Videotapes of witness interviews that the Democrat-led Jan. 6 congressional committee conducted have vanished, raising concerns for the chairman of the successor House panel that is now examining security failures related to the Capitol riot as well as possible implications for upcoming criminal trials.
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Just the News on Tuesday obtained footage of an undercover Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer recorded by his body-worn camera behind police lines on the U.S. Capitol grounds. The footage was obtained directly from official sources and has not been altered.
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A federal jury in the District of Columbia decided Thursday that left-wing agitator John Earle Sullivan didn’t just document the January 6 Capitol Riot – he was a participant, Fox 13 reported.
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On a near-daily basis, the Department of Justice announces new arrests related to the events of January 6. Authorities arrested a Minnesota man on Wednesday for allegedly obstructing law enforcement and other minor offenses; U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, appointed by Joe Biden in 2021, trumpeted the news on his office’s X account.
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U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Friday agreed to temporarily pause a gag order she imposed on former President Donald Trump while he appeals the decision.
Chutkan on Monday issued the order, prohibiting him from publicly attacking the court staff, the prosecution, and any potential witnesses. The judge is overseeing special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case against the former president. Trump has vocally accused Smith of pursuing a political witch hunt against him to derail his 2024 White House bid.
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Liz Cheney said Thursday that what former President Donald Trump did on January 6th is as “evil as you can imagine” and as much of a “dereliction of duty of an American president we have ever seen.”
“[Trump was watching [the riot] on television, and he thought the mob was doing the right thing. And no matter how many times people pleaded with him to tell the mobs to go home, he wouldn’t do it,” the former Wyoming representative said in a talk at the University of Montana’s 2023 Mansfield Center Lecture series. “And did he not do it for over three hours, but in the middle of the violence, when the attack was happening, he sent out a tweet saying that Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what Trump wanted him to do.
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Former Representative of Wyoming Liz Cheney said on Thursday that making Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH-04) the new Speaker of the House is a risk to America’s democracy.
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Congressional Democrats are coming to the defense of their demonstrably unhinged colleague, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York. Bowman, last seen attempting to assault Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.), pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House office building as debate over a continuing resolution to fund the federal government intensified Saturday afternoon.
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Ray Epps, who became the center of a conspiracy theory about Jan. 6, 2021, riot has been charged with a misdemeanor offense in connection with incident, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Epps is charged with one count of disorderly or disruptive conduct on restricted grounds, court records reviewed by the Associated Press show.
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One must wonder if Special Counsel Jack Smith checks under his bed every night to make sure a large man wearing an oversized blue suit, long red tie, and MAGA hat isn’t there.
Smith, the public has been assured, is a nerves-of-steel prosecutor who has taken on some of the world’s most dangerous criminals during his time at the U.S. Department of Justice and The Hague. Following Smith’s appointment in November 2022, one former colleague swooned to the New York Times how Smith “has a way about him of projecting calm” and that “people look to him for steady guidance.”
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Special counsel Jack Smith has asked a judge to issue a gag order to former President Donald Trump in his Jan. 6 case to prevent him from publicly attacking major figures in the case.
“The defendant’s past conduct, including conduct that has taken place after and as a direct result of the indictment in this case, amply demonstrates the need for this order,” reads a filing from prosecutors that Politico obtained.
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GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released a statement Thursday denouncing a liberal group’s efforts to bar former President Donald Trump from the primary ballot in Colorado.
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GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released a statement on Wednesday vowing to pardon all non-violent January 6 protesters if he’s elected in 2024.
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Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz on Friday introduced a resolution to censure U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan over claims she has shown “blatant political bias from the bench.”
“Judge Tanya Chutkan’s extreme sentencing of January 6th defendants, while openly supporting the violent Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, showcases a complete disregard for her duty of impartiality and the rule of law,” Gaetz said, according to The Hill. “Justice may be blind, but the American people are not – we see Judge Chutkan for her actions, and we rebuke them in the greatest possible sense.”
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In a post to his locals.com page Georgia attorney Robert Barnes took subscribers on a little trip down memory lane about the 2020 Georgia election challenges.
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In episode 15 of his newest production, “Tucker on Twitter,” former Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson sat down with former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who was the acting chief during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
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In Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of former President Donald Trump regarding the 2020 presidential election and Jan. 6, the issue of alternate electors from seven states has become another focal point, as officials – all Democrats – from six of those states determine whether to prosecute.
In the federal indictment of Trump last week, Smith charged the former president with four counts, including conspiracy to defraud, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. The indictment also acknowledges six unnamed co-conspirators with whom Trump allegedly did “conspire, confederate, and agree” to defraud the country.
