New Jan. 6 Scandals: Julie Kelly on Destruction of Evidence and the DNC Pipe Bomb

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Think about this: If you’re going to do an investigation into January 6, who’s one of the first people you would call to testify, even behind closed doors? FBI Director Christopher Wray—they never interviewed him. They never interviewed Steven D’Antuono, who’s in charge of the Washington Field Office who oversaw the entire January 6 criminal investigation.”

In this episode, I catch up with investigative journalist Julie Kelly to get an update on what we know, and still don’t know, about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Why did the January 6 Select Committee—why did they destroy evidence that they collected? Why are they hiding transcripts from witness interviews at the White House … and at the Department of Homeland Security? How possibly could text messages belonging to more than two dozen Secret Service agents and officials, including the director, just vanish?”

What are the charges defendants are facing? What was the level of government and law enforcement involvement? Why hasn’t the mystery of the D.C. pipe bomb been solved?

“If you would have told me that two years later—I think that was when we recorded that interview for the [Epoch Times Jan. 6] documentary—that we would still be talking about people being rounded up, investigated, arrested, charged, and convicted now in early 2024, even I would have had a hard time, I think, grasping that that would be the reality. But here we are, in February of 2024. The Department of Justice is now on pace to arrest one January 6 defendant a day this year,” says Ms. Kelly.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Julie Kelly, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Julie Kelly:
Good to be with you again, Jan. Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Julie, you were featured in the first January 6th documentary published by Epoch Times. We now have a second documentary that focuses on what has happened to some of the defendants. There were significant abuses of power against people who only committed misdemeanors in some cases. What has happened since our last interview?

Ms. Kelly:
I was so grateful to be part of that documentary. It was so important and so well done. Joe Hanneman, the January 6th reporter, to this day is still doing amazing work. Even I would have had a hard time grasping that this would be the reality now in February of 2024. The Department of Justice is now on pace to arrest one January 6th defendant a day this year, trying to bring the total caseload to 2,000 defendants from the currently existing caseload of 1,300.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is not stopping. Do you know that they want another 700 defendants?

Ms. Kelly:
Yes. Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, a Biden appointee, told the Washington Post in 2022, shortly after he was put into that office, that he believed the caseload would exceed 2,000 defendants before he was done and the statute of limitations would run out. That’s certainly a promise that he intends to keep.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is the typical charge for these defendants?

Ms. Kelly:
Right now, the majority of charges are a couple of misdemeanors, parading in the Capitol, and being in a restricted area on Capitol grounds. One of the most common felonies, a nonviolent felony, is obstruction of an official proceeding; more than 320 January 6th defendants have been charged with that felony. Then you have assault on police officers and interfering with police officers. A few hundred people have been charged with that as well. That’s basically an overview of the most common charges.

But then you have the DOJ using very rare charges like seditious conspiracy that has typically been applied to foreign terrorists tied to Islamic terror cells. But the DOJ has dusted off that charge and that resulted in the conviction of multiple people tied to both the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers. Seditious conspiracy is really tantamount to treason.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are few people that know the whole picture as well as you do. What happened on that day, based on everything that you know right now?

Ms. Kelly:
Overall, January 6th was a lot of different things happening at different times at different locations. You had quite a bit of violence on the west side of the Capitol that started right before the joint session convened at one o’clock. You had police officers, as Joe Hanneman has reported in the documentary, assaulting the crowd outside, using munitions that are supposed to be non-lethal. That really initiated a lot of the confrontations that people have seen between protesters and police.

The east side of the building was a little bit calmer. But that is where the Oath Keepers entered the Columbus doors and people got inside the building. The bigger question for people is why the Capitol grounds and the building itself was so intentionally vulnerable and unsecured. This makes people suspicious this had been purposeful, and they wanted to leave the building and the grounds unprotected to draw in tens of thousands of Trump supporters into where Congress was going to be debating the election results.

In many ways, they got the outcome that they wanted, which was using the violence that day, and using people going into the building to shut down the proceedings. Then when Congress reconvened, the plans to debate the outcome and the contested swing states basically ended. They certified the election on January 7th.

Some people call it a fedsurrection. We know what this government was capable of doing to Donald Trump and people tied to him. How could they have no involvement, despite all the intelligence warnings.? They had multiple police departments on the ground that day, both uniformed and undercover. They had FBI informants embedded into these so-called militia groups. If they had all of this foreknowledge, informants, and officers on the ground, why did all this happen?

