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Jonathan Turley on the Jan 6th videos of the shaman guy, and his prosecution — 52 Comments

1. The scandal has been the collusion between the judiciary and prosecutors. Lamberth, Jackson, and others deserve disbarment.

2. It looks like Fox News has caved to threats from both parties and shut down Tucker Carlson’s showing of the videos. We’ll see what happens to night.

3. He is not the only one screwed by the govt.
   Contrary to evilists who pretend must not be innocent, or he would not have pled guilty, anybody with half at least half a brain knows they threaten you with much worse consequences.

4. Turley has fixed standards and defends them consistently. There’s a claque of partisan Democrats on his boards who vociferously despise him. (Some appear to be among those recruited by ActBlue). Ann Althouse gets little of this abuse because she seldom advances a clear thesis, but she does get some. Remember what sets these people off.

5. Wouldn’t have mattered if that video was shown in court because the fix was in for all these people.

   As Julie Kelly has repeatedly said the absolute worst actors in this entire thing are the DC judges.

   And Turley gives way too much benefit to the judge in this particular case. Had a little whiff of Andy McCarthy there which Turley usually avoids.

6. I mean it was like blutowski, or the python guy that dressed as a viking, chansley was odd, but who isn’t who hangs around rallies, his atty watkins, acted oddly somewhat like vince fuller’s defense of tyson, what can you expect he’s an animal, on 60 minutes, judge lamberth, who has a black mark against him because of the moussaoui search warrant, rubber stamped this kangaroo court, and then last october reluctantly allowed for public access to press organizations, and new counsel

7. He didn’t make himself the face of the riot the Democrats did. The put him up as poster boy because he was the strangest one in the group. This made it easy for certain conservatives to go along with his over punishment. They also have not removed the headline from the NY Times that says “Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage”

   The “Judges” that presided and the Prosecutors and the investigators that backed them should all go to jail.

8. Kevin McCarthy defends Tucker Carlson showing the Jan. 6 video.

   https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1633276405046730752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1633276405046730752%7Ctwgr%5E411e89ccd9b068239e2b3ee46126d4ebc61665a8%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Face.mu.nu%2F

   Keep making me look stupid, McCarthy. Just keep on doing it.

   Mike

9. Looks like they got to Tucker…watching the show now and he’s just repeating everything he said and showed on Monday. No new video. Out of 40k hours, just 5 to 10 minutes????

   He’s just talking about the criticism from all sides. That’s important for uncovering the uniparty. But we need to see more video

10. Democrat politicians are evil.

    Democrat prosecutors are evil.

    Democrat judges are evil.

    All are vicious, vile and vindictive. Nasty every one.

11. “Worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
    The author & repeaters of that lie need a good neck stretching.

    We are pretty well past the point of civil discourse & disobedience…but man I hate to think of what comes next.

12. I really like how they believe they’re upholding the rule of law.

13. @JFM
    I am doubtful they care about the law. They are self-righteous and they believe that they will be able to use the power they are gathering to bring about a utopia. They are the ones they have been waiting for. Every other attempt was not real socialism/communism because it didn’t have them running it.

14. I attended the panel session of the J6 defendants at CPAC. It’s one thing to hear about these stories, but meeting the people and families who have had their lives ruined because of the need to protect the narrative is heartbreaking.

    Yes it is true that many people attending the J6 protests made serious mistakes in judgement but that shouldn’t mean that they forfeit all their rights to a fair trial where exculpatory evidence is presented. There are people who have spent over a year in solitary confinement with no visitors and with still no trial date. These people have been abandoned. I read that Marjorie Taylor Green is organizing a congressional visit to the J6 defendants still locked up under brutal conditions. Say what you want about Green but she is one of the very few that has shown any concern for the treatment of the J6 defendants. There once was a time when the ACLU would be standing up for these people but those days are gone. These are very dark times for the United States system of justice.

15. The destroyed lives were mentioned.
    Don’t forget the suicides.

16. A bit O/T…
    (OTOH, is anything O/T these days?)
    Here’s a changer who recently joined Substack (linked to by Instapundit):
    https://ivyexile.substack.com/about
    Opening grafs of the “About” page:
    “Progressivism is supposed to be about winning the debate, but lately has switched to stigmatizing and censoring it. I know, because I’ve been part of the problem: as reporter and hype man for prestigious institutions, I helped push discourse into dogma.
    “It’s not what I’d envisioned as an idealistic Brown grad moving to New York to become a public interest journalist under my hero Bill Moyers. But the market for substance was in steep decline, and I ended up an all-purpose flack across Columbia sugarcoating dubious scholarship and weaving luxury narrative on demand.
    “Is there a way to turn that amoral experience back to the common good, and encourage the conversations I used to squelch? That’s what The Ivy Exile is about, rekindling debate and rescuing the movement from itself….”

    That last phrase, no matter how refreshing, sounds more than a bit unrealistic to me, since “the movement” has become religiously tyrannical and brooks no dissent (IOW a vicious cult).
    More importantly, since “the movement” can never be wrong, it is—it MUST BE—hatefully intolerant of ANY TRUTH that might shine light on it…as we have already witnessed and are currently seeing IN SPADES.
    In fact, such truths must be DESPISED and those spouting them consigned to the dustbin of history (but not before an attempt is made to destroy them socially, financially, mentally and/or physically).

    Wishing The Ivy Exile fortitude and courage, and much success (as well as the gracious smile of Good Fortune)…

17. @ Griffin > “Had a little whiff of Andy McCarthy there which Turley usually avoids.

    It wasn’t a large whiff; McCarthy’s post stinks on ice.

    I’ve pretty much lost all the confidence I used to have in his judgement.
    Maybe his lawyering is okay, but it’s extremely narrow in outlook, and very much biased against the people making his old buddies look bad — by showing just how bad they are.