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Former President Donald Trump on Thursday pleaded “not guilty” to all criminal charges stemming from special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment related to the 2020 presidential election and Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith’s most recent indictment of former President Donald Trump repeatedly referenced former Vice President Mike Pence objecting to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and insisting that the vice president had no authority to halt the electoral certification process.
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GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) after the department failed to respond to his previously-filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to uncover the communication between the White House, DOJ, and Special Counsel Jack Smith about the indictment in the classified documents case of former President Donald Trump.
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Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday was indicted as part of a special counsel Jack Smith’s federal grand jury probe into his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results and the former president’s role in the subsequent Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
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U.S. Capitol complex security footage shows the Secret Service brought Vice President-elect Kamala Harris into a garage at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Jan. 6, 2021, just a few yards from where a pipe bomb had been planted the night before by an unidentified suspect.
The video footage, obtained by Just the News and released on Friday, raised immediate concerns with experts on presidential security and top lawmakers in Congress on how the explosive device was overlooked during security sweeps.
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Intelligence forewarning of violence kept from decision makers. A plea for National Guard rejected. Security locks on a door deactivated, allowing rioters to flood into the Capitol. And now officers losing control of gear that then gets used against them.
The evidence of serious security failures inside the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 tragedy keeps mounting as House Republicans use their new found control to expose information that was suppressed by their Democratic counterparts’ original investigation.
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GOP presidential candidate released a four-minute video statement on Tuesday shortly after Former President Donald Trump said the Justice Department informed him that he is a target of the January 6 Grand Jury probe. Trump must report to the jury this week.
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It remains the greatest unsolved mystery related to the events of January 6: Who placed pipe bombs near the headquarters of both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee the night before?
Shortly before the joint session of Congress convened at 1 p.m. to debate the results of the 2020 Electoral College vote, a woman on her way to do some laundry looked down and spotted a device in an alley adjacent to the RNC building. Karlin Younger ran to notify security guards, who then called police. Law enforcement conducted a search of the area and located another device outside the DNC building.
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The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington D.C. has confirmed to Congress that it had plainclothes officers at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot and that at least one was captured on video exhorting the crowd, a key House investigator told Just the News.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, said in wide-ranging interview Wednesday night that MPD body cam video that leaked onto the video platform Rumble is authentic and confirms that officers in plainclothes were at the riot.
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A door on the West side of the U.S. Capitol was left open and mostly unguarded for key moments during the Jan. 6 riot, allowing more than 300 people to enter the building unimpeded even as officers fought valiantly to keep protesters out of other sections of the official home of Congress, according to police security footage obtained by Just the News. The footage — which confirms concerns first raised by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., two years ago — shows an episode in a narrow hallway in the middle of the Capitol that began around 2:30p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021 right after the first breaches were reported elsewhere in the landmark building.
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The Democrat-led House Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6 doctored a key piece of its evidence, adding audio to silent U.S. Capitol Police security footage used to create a dramatic video montage for the opening of its primetime hearings last summer, according to a Just the News review of the original raw footage and interviews. In at least two instances identified by Just the News, the panel’s sizzle reel that aired live and on C-SPAN last June failed to identify that it had overdubbed audio from another, unidentified source onto the silent footage. Multiple current and former Capitol Police officials as well as key lawmakers and congressional aides confirmed that the closed-circuit cameras that captured the video do not record sound and that it was added afterwards.
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Over the past month, speculation has swirled around why Fox News honchos ousted the nation’s most popular cable news host just hours before he was set to begin his nightly monologue. Tucker Carlson reportedly was stunned by the news, which was announced in a terse statement released by the network on April 24: “FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”
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The FBI abused a digital surveillance tool nearly 300,000 times between 2020 and early 2021, running 23,132 inquiries alone after Jan. 6., according to a newly unsealed court document.
The Section 702 database, which the FBI is authorized to use to gather foreign intelligence information or if they believe there is evidence of a crime, was used on Jan. 6 suspects, along with congressional campaign donors and protestors arrested in riots after George Floyd was killed in 2020, a newly unsealed court document reveals. An April 2022 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) opinion described these abuses, noting that the employee who ran the queries after Jan. 6 did so “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query term used.”
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In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when establishment politicians started to make common use of the term “homeland,” they told us the most dangerous threat to Americans was foreign terrorists. But today, we are instructed to fear the enemy within. A new iconic date, January 6, 2021, is inscribed on our collective consciousness. From coast to coast, Americans are being herded into two camps. There are the “white supremacists,” those bad people who purportedly hate good people. And then there is everyone else, good people who are encouraged to hate the bad people.
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Matthew Graves just received a court summons.