Mr. Jekielek:
You are saying there was involvement by multiple agencies, yet the vulnerability of the Capitol building was apparent, which suggests there was some level of intentionality. We have Russiagate to show us the great lengths that people will go to attack a political candidate. We have also had an astonishing level of censorship. We have been learning more and more about this disinformation industrial complex that has emerged with obvious government involvement. But the idea that they had a plan to entice all these people into the Capitol still feels far-fetched somehow.

Ms. Kelly:
It really does. Vivek Ramaswamy just said, “If you would have told me three years ago that I would be calling this an inside job, I would have told you you were crazy.” But there’s so much emerging evidence now. Now, more than three years removed, you have to ask, “Why is the government continuing to conceal evidence about what happened that day?

More importantly, why did the January 6th Select Committee destroy evidence that they had collected? Why are they hiding transcripts from witness interviews? Why are they hiding transcripts from those interviews at the Biden White House and at the Department of Homeland Security? How could text messages belonging to more than two dozen Secret Service agents and the director just vanish? They were purged and were never recovered.

I’ll tell you the biggest coincidence—the ties to the FBI entrapment scheme to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. We now know from those trials that this was a plot conceived and executed by the FBI that was run out of the FBI Detroit field office in Michigan. The head of the Detroit FBI field office, Stephen D’Antuono, was promoted by Christopher Wray, the FBI director, to take over the Washington field office. He was promoted by Christopher Wray a few months before January 6th.

Why was he moved after successfully executing this FBI entrapment operation in Michigan? The arrests were announced right before the 2020 election. This was a big issue during the last few weeks on the campaign trail. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Gretchen Whitmer were all blaming Donald Trump for inciting his supporters to try to kidnap and kill Gretchen Whitmer.

It turns out this was another FBI plot. This was like Russiagate, something to interfere with the election in the key swing state of Michigan. Then this FBI official is moved to Washington. We know for a fact that there were FBI informants embedded into various groups on January 6th.

We know there were informants on the ground on January 6th. Stephen D’Antuano then led the criminal investigation into January 6th. But he suddenly retired in November of 2022 after Republicans won the House, because he himself had become a person of interest that Republicans wanted to talk to. There were odd coincidences.

Mr. Jekielek:
Speaking of coincidences, you have been looking at the DNC pipe bomb when key cameras pointed at that spot suddenly pan away at the critical moments when you need that footage. It’s hard to believe that was a coincidence, because normally these cameras don’t pan away. Please tell us about the whole pipe bomb situation and its implications.

Ms. Kelly:
This is another angle of the narrative that at first was a really big deal. It was that someone, presumably a Trump supporter, had planted pipe bombs outside of the DNC and RNC headquarters right before the joint session convened. The idea was that this was a Trump supporter who was trying to blow up these buildings, kill people, and then coordinate the first breach into the Capitol. That’s what our top officials, like Chris Wray, told us. Then all of a sudden, the interest in the pipe bomb story dissipated. The media, who was once all over the subject, just dropped it. The question is, “Why?”

Because we found out towards the end of 2022, that unbeknownst to anyone, Kamala Harris, a sitting U.S. Senator who should have been participating in the events of January 6th, or at least soaking up all the glory as an incoming vice president, was not at the Capitol. In fact, she had been there, but then she left and oddly went to the DNC headquarters. She remained there for almost two hours while the pipe bomb was sitting right outside the building. It was only evacuated after it was discovered.

That raised a lot more questions. How could her secret service security detail have possibly missed a device that’s not buried somewhere, but that’s sitting outside in plain view between two benches? How did other law enforcement officials miss it? How did the security guards at DNC miss it?

With the new video footage that came out recently, Darren Beattie at Revolver News has reported that it actually was the secret service security detail that discovered the pipe bomb, and their response was really inexplicable. They were lackadaisical about it. You didn’t see them rushing around and trying to get her out of the building. It was almost like they kind of knew about it and they didn’t seem scared at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
We were led to believe there was a credible pipe bomb threat, yet the security services don’t seem to notice. If there was a bomb threat, hopefully there would be a quick response.

Ms. Kelly:
But there wasn’t. That’s what Darren pointed out, “Look at how these officers and secret service agents were responding to the detection of this device.” Furthermore, what I found recently watching the surveillance video is that a bomb-sniffing canine was within feet of the explosive device at least twice that morning. How did a bomb-sniffing dog miss what we still are told to this day by the FBI was a viable explosive device that could have detonated and killed people?