    You can find his column at NRO or excerpts at the other link; I don’t pay to access the National Review, because of their editorial positions like this one:

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/tucker-carlsons-january-6-revisionist-history/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

    I’ll go to CNN or WaPo & NYT if I want that kind of viewpoint.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/making-sense-of-the-capitol-riot-tapes/
    Capitol Riot Tapes: Tucker Carlson, January 6 Committee Narratives Both Flawed | National Review McCarthy

    New PLB writer Stauffer does a good job on the story.
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/03/chuck-schumer-beclowned-himself-in-response-to-carlsons-expose.php

    Let’s fix that for Chuck. Maybe he doesn’t realize that Democrats did the same thing Carlson did. The difference is that Carlson is an opinion journalist and lawmakers are expected to act as arbiters of the truth.

    For over two years, Democrats have engaged in one of the most shameful conspiracies in political history. “By diving deep into the waters of conspiracy and cherry-picking from thousands of hours of security footage,” House Democrats presented the American people with a skewed version of what transpired during the hours of the Capitol riot.
    …
    The hyper partisan Jan. 6 Committee was composed of seven Democrats and the two House Republicans who hated Trump the most.

    Perhaps the most egregious issue with the House hearings was the complete absence of witness cross-examination.
    …
    It is clear from both the House Committee’s footage and the clips aired by Tucker Carlson that the Capitol Police were utterly overwhelmed on Jan. 6. Yet no one has ever explained why, despite FBI warnings of a large, potentially dangerous demonstration, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser declined Trump’s offer of National Guard protection. Both must be asked to explain their decisions under oath.

    She quotes McCarthy, who starts out with “on the one hand”:

    To the extent that the media–Democrat critique is that Carlson is an opinion journalist who is apt to present a skewed picture, this is the price they must have known they’d have to pay for the January 6 committee. That panel was a blatantly partisan, monochromatically anti-Trump political exhibition that presented the country with a skewed picture, eschewing cross-examination and perspectives that deviated from its relentless theme: “Trump’s incitement to insurrection had our democracy hanging by a thread.

    Anyway, as we have lots of occasion to observe, the first rule of politics is: What goes around comes around. If Democrats and their notetakers don’t like this, they should have rethought the January 6 committee, as many of us implored them to do.

    So far so good. Then McCarthy, on the other hand, figures out a way to condemn a patently inoffensive, non-violent performance artist.

    And he pled guilty anyway, because there is nothing exculpatory on the video clips that Carlson has published.

    Understand: As a matter of law, what is exculpatory or incriminating is not assessed based on a media narrative. It is assessed based on the specific charges in the case. Here, the charge was that Chansley obstructed Congress. One need not engage in an insurrection, or even a riot, to obstruct Congress. One need only be in a place one has no lawful right to be in, and willfully engage in action that prevents Congress from conducting its proceedings. In that sense, the just-released video is the antithesis of exculpatory evidence; it shows Chansley committing the crime charged.

    A defense team with possession of the video — which they were NOT given despite their requests — would make hash of that argument, and McCarthy ought to know that.

    If the police are not arresting you at your first entry, but instead walking around and opening doors for you, then you are not obstructing anything, and they are prima facie implying that you have a lawful right to be where you are.

    I find that one of the most annoying omissions from the right is that the barriers were removed and the doors, in some cases, opened by the cops; IOW, many of the protesters had no knowledge that they were “trespassing” on ground that was usually open to the public, although IMO they ought to have assumed there would be trouble if they went inside the building.

    Escorted is the benign word being used to describe police who walked alongside one of the most visible intruders in the Capitol, observed what he was doing, and at a certain point allowed him to enter the congressional chamber. It’s been noted that this all seemed downright amicable: The police did not treat Chansley as if he were a threat, and they didn’t place him under arrest or otherwise attempt to subdue him.

    Police are trained to de-escalate violent or potentially violent situations when doing so is practicable. When they are grossly outnumbered in powder-keg situations, they are trained not to provoke people who are not menacing them, lest they needlessly ignite mob violence.

    As many, many people have pointed out — including the commenters at Powerline — there were no other protestors in the halls where the police were sauntering around with this vicious, violent obstructionist insurrectionist; they could have cuffed him and dragged him off with no one ever knowing what happened, if they had wanted to.
    To ignore THAT point is evidence of a prosecutorial agenda.

    McCarthy does have one redeeming point to make, but it’s not unique to him.

    The mindlessly repeated refrain that the riot “prevented the peaceful transition of power” is overwrought. The transition of power was never in doubt. Was the peace disturbed? Yes.
    …
    The video we are now seeing does not establish anyone’s innocence. It does, however, bolster the conclusion that the Democrats’ political messaging about the day has been a duplicitous exercise in mythmaking. Is Tucker Carlson presenting a depiction of January 6 that is overly sympathetic to a violent mob? Probably so . . . but then, the Democrat-dominated January 6 committee put its thumb on the scale as it presented Götterdämmerung.

    Stauffer’s conclusion is more apt:

    As I see it, Carlson performed a valuable public service. For 26 months, the Democrats have been using the Jan. 6 riot to prove that Trump and MAGA Republicans represent a serious threat to “our democracy.”

    Democrats are correct that democracy is under attack, but they’re lying about its source. The encroaching tyranny that has begun to engulf our once (relatively) free society comes from the Democratic Party.

18. Just in case you hadn’t noticed what happens when you look for Carlson’s shows from Monday & Tuesday:
    https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/07/searching-for-tucker-carlsons-bombshell-j6-videos-youtube-censors-will-direct-you-to-fake-fact-checks-instead/

    I didn’t find either one on the Fox News channel website; had to pick them up from unofficial youtubers.

    Not a good look.