As the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Graves is rarely on the receiving end of a legal inquiry. In fact, Graves’ hand must be tired from signing thousands of criminal indictments, sentencing memos, and plea offers related to his ongoing investigation into the events of January 6, 2021. Just this week, the FBI arrested two more individuals on minor offenses, giving Graves’ overstaffed office more fresh meat for the Justice Department’s vengeful retaliation against Americans who protested the certification of Joe Biden’s election that day.
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A Massachusetts man on Friday was charged with a felony related to his participation in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mark Sahady already faced misdemeanors for his nonviolent and brief jaunt through the building that afternoon, but the Justice Department decided to add the common “obstruction of an official proceeding” charge to Sahady’s case on April 7.
That same day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw Sahady—and more than 300 January 6 defendants charged with the same obstruction felony—a potential lifeline. In what one judge described as a “splintered decision,” a three-judge panel narrowly reversed a lower court ruling that tossed the obstruction count against three Capitol protesters. D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols dismissed the charge last year largely based on the argument that the statute “requires that the defendant have taken some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence an official proceeding.”
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Law enforcement agencies had at least 40 undercover informants engaging in surveillance work among defendants on Jan. 6, defendant Dominic Pezzola’s lawyer Roger Roots said Wednesday.
A Proud Boys member, Pezzola is currently standing federal trial in Washington, D.C. with the group’s former national chairman Enrique Tarrio and members Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl for allegedly conspiring to oppose the Jan. 2021 transfer of presidential power and related charges. The government admitted Tuesday that eight FBI confidential human sources were embedded among the Proud Boys on Jan. 6, Roots reported in a Wednesday court filing, saying the Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) agency appears to have had some 19 informants active at the time.
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Two years after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the issue of security footage is bedeviling law enforcement as federal prosecutors belatedly admit there is footage of some cops consorting with the riotous crowd and a retired Capitol Police executive divulges there are sizzle reels of all defendants inside the Capitol that were prepared for the FBI.
Retired Capitol Police Deputy Chief J.J. Pickett told Just the News on Monday that he is not certain whether federal prosecutors have turned over to Jan. 6 defendants the compilation videos made by his department of every person who entered the U.S. Capitol during the riot.
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After nine weeks of testimony from multiple government witnesses, including FBI agents, the Justice Department finally concluded its case-in-chief in the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy trial on Monday.
Five Proud Boys, including the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, are accused of conspiring to “oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” on January 6, 2021. It is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s most consequential case related to January 6; convictions will help build a similar case against Donald Trump largely based on his infamous “stand back and stand by” remark to the Proud Boys during an October 2020 presidential debate.
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Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the first set of previously-unseen surveillance video captured by Capitol police security cameras on January 6, 2021 that undermines several aspects of the reigning narrative about what happened that day.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last month gave Carlson’s team “unfettered” access to 41,000 hours of footage the government kept hidden from the American public and individuals charged in the Justice Department’s unprecedented and ongoing investigation into the events of January 6. Capitol Police and the Justice Department designated the recordings as “highly sensitive” material in March 2021; the trove remains under tight protective orders and defendants must agree to strict rules before gaining access to clips entered as evidence against them.
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The Capitol Police, FBI and eight other federal agencies gathered intelligence that extremists were planning to commit violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 but failed to adequately adapt security or get threat assessments to key decision-makers and frontline officers, the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress concludes in a stinging report that confirmed months of reporting by Just the News.
“Some agencies did not fully process information or share it, preventing critical information from reaching key federal entities responsible for securing the National Capital Region against threats,” the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report this week that immediately renewed questions inside Congress about whether the riot was a preventable attack and why the leadership under then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer did not accept the Trump Pentagon’s offer of National Guard troops for reinforcements.
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The public is gradually learning how, despite repeated denials and non-answers, top government officials were well aware of the potential for violence on January 6, 2021.
A chief investigator on the January 6 select committee told NBC News last week that law enforcement was privy to a trove of intelligence indicating problems could arise during the election certification process but, for some unexplained reason, chose to ignore the warning signs. “The Intel in advance was pretty specific, and it was enough in our view for law enforcement to have done a better job operationalizing a secure perimeter.” Tim Heaphy told NBC News reporter Ken Dilanian. “Law enforcement had a very direct role in contributing to surely the failures—the security failures that led to the violence.”
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One might be inclined to apply Hanlon’s razor—never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity—to the actions of law enforcement on January 6, 2021. One might even be inclined to replace “stupidity” with “incompetence” to explain why police behaved the way they did that afternoon. But a growing body of evidence suggests neither stupidity nor incompetence can justify what now appears to be the worst incident of police brutality against political protesters since the civil rights era. After two years of watching cherry-picked video clips produced by the Department of Justice and the news media to depict Trump supporters as the violent aggressors on January 6, the public now has an opportunity to see what really happened thanks to police body camera footage released at trial.