If you have a trained dog who’s supposed to find these explosive devices, how did the dog miss it twice on that day? Congressman Tom Massie and others are promising to open another investigation into the DNC pipe bomb asking, “How did they miss it?”

Going back to Stephen D’Antuano, he told Congress last year that the data from the cell phone provider of the suspect who planted the devices is corrupted. They believe that this data belonged to the suspect who planted the devices the night before.

How could the FBI continue to sweep up more than 1,300 individuals using facial recognition and all of the invasive surveillance and investigative tools they have to get a grandma from Florida and arrest her for trespassing, but they can’t find the person who could have killed Kamala Harris, her staff, and Secret Service agents on January 6th? By the way, she has never mentioned it publicly either. It is another angle of January 6th narrative that just does not add up.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is the issue of the cameras panning. There isn’t actual footage of what really happened when they were dismantling it. When the bomb squad arrives, that video footage is missing.

Ms. Kelly:
Why isn’t there any video from cameras that are in that vicinity that could show exactly where the pipe is sitting? We’ve only seen the video from Congressman Massie, and then from Darren Beattie, that showed a quick zoom in on this device that was propped up outside and very visible. It was in between two benches where people could sit.

We do see the camera zoom in, but that’s really the only camera angle that we have of that specific area. There is a lot to the DNC pipe bomb story that could unravel bigger questions about January 6th, which is why the media is completely ignoring the new scandals related to the pipe bomb.

Mr. Jekielek:
The silence on this issue is completely deafening. I see that people are now dubbing it as Russiagate 2.0.

Ms. Kelly:
We have FBI whistleblowers who have come forward and said that agents are being taken off child trafficking and child pornography investigations to hunt down January Sixers. We also know that the Department of Justice is pulling assistant U.S. Attorneys from offices across the country to come to D.C. to help prosecute these cases.

If you’re pulling assistant U.S. attorneys away from the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago or other areas with real crime issues to come here and prosecute someone for obstruction of an official proceeding or parading in the Capitol, what is the impact on those areas? They’re being taken off both investigating and prosecuting serious crime.

Mr. Jekielek:
There was media silence around this issue, but it certainly wasn’t total silence. You mentioned that the J6 committee destroyed evidence. Please remind us exactly what happened there.

Ms. Kelly:
The January 6th select committee was solely targeted at Donald Trump. It was actually the predicate to criminally charge him. Special Counsel Jack Smith basically lifted most of his 45-page indictment against Donald Trump for January 6th from the committee’s report. Much of it is regurgitated from the committee’s findings.

Think about this, Jan. They promised they were going to get to the bottom of January 6th to make sure it never happened again. Yet, they gave short shrift to intelligence and law enforcement failures. They put that section in an appendix of the report, so that they could fixate only on Donald Trumpand his associates.

In fact, after the committee disbanded, there were people who complained to the media that members, especially Liz Cheney, wanted to make that report and its findings only about Donald Trump. That was the basis of the January 6th committee. It was to fuel this narrative among the public that Donald Trump was responsible for January 6th, and that it wasn’t law enforcement, or the FBI, or the Capitol Police, or Nancy Pelosi, who really was responsible for securing the Capitol.

Think about this. If you’re going to do an investigation into January 6th, who is one of the first people you would call to testify, even behind closed doors? It would be FBI Director Christopher Wray. They never interviewed him. They never interviewed Stephen D’Antuano, who is in charge of the Washington Field Office, who oversaw the entire January 6th criminal investigation. Why did they overlook those two individuals, and interview Donald Trump’s campaign manager instead?

Mr. Jekielek:
What about the evidence that was destroyed? Please explain to us what happened there. What do we know factually?

Ms. Kelly:
Representative Barry Loudermilk, who is heading up a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, is trying to locate all of the evidence that the committee collected. Benny Thompson, the former chairman of that committee, has admitted that they did not archive or preserve any of the video recordings of the 1,000 or so witnesses that the committee interviewed. All of those video recordings are gone.

Furthermore, there are hundreds of transcripts that the committee said that they would make public that still have not been made public or available to House Republicans. Going back to the Secret Service texts, those are gone and have never been recovered.

Mr. Jekielek:
When it comes to these still existing documents that aren’t being handed over, what is the justification for that?