    Unlike McCarthy, David Strom is blunt about the importance of the videos:
    https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/03/08/doj-withheld-exculpatory-evidence-when-prosecuting-q-anon-shaman-n535782

    I am no lawyer, but what is at issue is something called Brady Disclosure, named after a case where the Supreme Court ruled that the government provide any exculpatory evidence to defendants in criminal cases. The ruling was necessary, obviously, because prosecutors can be very…enthusiastic…about winning their cases and didn’t always disclose facts that would undermine their cases, leading to people being convicted based upon flawed or incomplete evidence.
    …
    That video of Chansley clearly provides exculpatory evidence. While it may prove he committed a trespass, it darn well shows he was not leading peasants with pitchforks with the intent to overturn the government. He was being escorted around by police, for God’s sake. Alone. Surrounded by police. Showing him the sights.

19. Some commenter at Powerline argued that the prosecutors didn’t have to turn over the videos because they didn’t have possession of them; the Congress did.

    That didn’t wash with the others, who noted that the DOJ has been using the tapes and facial recognition software to identify and arrest everyone they could find — as long as it wasn’t anyone who was, you know, actually breaking windows and moving barricades, or doing some other mostly peaceful protesting.

    They had their hands full with the flag-waving grandmas and cosplaying veterans.

    This is the post that Strom quoted from, but I found a lot of interesting things that he omitted.
    IMO this may be one of the most important articles about the despicable video situation foisted on the defendants.
    You may have seen other stories cite a different lawyer, because Watkins no longer represents Chansley.

    https://www.dailywire.com/news/its-appalling-qanon-shamans-lawyer-says-doj-lied-withheld-videos-aired-by-carlson

    Albert Watkins, whose client Jacob Chansley pleaded guilty to felony charges in connection with the Capitol riot and was sentenced to 41 months in prison, said Department of Justice prosecutors were legally bound to turn over the footage. Clips shown on Carlson’s Fox News Channel program show Chansley walking freely and peaceably through the building, often accompanied by multiple police officers.

    “We did not receive that video footage,” Watkins said. “We asked for it, and not just once or twice. Whether we asked for it or not is irrelevant because the government had an absolute, non-compromisible duty to disclose that video and they did not do so.”</b

    “And all the while, they were actively representing to the court and the American people that Jake was a leader, leading the charge into the Capitol,” he said. “They did not disclose that footage because it ran contrary to their rote narrative.”

    Watkins, an attorney for nearly 40 years, told The Daily Wire he was stunned to see the footage, which he could have used to defend Chansley.

    “I’ve never seen anything so vile as what I’m seeing right now,” he said.

    Welcome to the USSR.

    Watkins said anger now being focused on Carlson for locating and airing the footage should be directed at prosecutors who appeared to violate rules established in the landmark Supreme Court case U.S. v Brady, which cemented that prosecutors must turn over relevant information to defense attorneys, particularly exculpatory evidence.
    …
    “It’s appalling,” he continued. “Whether you’re right-leaning, you like Tucker Carlson, you hate Tucker Carlson, is irrelevant. This is about putting a dagger in the heart of our justice system. And the person holding the dagger and thrusting it with all its might is our Department of Justice. This required collaboration from the top of the Justice Department right down to the Assistant U.S. Attorney lying to me, a fellow officer of the court, knowing I had a duty to put my client in the best position I could based on the evidence.”

    They had to kill Justice in order to save Democracy.

    Court filings in Chansley’s case corroborate Watkins’ claim that he repeatedly asked for all videos of his client.

    “Our position is that the government must identify any evidence it believes to capture [defendant], regardless of whether it intends to rely on the same in its case in chief,” one said.

    In another discovery request, Watkins wrote that “I am also concerned about the thousands or tens of thousands videos the government has received from public sources, particularly how the government is searching, indexing, and storing these videos, and whether the government is withholding any video footage in its possession; Based on my review of the discovery thus far, there is official video surveillance and publicly sourced video footage that is exculpatory to the defendants. Many of those videos show [defendant] and other[s] peacefully walking around the Capitol. In these videos, they, like thousands of others, are doing nothing illegal with the possible exception of being present in the building, all of which is potentially exculpatory.”

    The government set up a video “dump” after Chansley had pled guilty, but it wasn’t very useful (Your Bureaucracy At Work).

    But by that time, Chansley had already entered a guilty plea which allowed him to get out of solitary confinement. Even when Watkins looked at the evidence platform–he has represented four January 6 defendants–it did not actually allow lawyers to filter and navigate the videos using the same methods available to law enforcement, he said; it was merely a giant dump of generically presented videos, he said. noting that even now, he has not been able to find the video played by Tucker Carlson using the government’s system. He said the government’s responsibility is to provide evidence pertaining to specific defendants, not a giant dump of all Capitol videos—and that they do have such technology on the government’s side.

    Reagan’s ten most terrifying words: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”

    In numerous other January 6 cases, the government has admitted to using facial recognition software to identify which videos show which people. The high-tech methods used to navigate each frame of Capitol video footage were so advanced that it even connected drivers license photos to a system to identify who was in which video.
    …
    On February 27, Ryan Nichols, a January 6 defendant who is headed to trial, filed a motion that said Tucker Carlson gained access to 41,000 hours of CCTV footage, “more than double the amount of CCTV footage previously thought to exist. Undersigned Counsel has obtained permission to examine the totality of the abovementioned footage. Importantly, since this newly discovered evidence was made available, we have already learned information directly relevant to Defendant’s case. Defendant’s position is simple and straightforward: there is no justifiable reason why this newly available evidence had not been made available before today.”

    Nichols also moved to remove a protective order that has gagged defense attorneys from sharing video with the public, saying that law enforcement openly appealed to “crowdsourcing” to help identify January 6 suspects, and crowdsourcing is also needed to comb through the footage for exculpatory evidence.

    “Because it would take a single individual over five years to view 44,000 hours of video, it is impossible for any one Defendant to review this discovery comprehensively,” Nichols’ lawyers wrote.

    Carlson noted in the preamble to his Monday show that much of that footage was irrelevant, being empty rooms or normal Congressional activity from before the protesters entered the building. However, his team spent three weeks looking through the tapes, and undoubtedly were focused on the times and places where they were most likely to find some evidence refuting the J6 Committee’s lies, rather than arguments for all the defendants.

