off and does whatever they want, whether it's blow up a federal building or, you know, murder whoever they want for decades, like Wydie Bulger and all that kind of thing, or, you know, it could be that protected people, people who are embarrassing for their relationship with the FBI could get away with being part of something like this or, you know, that kind of thing's not outside of the realm of possibility or fair speculation, I don't think. Right, but I mean, let me just, let me just give you, I agree in theory, but let me give an example, Robeson, or, the other informant, Dan, I mean, we know their government informants because the court record

shows it. Like, we have documents. We have that prove that they work for the government. So when we say the government is trying to hide them and doesn't want them out there, it's because they're definitely government informant. The government is not happy with how they behave or doesn't take it to play well in front of the jury. Right. They're going to hide it from the jury, but the newspaper still knows, yeah. Right. But that is documented evidence that they were informant, right? That's not the same as Stuart Rhodes wasn't arrested, so he must be an informant of the government does what he wanted to know. And that's why they're indicting him now because they want to keep his mouth shut. Because what's missing from that is the part where we have the documents showing it to do an informant.

We know that Stephen Robes who's informant. It's documented. It's proven. There's actual court papers showing. We don't have that with Rhodes. And that's a huge difference. I mean, but I just think that that was why it was just a question was, is this guy an informant or not? Do we have documentation? Let's see if we can find some. that's why it's a good question for a reporter to tackle because don't you think it is kind of interesting that Rhodes has been free all these years

that they didn't get him for something all this time look I've heard rumors about him being an informant long before even before January 6th ever happened right and I've been interested in it and I'll tell you I've done reporting on it and I've never seen anything and I spent a long time reporting it and I've never found evidence to anything beyond

random speculation that he did it and so therefore I never wrote it so that's to me a really important thing. Have I thought it? Have I looked into it? 100%. Do I think it's plausible? Absolutely. Right. Do I have anything to sustain it? No. And therefore, I didn't go and publicly ask the question because the problem is when you publicly ask a question like that, some people are going to take the next step and say it must be true. And I'm, that's not the world I would live in. I'm not going to put things out there just because I'd sort of like want them to be true or I think they might be true.

I need some kind of handhold and I don't have it. Yeah. All right. Well, and so now, this seditious conspiracy charge, they've charged him and how many others with this? Remember? This is a dozen. It's 11 total. And then,

as you said, they rarely charge people with this because it's really difficult to get a conviction. Yeah, their last several cases, they've done this with, I think they've lost.

The government is lost. And the government, as you probably know, that isn't accustomed to losing. They have a really high batting average in federal court. And so, and it can be a career ender for a prosecutor to lose a big case like that. So they're very hesitant to bring sedition, anything close to sedition up in court.

So now I saw that the idea was that they have these text messages and all this that show that they had brought weapons to D.C., that they had teams kind of on the periphery prepared to come into the center with the weapons in the event that they were going to try to lock down the Capitol building or C. it or some kind of thing that obviously didn't happen but that that was part of the plan and that's i believe the conspiracy that they're being charged with there but then i wonder um was there much in there or do you know much about roads and the and his men's role on the ground there that day as compared to say for example this guy epps who whispers in the ear of a guy before he picks up the bicycle rack and throws it at the cops and starts that riot and bring you know, breaches the original perimeter there.

Well, yeah, there's a ton. There's an enormous amount of evidence. The government is holding forward about what the both keepers did that day and leading up to it. As far back is November 5th, two days after election, Rhodes is sending, it's creating an encrypted leadership, what he calls an oathkeeper leadership group, and he's saying we're going to need to, violence is coming, we're going to need to take action. The Civil War is coming.

It's inevitable. We need, this blood's going to run the streets. This is all from the indictment. Is that right? Correct. Okay, go ahead. But these are not. This is, this is, you know, these are,

actual messages that they have copies of, right? And that kind of rhetoric is going on. And he's helping people plan specifically for going ultimately to plan to go to DC on the 6th. He's organizing people to go. He's creating teams. He's naming people to be leaders and sub-leaders. And they're specifically planning for going there and to create the VIP protection force, but also his quick reaction force, which was across the Potomac in Virginia. He's designated people to set that up. One of them, picks a hotel, rents three hotel rooms. Each room is assigned to a, to oathkeepers from a different state who are there to stow their weapons. The government has evidence in the form of messages, but also video of people bringing weapons into these rooms. There's an enormous amount

of evidence showing that they planned to be there. They were orchestrating a plan to be there, people prepared for violence for what they consider to be civil war, and to find different ways to get weapons into D.C., which obviously has very strictive gun laws. when the time calls. So they were all prepared. There's other evidence cited in other documents where Rhodes is talking about what non-firearm weapons and defense things

they can bring into D.C. that day. He's talking about what kind of armor to wear and what kind of things they can bring that's legal. I can't remember exactly what they were, but there were different things you could use to club people and things like that. I think he said get one of those long police maglite flashlights that you can whack people with,

things like that. There's an enormous amount of evidence about them planning and preparing for this and planning to have weapons at the ready if they needed. And then as far as what they did on the ground there that day was, did he cross the perimeter at all or he stayed out in the street or what? He was in the, he was on the grounds, meaning he wasn't inside the building or even on the balconies or whatever, but he was in restricted area. And do you know about his five best guys or whatever, were they involved in breaking

windows and climbing in and all that kind of thing they were involved in pushing through a door that was open they didn't break windows but they were and they had two they had two stacks of oathkeepers there was audio of them saying push push push push and pushing into the building and there was this zello chat um they were on this this sort of radio emulation online thing called zello works like a two-way radio but it's close through the internet someone to their bad luck recorded their two hours of conversation that day and so you can hear them saying let's push through let's get them calling people traders saying we're in the fucking capital excuse me I said a bad word we're in the capital that sort of thing so

there's there is really quite a bit I mean this is of course one of the things that's unique about about this case is there's so much evidence the government can look at right that's not that's not the normal thing but these people recorded themselves committing what the government thinks are crimes so but that's awkward when you're trying to defend yourself right when you actually provided the evidence that the government is going to hold up against you know and boy you think about all that cell phone footage there must be a 5,000 angles of different time periods of that day of what was going on there and just forget about it I'm glad that's not my job being a federal cop um anyway through that stuff I'm sorry you mean looking through that stuff right yeah yeah um all right

man well uh thanks very much great to have you on the show really appreciate you joining us here today and uh all your great journalism ken it's it's my pleasure and i appreciate you reading it and calling me to do this and i hope you don't mind me pushing back a little bit and some of this stuff i mean i oh no absolutely i mean that's the point of it uh i ain't always right i'm just trying to get you to you know give you a platform to say the right thing what uh as far as uh from your point of you so it's all good yeah and i just don't i just i you know i i i i i'm waiting for someone to show me any scrap of paper, any piece of evidence, anywhere if it shows that Ray Epps or Stewart Rose are informants. Show me that and maybe in my opinion will change. But

beyond that, it's just pure speculation. All right. Well, thanks very much again. Take care. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and liberal.com, Libertarian Institute.org.