AP Photo/John Minchillo
While we’ve all been heavily focused on the election, the NY Times dropped an important story about Jan. 6 that many didn’t notice.
Remember when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) grilled an FBI official about FBI or confidential human sources (informants) who may have been involved or had knowledge about Jan. 6?
Turns out that one of the top people in the Oathkeepers — their vice president — was an FBI informant, according to the NY Times.
An F.B.I. informant who was embedded for months in the inner circle of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, is likely to testify as a defense witness at the seditious conspiracy trial of Mr. Rhodes in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The informant, Greg McWhirter, served as the Oath Keepers’ vice president but was secretly reporting to the F.B.I. about the group’s activities in the weeks and months leading up to the Capitol attack, according to two people familiar with the matter.
But that wasn’t all. Let’s read on.
Mr. McWhirter is the second known F.B.I. confidential source who was in a position to provide information to federal agents about the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, raising questions about why investigators did not know more about the attack on the Capitol.
Near the start of Mr. Rhodes’s trial, Abdullah Rasheed, a former Oath Keeper from West Virginia, told the jury that he became alarmed by the violent language Mr. Rhodes used during a video conference with members of his group in November 2020 and provided the F.B.I. with a recording of the call.
“The more I listened to the call,” Mr. Rasheed testified, “it sounded like we were going to war against the United States government.”
Officials at the F.B.I. did not respond to Mr. Rasheed’s initial attempts to contact them and only reached out to him after Jan. 6.
The F.B.I. also had a confidential source in the Kansas City chapter of the Proud Boys in the months leading up to Jan. 6. That person, a low-level member of the far-right group, marched with other Proud Boys into the Capitol on Jan. 6. But in meetings with the government before the Capitol was stormed, he told investigators that the organization had not planned to attack the building and stop the certification of the 2020 election.
That was in addition to the fact that the head of the Proud Boys had also been a government informant in the past and just coincidentally was arrested before Jan. 6 so he wasn’t at the site of the riot.
Even the NY Times snuck in the obvious question here: If the FBI had all these contacts and they’re claiming it was some prior plot, why wasn’t it stopped beforehand, if it was a “seditious conspiracy” and not a spontaneous riot?
When the FBI got a tip from Rasheed, why didn’t they follow up on it? It would seem with something that specific you would want to follow up on it, especially if he was saying there were questions of violence. So why didn’t they?
If McWhirter was a confidential human source, why didn’t the government put him on the stand? Why didn’t they want the jury to hear that they had a confidential human source embedded in the matter? Why is it the defense that wants to call him?
A lot of questions going on here. With all the things that may be on the plate of a new GOP majority, maybe Ted Cruz wants to re-up that grilling and get to the bottom of this.
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RELATED ARTICLE
In Completely Unforeseeable Twist, January 6th 'Conspiracy Theory' Turns out to Be True
By Bonchie | RedState.com
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
What’s the current timeframe these days of “conspiracy theories” becoming fact? Whatever it is, it sure seems to be accelerating. Heck, I’m old enough to remember when sharing the COVID-19 lab leak theory would get you banned from social media. Now even the “experts” have admitted that’s the most probable origin explanation.
It’s not just the pandemic, though. For years, conservatives proposed, after piecing together much evidence, that the FBI was somehow involved in the unrest that took place on January 6th, 2021. Yet, those calls for answers and accountability were met with condemnation. “How dare you question the impeccable reputation of the FBI,” they asserted while absconding from any critical thinking.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Despite well over a year of deflections and denials, it is now confirmed that no less than eight FBI agents were embedded in the Proud Boys organization during the period surrounding January 6th.
The F.B.I. had as many as eight informants inside the far-right Proud Boys in the months surrounding the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, recent court papers indicate, raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack both before and after it took place.
The existence of the informants came to light over the past few days in a flurry of veiled court filings by defense lawyers for five members of the Proud Boys who are set to go on trial next month on seditious conspiracy charges connected to the Capitol attack.
In the papers, some of which were heavily redacted, the lawyers claimed that some of the information the confidential sources had provided to the government was favorable to their efforts to defend their clients against sedition charges and was improperly withheld by prosecutors until several days ago.
I’m sure you are totally shocked by this news. Who could have possibly guessed that Christopher Wray’s FBI, which ran an entrapment scheme involving Gretchen Whitmer prior to the 2020 election, would end up having been intimately involved in the lead-up to January 6th?
You have to admire the framing by the Times, though, pondering how much “federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack.” Yes, I’m sure that’s a real mystery. Conversely, the FBI agents likely knew exactly what was being discussed the whole time, which would mean one of two things.
One possibility is that the Proud Boys weren’t planning an insurrection and that conservatives who have called it a spontaneous event have been right all along. That would nuke all the deranged attempts to suggest that Republicans, including Donald Trump, somehow orchestrated the entry into the Capitol Building. The other possibility is that the FBI knew a riot was going to take place and did nothing to stop it, instead letting it play out for political reasons. Wouldn’t that be something? Yet, I wouldn’t even begin to put it past them.
Of course, everything I’m writing here might as well be words thrown into the sea. The FBI is nothing if it isn’t a completely unaccountable behemoth. The bureau will hide behind “national security” considerations and we’ll never find out the full extent of what transpired. Instead, the goalposts will move yet again with the press saying “well, sure, FBI agents were involved in January 6th, but that doesn’t mean anything.” Because nothing ever means anything. The corruption of government marches on, never ceasing.