    He also specified that they were not going to play video of the people who were most likely to be federal agents and provocateurs, because they couldn’t conclusively identify the individuals. I suspect the Fox lawyers had a say in that decision.

20. A lot of us appreciated the Hot Air posts by the pseudonymous writer “shipwreckedcrew,” who disappeared from the website some time ago. Apparently he’s been busy defending some of the J6 political prisoners.

    See this post for some of his recent tweets. Ed is writing before Chansley’s attorneys stated that the videos were deliberately withheld from them.

    https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2023/03/07/tour-de-farce-new-j6-videos-raise-serious-questions-at-least-in-one-case-n535322

    “There’s quite a bit of video you haven’t seen,” Tucker Carlson told his audience last night to introduce exclusive publication of never-seen surveillance video. “And that video tells a very different story about what happened on January 6th.”

    Just how different is the story? In one specific instance, it seems quite different — even if the new tapes add more nuance than contradiction overall. Remember Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman”? Carlson argues that he was much more a tourist than terrorist, and that Capitol Police were his tour guides.

    Ed wasn’t impressed with the explanation the Capitol Police gave for escorting Chalnsley through the building instead of arresting him.

    That would make sense when confronted by superior numbers, and no doubt that policy made sense in other areas of the Capitol. However, there are a number of points in this video where Chansley is outnumbered by officers, and indeed is completely separated from other rioters/trespassers/whatevers. Why did police continue to escort and/or guide Chansley through the Capitol at those points if he represented the kind of threat that gets a four-year sentence?

    That’s not to argue that Chansley shouldn’t have been prosecuted. Chansley committed a criminal trespass, regardless of his police tour later. It does suggest, however, that he may have been overcharged, especially in light of how other rioters get charged, prosecuted, and sentence for violence and criminal trespass for political demonstrations.

    Side note, from the NY Post story except:

    Chansley and the two officers eventually find an unlocked door and one of the policemen holds it open after Chansley lets himself onto the Senate floor. The DOJ timeline confirmed that Robishaw followed Chansley into the chamber as the “Shaman” took the seat on the dais recently occupied by then-Vice President Mike Pence.

    Since the Senators had already been evacuated (and the framing of Josh Hawley as a coward — for being the last one to leave the Chamber behind the other fleeing senators — was really a cheap shot), then Chansley didn’t obstruct anything himself.

    I wonder if his police escort were wandering around waiting for the word that it was finally okay to take him to the chamber. The testimony of the Capitol cop on Tuesday was that he couldn’t get any authorization for the evacuation and did it on his own hook, for which he was punished — maybe the plan was to have protesters actually enter the chamber when it was occupied? That would really be a case of the right hand not knowing what the Left hand was doing.

    Update: Our old friend and former colleague Shipwreckedcrew, who represents several J6 defendants, says that the DoJ has made quite a lot of video available to defendants. However, he’s not sure whether that’s a complete record in each and every case:

    For example, my client David Mehaffie was indicted for his conduct from the period 2:30 to 3:30 in and around the Lower West Terrance tunnel. I was given access to video that showed his location and conduct during that entire period. I had multiple videos from multiple sources.

    — Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com (@shipwreckedcrew) March 7, 2023

    I had crowd shot videos. There was no real serious question on the issue of whether there was more than enough video evidence for me to assess the case against him and prepare a defense.
    But every case is different in that regard.

    — Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com (@shipwreckedcrew) March 7, 2023

    In those cases the hunt is on for more videos that might show the same events from a different angle and further undermine the position adopted by the Government.
    Colt McAbee’s case is the most glaring example of this for me.

    — Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com (@shipwreckedcrew) March 7, 2023
    …
    The videos could only be released if they were used in court.
    So who used them in court? The Govt when it asks for defendants to be detained without bond, or other various types of pretrial proceedings.

    — Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com (@shipwreckedcrew) March 7, 2023

    This is why what Carlson is doing is so important. For the first time the wider public is seeing that the events of Jan 6 were a lot more nuanced that has been suggested by the GOVT — including the Jan 6 Committee.

    The GOVT has misled the public.

    THAT should make you unhappy.

    — Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com (@shipwreckedcrew) March 7, 2023

21. Here’s a post from shipwreckedcrew about one of his clients who did have a lawyer with access to some of the videos. 🙂
    (I’ve corrected a few typos, so as not to detract from swc’s presentation.)

    https://shipwreckedcrew.substack.com/p/reason-and-rationality-prevailed
    Reason and Rationality Prevailed Over Hyperbolic Bombast For David Mehaffie at Trial and Sentencing — Good thing for him he had a great lawyer.

    David Mehaffie is a 63 year old father of 6 and grandfather of 13 who came to DC on January 6 to attend the rally and hear what he thought would likely be the last public speech of President Trump.

    Here is what will now be the photograph that memorializes his day in DC for the rest of his life:
    …
    Shortly after January 6, David’s image was given the moniker “Tunnel Commander” by the Sedition Hunters website as online sleuths went about trying to learn his identity.

    Let me provide some necessary contextual facts for those of you — unlike me — have not had the opportunity to watch hundreds of hours of video.

    The tunnel entrance is on the level of the inaugural stage on the West Side of the Capitol. The tunnel leads to two sets of glass doors into the Capitol. The outer doors lock, but the inner doors do not. Behind the inner doors is a magnometer machine. This is not a public entrance to the Capitol — it is only available to members and staff.

    Many of the police officers who were the last to leave the outside of the Capitol on the West Side went in through this tunnel, with the last being captured by this camera at approximately 2:30 pm. Within 1 minute protesters who had made their way to the stage level — one level above the ground level — began to enter the tunnel. David Mehaffie was one of the first 20-25 people to enter the tunnel. This was all captured on the CCTV video played during his trial.