Ms. Kelly:
Some of it is due to security issues. We know there are transcripts being concealed at the Biden White House and the Department of Homeland Security. More than a year later, the justification is that they are undergoing a security review to make sure that any personal or private information is not given to House Republicans, and that nothing would jeopardize national security. That’s one excuse.

As far as destroying the video recordings, Benny Thompson said, “You have the written transcripts, so you don’t need the video recordings.” That wouldn’t work in most criminal trial proceedings, but somehow it has here. Not only is it impacting House Republicans trying to figure out what that committee did on January 6th, it’s impacting Donald Trump’s trial as well and other January 6th criminal proceedings. Those J6 defendants want access to what the January 6th committee had, which could be exculpatory, and certainly discovery evidence. This is a cover-up on a massive scale.

Again, does the media care? No. They covered the January 6th Select Committee hearings wall-to-wall. But now that we find evidence has been destroyed, the media is nowhere to be found.

Mr. Jekielek:
Are there laws against destroying evidence like that?

Ms. Kelly:
There are laws against destroying evidence. But who is going to enforce them? Unfortunately, it would fall to Attorney General Merrick Garland or Matthew Graves to open an investigation into House Democrats, and that’s never going to happen.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about the treatment of some of these defendants. This was a big focus of our recent Part 2 documentary. Overall, can you give us a picture of how they have been treated?

Ms. Kelly:
The consequences for these defendants and their family members have been devastating. At least four January 6th defendants have committed suicide under the torment from this DOJ. There has been a 100 percent conviction rate for the DOJ in jury trials.

Excessive prison sentences are being handed down by judges, including terror enhancements for nonviolent offenses where they weren’t plotting to kill anyone or destroy anything. This is what these American political prisoners are enduring. The DOJ is continuing on with the persecution. It’s happening every single day in the federal courthouse in our nation’s capital.

Mr. Jekielek:
How is it possible to get a 100 percent conviction rate in a jury trial?

Ms. Kelly:
It is because you’re putting Trump supporters before a jury made up of voters in a city that voted 92 percent Democrat. Furthermore, jury surveys indicate that the people of Washington have a far different view of the events of January 6th than people who live in other jurisdictions. They really view this as an insurrection and an act of domestic terror. They took this very personally, even though no one outside of the Capitol was hurt and Trump supporters were the only ones who died that day.

I’ve sat in on these jury selection proceedings and I heard what these Washington residents say about January 6th, and it’s truly shocking. They still say that they are traumatized by what happened. How could you possibly be traumatized if you weren’t even there? The whole thing was over in four hours. Yes, there were pockets of violence. But this is what they’re hearing and they’re returning their verdict in record time.

Mr. Jekielek:
But people who say they were traumatized by the events are allowed to serve as jurists?

Ms. Kelly:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
That doesn’t seem to work.

Ms. Kelly:
Right. Because then they will tell the judge, “I can set aside my personal feelings and I can be an impartial juror.” Of course they can’t. There was an interview done with one jury member on the Oath Keepers trial. She explained to the interviewer how she was desperate to get on the jury, and she was calling the clerk’s office every day to find out what was happening with the jury selection process. They want to be on these juries and help send these people to prison.

What’s even scarier, Jan, is that judges are obligated to protect the rights of defendants. They have not done that at all. We’re almost two years removed from the first jury trial in March of 2022. The DOJ has a 100 percent conviction rate for J6 defendants. Yet, judges refuse to move these trials out of Washington. Their due process rights are being completely obliterated.

Mr. Jekielek:
As we finish up, what are the three things that should happen now?

Ms. Kelly:
There should be a congressional investigation into all of this, including the DOJ and these federal judges.

Mr. Jekielek:
There should be another J6 committee, basically.

Ms. Kelly:
Yes. It’s unfortunate that Republicans did not form their own January 6th committee. I know that they’re becoming more interested in it. If the Supreme Court, which they very well could, reverses how DOJ has applied this 1512(c)(2) obstruction count, there needs to be repercussions for the DOJ, Matthew Graves, the line prosecutors, and more importantly, federal judges of both parties who gave their imprimatur to the unprecedented use of that statute to criminalize political dissent. There needs to be a mass call for resignations, for retirements for these judges, and for separate investigations into what the DOJ and these prosecutors did to weaponize that statute.

Mr. Jekielek:
Julie Kelly, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Kelly:
Thank you so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Julie Kelly and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.