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The jury trial of Richard Barnett, the man famously photographed with his feet on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6, 2021, is underway in Washington, D.C. Nearly two years to the date of his arrest, Barnett finally had a chance to defend himself in court on multiple charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding.
But it was not the fiery, outspoken Barnett who provided the most jaw-dropping testimony in the trial so far. To the contrary, one of the government’s own witnesses confirmed under defense cross-examination that “agents provocateur” were heavily involved in instigating the events of January 6.
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The second anniversary of the events of January 6, 2021 came and went last week, fortunately, without a copycat attempt by behorned furries and selfie-taking Indiana meemaws to “overthrow democracy” and whatnot.
While most people somehow have managed to move on with their lives, official Washington remains fixated on the four-hour disturbance that took place two years ago. What can only be described as “insurrection psychosis” continues to grip the Biden regime, congressional Democrats, and the national news media in yet another example of the vast differences between the priorities of the ruling class and the American public.
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The Capitol Police chief who handled the Jan. 6 riot says political bureaucracy under Speaker Nancy Pelosi put optics over safety and hampered his department from crafting an appropriate security plan to protect the home of Congress that fateful day.
Steven Sund, who resigned as the head of the $600 million a year Capitol Police Department after the tragedy, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show on Wednesday that significant lapses occurred inside his department, inside the political leadership of Congress and across federal law enforcement and security agencies in the days before the Capitol riot.
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A day before the fateful Jan. 6 riot rocked the U.S. Capitol, security officials in the House and Senate received a warning of a possible aviation terror threat to the seat of Congress but shrugged off the concerns until congressional leadership found out from news media and began pressing for answers.
“Are you making any notification regarding the intel that I’m told is going public?” then-House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving texted Michael Stenger, his counterpart in the Senate, about the aviation security threat early on the evening of Jan. 5, 2021, according to text messages reviewed by Just the News.
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House Republicans gathered a trove of text and email messages showing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was directly involved in the creation and editing of the Capitol security plan that failed during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot and that security officials later declared they had been “denied again and again” the resources needed to protect one of the nation’s most important homes of democracy.
The internal communications were made public Wednesday in a report compiled by Republican Reps. Rodney Davis, Jim Banks, Troy Nehls, Jim Jordan and Kelly Armstrong that encompasses the results of months of investigation they did of evidence that had been ignored by the Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee. The lawmakers were authorized by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to do their own probe.
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The government watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit against the FBI for having put on administrative leave an analyst for espousing “conspiratorial views” that suggest support for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The suit was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina on behalf of FBI analyst Marcus Allen.
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One year after the events of January 6—despite their best efforts—federal prosecutors still hadn’t filed a single criminal charge that came anything close to resembling “insurrection” or domestic terrorism. Democrats and regime media were agitated: How could they continue promoting the four-hour disturbance as an attempted coup if the most prevalent offense charged by the Department of Justice a year later was the petty misdemeanor of “parading” in the Capitol? Even the chief judge for the D.C. district court overseeing each January 6 case had publicly expressed her frustration that the government wasn’t producing harsher indictments against Trump supporters.
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What do you suppose the chances are that Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s attorney general and chief enforcer, is a student of Søren Kierkegaard? Pretty slim, I’d wager. But his announcement yesterday that he was getting the old band back together and appointing yet another “special counsel” to investigate Donald Trump made me think that he should take a gander at Repetition, a book that Kierkegaard published in 1843 under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius.
The book is an arch, hothouse affair, full of Kierkegaard’s mocking and self-indulgent philosophical curlicues. But the MacGuffin of the book—whether one can really repeat the events of one’s life and, if so, what significance that repetition has—is something Garland might want to ponder for himself. I don’t think I will be spoiling things by revealing that Kierkegaard—or at least his pseudonymous narrator—concludes that, no, “there simply is no repetition” in life.
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If Republicans eke out a win in the House of Representatives—which now seems likely—GOP leaders have promised to investigate numerous government scandals, including the irredeemably corrupt Federal Bureau of Investigation. One path of inquiry is how the bureau manufactures data to promote the phony narrative that “domestic violent extremists,” i.e., supporters of Donald Trump, pose a security threat to the country.
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The FBI had up to eight informants within the Proud Boys in the months surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, recent court filings suggest, according to The New York Times.
Defense attorneys for former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four members of the group, who are scheduled to stand trial in December for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to Jan. 6, filed court documents in the past several days revealing the informants’ presence in the Proud Boys’ ranks, the outlet reported. The defense contended that the prosecution had, until recently, improperly withheld some information the government received from the informants that was favorable to the accused.
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