    All the police who had entered the tunnel before them had passed through both sets of doors. The outer set of doors were locked — the inner set did not have locks. At approximately 2:41, the glass on one of the outer sets of doors was broken by a protester. Another was able to use the push-bar on the inside of the door to open it and held it open while Mr. Mehaffie was the first one through. Again — all captured on video.

    There were no police in sight at this point. Mehaffie reached out and grabbed the handle on one of the inner doors at 2:42. As he pulled it open he turned his body 180 degrees to face back towards the crowd in the tunnel and stood politely holding it open for others coming forward and enter the building. It is obvious from the look on his face while doing this that he never saw the riot gear-clad police officers inside the second set of doors lined up from wall-to-wall in a relatively narrow space. Within 15 seconds a violent clash occurred between police and protesters. David Mehaffie was not involved in that clash.

    For the next 10 minutes David Mehaffie struggled to extricate himself from inside the tunnel as more and more people outside attempted to enter it and go forward. CCTV captured David exiting the tunnel at 2:51, at which point he climbed to the elevated position shown in the photograph above.

    With that factual timeline in mind — which was not in any serious dispute between the parties, the story continues.

    Subscription required for the rest of the article, because he’s using his Substack account to help with the legal defense fund for his clients.

    Go to this post for details:
    https://shipwreckedcrew.substack.com/p/turning-ships-port-to-a-subscription

22. McCarthy is correct as what is required to prove a case against the Shaman, but given the new video, which was not revealed to his attorney prior to his conviction, the sentence appears truly excessive. The other trouble I have with the many cases, is how the Court got around the arrestee’s entitlement to a speedy trial.

23. People guilty of wrongthink are not entitled to rights. That is the essential position of Democrats and their voters in America today.

    If you do not agree with them, you are a non-person.

    The baker in Colorado, Trump, the Shaman and the rest of the J6 political prisoners, Ashli, George Zimmerman, the cop in Ferguson, Keri Lake …. are all guilty of the ultimate crime — they are inconvenient for Democrats in the quest to achieve total domination. Therefore, they have to be “othered”.

    1984’s Big Brother is real and here.

24. Mike K…”It looks like Fox News has caved to threats from both parties and shut down Tucker Carlson’s showing of the videos. We’ll see what happens to night.”

    I didn’t see anything about this with a quick search. Where did you hear it?

25. “…But by that time, Chansley had already entered a guilty plea which allowed him to get out of solitary confinement….”

    Someone might want to mention this to Andrew McCarthy**, who does not seem to be aware (or want to be aware?) that if one is presented a choice of a) continued tortured incarceration with a lengthy sentence likely at the end of that tunnel OR b) pleading guilty, then most people would choose the latter…especially when they know they’ve been set up; especially if they know they are being railroaded.
    Especially when they know that they have no way of fighting a government wielding such grotesque injustice.
    BTW, much thanks AF for your extraordinary efforts…

    ** From the article by Andrew McCarthy (linked to above by AF @ 4:26):
    “Making Sense of the Capitol Riot Tapes”—
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/making-sense-of-the-capitol-riot-tapes/
    “…In Chansley’s case, we should be mindful that what is new to us is not necessarily new to him. Knowing what the proof against him showed, Chansley, represented by experienced defense counsel, voluntarily pled guilty to obstructing a congressional proceeding (namely, the January 6 joint session of Congress at which the state-certified electoral votes were counted and then-candidate Biden’s Electoral College victory was affirmed). His lawyers would have insisted on being shown any potentially exculpatory evidence prior to the guilty plea, and the prosecutors would have been obliged to produce it. I presume Chansley knew about this video, or at least images just like it; after all, he was in the Capitol and knew what he experienced there, including his interactions with the police….”

    “I presume”.
    Damn right he presumes, and not just about this.
    An outrageous article.

26. Honestly national review is hot steaming garbage now chambers was an illegal operative for kgb mccarthy would have blackballed him. I retract 100 demirits

27. Buckley is probably wondering what did i spend my life doing, in the ether

28. One of the questions that seems to have gotten lost is why the heck were the capital police behaving the way they were that day? They were letting people in, and clearly escorting and assisting the hapless Q Shaman (and likely others). But why?

    Were they ordered to do so?
    Were they sympathizers/supporters?
    Or was it some sort of a mob de-escalation tactic?

29. Or was it some sort of a mob de-escalation tactic?

    Interesting mob de-escalation tactic. Two cops wander around with one member of the mob until they get him access to the Senate chamber? While another 7 cops stand around?

    Such an efficient tactic. Nine cops per mob member. Totally makes sense.

30. He wasnt a threat, that was clear so they edited the tape of all context

31. And they shot the least threatening one which would be babbit not the beefy guys around her

32. How can it even be obstruction, they gave him a guided tour

33. @ Barry > “Here’s a changer who recently joined Substack (linked to by Instapundit):”

    I read the most recent post from that blog. Lots of food for thought.
    Particularly appropriate when discussing the made-for-tv J6 hearings
    (they certainly were not an investigation).

    https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/magical-sorkinism

    Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.

    As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news—except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.

    It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week—not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.
    …
    Uncut conversations were eye-opening; it was astonishing how often our esteemed guests hemmed and hawed and got basic facts embarrassingly wrong. And how many came off batshit crazy: one, later an anchor on MSNBC, speculated that Captain Sully’s Miracle on the Hudson—visible from our west side offices—had been God blessing the Obamas.

    Drafting the Moyers Blog and promotional listings, I’d sit in with producers and video editors to consult on coalescing broadcasts. They were like wizards, casting away awkwardness and errors to sculpt artful vignettes of the most compelling bits of conversations that often stretched well over an hour or more.

    So many of the most rousing clips came from when guests were at their most factually inaccurate, and editors deftly dipped in and out to pull and seamlessly reassemble the very best parts. It was wondrous alchemy, and a privilege to work with super-talented creatives, but the reality of our academic pundits remained the same.

    Viewers, or at least those motivated enough to weigh in, frequently testified that their social-democratic faith had been wavering until they’d seen whichever inspiring interview affirming what they’d always believed. I always found that frustrating, wondering if they might have reacted more thoughtfully to the real deal than the perfected package that aired.

    By no means were Bill Moyers and team operating with any less than the highest of ethics or best of intentions—from their perspective, we were clarifying what our distinguished guests were truly saying. The problem was that the intellectual scene our show channeled was dwindling, but my colleagues so badly wanted things to be better that it was all too easy to paper over the accelerating collapse of discourse.
    …
    Even more than The West Wing, Moyers programming shaped my whole sense of humanistic possibility, of the crackling potential when nuanced thinkers can empathetically come together.

    Years of disillusioning experience have forced me to question if that too was largely a fantasy. Not quite, I don’t believe—not so long ago, the range of respectable discourse was broader, attention spans longer, and technology limited for seamless video editing. Before this age of personalized partisan silos, opposing advocates had to jostle for the same common ground.

    Bill Moyers’ genius lay in holding up a mirror to the best of that back and forth, and giving the aspirational public chance to feel involved. But that was a time and place now passed, like it or not, and the true inheritors of his tradition are no longer tenured professors and establishment journalists—these days selected specifically for emptiness—but the freewheeling multiverse of online alternatives.

    Are some of them kooks? Sure, but few have done half as much to discredit themselves as top institutions abandoning standards for easier melodramas ala Aaron Sorkin. I miss the comforting era of credible authorities as much as anyone, tried to devote my career to it, but ultimately real progressives must adapt to changing circumstances.

    Powerful stuff.
    Of course, tv pundits on the Right do exactly the same thing — it is very rare to find an unedited interview or uncut video — but the media only complains when Tucker Carlson does it.

    I suspect Ivy Exile can be easily identified by his colleagues, and we wouldn’t know him by name. Or maybe we would: he went on to teach at the Columbia Journalism School; maybe he had a hand in the recent mea-not-really-culpa about the execrable status of main stream journalism.

    Refresher:
    https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1620433389932417024?cxt=HHwWgMDU0aXl9_wsAAAA
    “The 4-part series just published by the Columbia Journalism Review — written by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Jeff Gerth, for decades with the NYT — is absolutely devastating on how casually, frequently, recklessly and eagerly the press lied on Russiagate.”

34. ….prosecutors have positioned Chansley as emblematic of a barbaric crowd.

    And Judge Lamberth has wholly subscribed to this myth. He therefore associates Chansley’s bizarre getup with violence he did not commit, and by brute symbolism justifies a long solitary confinement PLUS an extended jail sentence. What’s missing here?

    Justice, that’s what. It’s immoral to jail someone simply for having black skin near a crime scene, and no less immoral to severely punish a costume freak for strolling around while others commit violence.

35. More introspection from Ivy Exile:
    https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/intro-class-treason

    However painful to admit, progressive discourse has long since curdled into petty clickbait, big business of scapegoating and self-congratulation over empathy or intellectual honesty. Self-anointed wonks contrive niche-pleasing infotainment at the incestuous nexus of elite journalism, academia, nonprofits and government, competing for funding and status.

    Alas, crafting workable policy for a vast, diverse nation is hard—ground out only excruciatingly to correct for unintended consequences and inconvenient truths. We’re attempting to uplift hundreds of millions of human beings, after all, daunting even before considering the corruption of Washington, Wall Street, Beijing, et al.

    Yet few bother with real questions or argument anymore; blaming the other is more fun and profitable. Attention spans shrunken from pandering and algorithms, progressives have sunk to slogans and platitudes. The nuance once at the heart of our work, and indispensable for making programs actually operate, is all but gone.

    The right’s deteriorated too, but that’s meager consolation. The left’s crippled its capacity for adult conversations to craft practical policy for the country—let alone fulfill fantasies of global governance.

    That said, how to be constructive? Step one is reviving the Studs Terkel/Bill Moyers approach, hearing an array of perspectives instead of telling people what to think. For all our rhetoric about diversity, the range of upscale opinion has narrowed into oblivion.

    Thus The Ivy Exile, applying what I’ve learned selling the system to sharing my experience of it—that our elite institutions no longer deserve their historic prestige. Whatever journalism, academia, and progressivism once meant is ancient history now, superseded by a glib authoritarianism. Only by popping that balloon can we proceed in the real public interest, more likely by building new institutions than salvaging ruins of the old.

    As Sarah Hoyt might say, “Oh my sweet summer child!”

    How has Ivy Exile missed the takeover of Progressives / Democrats by the hard Left, who most certainly are NOT interested in “crafting workable policy for a vast, diverse nation ” or “making programs actually operate” or proceeding “in the real public interest” — laudable goals for conservatives and liberals, such as are still in existence.

    And this is supposed to be one of the Conspiracies of the Alt-Right: proceeding “more likely by building new institutions than salvaging ruins of the old.”

    I would like to see what he — and Taibbi, Greenwald, and Weiss — would do with the J6 videos.

36. Bonus research for Trivial Pursuits:
    https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fc.tenor.com%2FDNoUNJ0a3PsAAAAC%2Fsummer-child-my-sweet-summer-child.gif&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=766763491c4f7236c4b3cc59b449c3526cac943402d0a2db65c8ffaa394316d3&ipo=images

    https://thequestingfeast.com/the-origin-of-sweet-summer-child/

    Please hear this in my very best “Church Lady” voice. “Oh, my sweet summer child, Game of Thrones did NOT coin ‘sweet summer child.’ GOT may have popularized it, but GOT did NOT create it.”

    “Sweet summer child” already was old when my grandmother used it in the 1960s.
    …
    In that oh-so-Victorian poetry, the “sweet summer child” can refer to anything tender and summery—from a gentle breeze to an actual child.

    So, how did such a tender sweet phrase develop its stinging backhand? Well, for that, let’s turn to my Nana. Born in 1900 in St. Louis, Missouri (properly pronounced “Muzurah,” I have been informed), she moved to Hawai?i as a young bride. When she packed her bags for the islands, a number of colloquialisms jumped in before she could get the latches fastened.

    If you know anything about the ladies of that time and place, you know that they were strong proponents of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Instead, they became masters of making a cut while using the nicest possible words. And, the same phrase can have many different meanings, depending on the skill with which it is deployed.

    “Why, bless your heart” can mean anything from “thank you, that was so sweet of you,” to “how on earth did you come up with THAT?”

    And so, “Oh, my sweet summer child” could be anything from a simple comment on the beauty and grace of a small child playing in the summer sun to a verbal head shake at unfathomable naïveté. It can refer to a very young child born in summer, a person with a summery disposition, or a person who has little to no experience of “winter:” hardship, trials, and tribulations, or just someone who is clueless as to anything that has happened before they came on the scene.

    In the 60s and 70s, I frequently heard it in response to some bit of pre-teen or teen angst I expressed in my youthful confidence that in under two decades I had managed to acquire far more wisdom than had the totality of adults of my acquaintance. “You really think no one else has thought of that? Oh, my sweet summer child.”

    So in honor of Summer Children everywhere, here is a recipe for Mama’s Lemon Icebox Cake. No, not my Mama’s Lemon Icebox Cake. HER Mama’s lemon Icebox Cake. It’s good. Try it. But first, make the lemon curd.

37. @ Nonapod > “One of the questions that seems to have gotten lost is why the heck were the capital police behaving the way they were that day? They were letting people in, and clearly escorting and assisting the hapless Q Shaman (and likely others). But why?”

    I’m glad you asked that question.
    I was free-wheeling in my comments last night, and suddenly saw how some of the odd happenings in the Capitol might be connected — as if I were Aaron Sorkin writing an episode of West Wing!

    My speculations might be dashed by an accurate timeline, but here’s my “dots” to be connected, based mostly on Carlson’s two shows Monday & Tuesday.

    (1) When the video of the Q-Shaman, Mr. Chansley, begins, Tucker remarks that no one knows how he actually got into the building — which surprised me, because that should have been shown somewhere in the 42000 hours. He didn’t seem to be in the clips that we saw Monday.
    We do know that a large number of protesters entered because the cops opened the doors on one side of the building.
    So: was he allowed in by the Capitol Police themselves, and that video either removed or never made? (Tucker’s team might have just missed it, but Chansley was easy to spot.)

    (2) The police unquestionably escorted him around the building — unaccompanied by other protesters, and tried to open one of the doors, which was locked. It was blurred out in the video: Tucker mentioned specifically that this was the only change the cops made when they vetted his material.
    Why don’t they want us to know which door this was?
    So: were they being instructed to take him to the Senate Chamber (which they eventually did), and were surprised they couldn’t get in?

    (3) When the police finally open another door and let the Shaman go into the Senate chamber, it’s empty.
    That was an accident.
    Because, as we learned Tuesday from the interview of the police veteran — suspended (fired?) for his actions that day — he made several attempts to get permission to evacuate the Senators without getting any response and finally herded them out on his own initiative.

    So: was the lack of response from his bosses just incompetence (of which there were astounding examples elsewhere), or did the Manipulators (because there clearly was a group, headed by Pelosi, working to cause maximum pain for Trump and Republicans) intend for the Senators to still be there when the “violent protesters” (represented by the very distinctive Q-Shaman) entered the chamber to “obstruct Senate proceedings.”

    In which case, they couldn’t think of a good way to tell the cop to just leave the Senators where they were (shelter in place?), when he clearly recognized that IF the protesters were the armed insurrectionists of the narrative, he had a duty to remove the legislators from danger.

    So: they just kept quiet, watched their plan crumble, and still charged Chansley with the obstruction that he DIDN’T commit (contra McCarthy).

    Change my mind.

38. AesopFan,

    You left out the part where the head of the Capitol Police, the woman leading the non-response, was given a very plum, very high paying job in Nancy Pelosi’s district shortly after said events.

39. Change my mind.

    I don’t want to and I couldn’t anyway ithout more actual facts.

    But I guess I could play devil’s advocate. It seems to me if this was a situation where Nancy Pelosi in conjuction with various lofty members of our beloved FBI as wall as other Deep State apparatchiks was setting a trap for Trump and his supporters, such a scheme would require the unquestioning compliance of a fair number of capital police officers. If a bunch of cops are told to stand down and let people in, they naturally might have questions as to why.

    The larger the number of people in a conspiracy there is the greater the chance that it will be revealed sooner or later. People talk, brag, reveal stuff to loved ones, blather when they’re in their cups ect. And of course if a proper investigation is ever conducted (which won’t happen as long as this regime is in charge obviously) people will talk too. So if this is really what was going on, the truth will come out eventually.

40. From COVID’s start to the Jan 6 committee, and the solitary confinement of those arrested for over one year for trespassing the Capitol, it is clear to me the Democratic Party is intent on authoritarian rule forever. Next they will, if given the chance, set up gulags.

    I read somewhere, shortly after Jan. 6, the Capitol Police report ONLY to the House Speaker. For most of the time at issue, that would have been Pelosi. McCarthy, get on the right side!

41. “(1) When the video of the Q-Shaman, Mr. Chansley, begins, Tucker remarks that no one knows how he actually got into the building — which surprised me, because that should have been shown somewhere in the 42000 hours. He didn’t seem to be in the clips that we saw Monday.”

    I wondered about this as well, and went looking for video of when Jacob Chansley entered the building. What I found is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbxng-nIMu0.

    Whether or not this is when he FIRST entered, I have no idea.

42. I can anticipate, from a couple of people I know, responses to this outrage being “I DON’T CARE! IT WAS A VIOLENT INSURRECTION AND WHATEVER THEY GET THEY DESERVE!”

    Not sure, in terms of future relationships, if I should point out they’ve just forfeited any moral claim to just treatment under the law if the law doesn’t like them.

43. David Foster on March 9, 2023 at 8:41 am said:
    Mike K…”It looks like Fox News has caved to threats from both parties and shut down Tucker Carlson’s showing of the videos. We’ll see what happens to night.”

    I didn’t see anything about this with a quick search. Where did you hear it?

    That was pure editorial by me after watching his second night. On Wednesday he did show more video about the guy in the horns, Chansley. That guy has a history, according to the lawyer, of mental illness and he sure looked like it that day.

    The other factor is that no Republican or Trump voter will ever get a fair trial in DC. That’s been the case for years. Look at the cases of Scooter Libby and Geoff Craig.

    Libby was clearly innocent. I actually watched Meet the Press when Tim Russert let the story out.

    There was also gross misbehavior by Fitzgerald.

    From the moment he took over the FBI leak investigation in December 2003, he knew that Mr. Armitage was the leaker but declined to prosecute him, Mr. Rove or Mr. Harlow because the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s identity wasn’t a crime and didn’t compromise national security.

    Having failed to find any underlying crime, Mr. Fitzgerald nonetheless pressed on for someone to prosecute, eventually focusing on Mr. Libby, whose trial became a contest of recollections. The excruciatingly inconsequential question on which his conviction turned was whether, as Mr. Libby recalled, he was surprised to hear NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert ask him about Ms. Plame in a phone call on July 10 or 11, 2003.

    They are all crooks.

44. @ Mike K > “It looks like Fox News has caved to threats from both parties and shut down Tucker Carlson’s showing of the videos. We’ll see what happens to night.”

    It doesn’t look to me that Tucker pulled any punches last night (3/8).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPg9N_HiLMg

    He didn’t air anything new, granted, but IMO that was because of two things:

    (1) He’s working on the fly addressing the reactions to the Monday & Tuesday shows; although I suspect he had a provisional script in the can ready to go, because Schumer and McConnell are predictable. Thus he reiterated, again, that the Democrats in and out of the J6 hearings lied, repeatedly, about Chansley, and about the police allegedly “killed” by the violence at the Capitol — which Tucker did not diminish, and which he does not dispute — when in fact they were not.

    (2) He’s hammering the Chansley case because it’s an obvious violation of the Shaman’s constitutional civil right to a fair trial, and a blatant violation of the Brady Act.

    The J6 Committee narrative is that the Shaman was the “flag carrier” of the insurrectionists, and “put himself at the center” of the riot.
    If Tucker can show that was NOT the case — and the tapes are pretty clear about it — then he’s put the slag heap of the left at the tipping point.

    Historically, Americans react strongly to unfairness (the left’s sham “equity” trades on that), and while there is no hope of changing the die-hard partisans, the fair-minded but misled public can be convinced that the agenda of the Democrats has very little to do with saving democracy, or anything other than their own power & perks.

45. @ Rufus, Nonapod, & Gwynmir — all good points.
    I had another question about Chansley in the chambers:
    he is alone with all the cops escorting him, but then Tucker’s videos cut to the inside of the Senate room and it’s full of other protesters — where did they come from and when? Did they get escorted in also? Are they who the CPD referred to when whining that they had to “de-escalate” so the mob wouldn’t get violent — all patently false applied to Chansley himself, and most of the people in the building.

    IMO, any cop could have stood in a doorway or hall entrance and requested they not enter, and the grannies and tourists would have obeyed. The agitators, maybe not, but they weren’t part of the “Chansley crowd” that we saw on Tucker’s clips

    We actually don’t know if there were more violent, or more peaceful, people, because no one’s counted up the incidents yet.

46. AesopFan:

    I noticed that Andrew McCarthy went off the rails when January 6th happened. He still is rational on many other topics, but never has been rational on that one.

47. The video that gwynmir linked shows Chansley going through the building doors with a large crowd, next to the window that IS being violently broken — which looks like the clip Tucker showed from the other direction.

    “2021 Judge releases new video of ‘QAnon Shaman’ Jacob Chansley during Capitol riot – Exhibit 2”

    I’m not sure that the people kicking the door out (if it was that door) and the window in were charged or not; they were certainly identified by DOJ with their technology, as described in some of my other comments last night.

    Then he disappears from frames of the crowd, which is rowdy but not violent, until a few minutes later when he is shown going up the stairs with them.
    NOT leading them, as the Democrats repeatedly claimed.

    So, when did he get separated from the rest of the mob?

48. There are comments on the old video from the beginning up to this week.

    @petersmithyy4556
    1 year ago
    Yeah sure a couple of the people that broke a window. Woohoo. Why most of the time everyone was pretty much doing nothing lol walking within the Velvet ropes

    @braden2345
    10 months ago
    0:51 he stops the guy from stealing candy lol

    @grandmaismyname1597
    1 day ago
    New videos of J6 shows Jacob Chansley was not violent during the protest. All this video shows is that he was surrounded by many other protesters who were very loud.

49. I cherry-picked those, of course.

50. Yogananda (shirley) was the intelligence chief, sarc before she replaced chief sund

51. …the truth will come out eventually.

    Nonapod:

    Perhaps. I don’t consider it a sure thing.

    What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?

    We know he disappeared, we strongly suspect he was murdered and his body disposed of, there are various stories to that effect. but whatever the truth is, it hasn’t come out.

    Then there’s Judge Crater, who became a running joke in “Mad” magazine for his famous disappearance which remains a mystery.

    I think people can keep secrets, though not always.

52. We know he disappeared, we strongly suspect he was murdered and his body disposed of, there are various stories to that effect. but whatever the truth is, it hasn’t come out.
    ==
    Little question he was murdered. The question has always been who did what. There is evidence against Anthony Giacalone and ‘Chuckie O’Brien’. Giacalone died in 2001 and O’Brien in 2020.
    ==
    Then there’s Judge Crater, who became a running joke in “Mad” magazine for his famous disappearance which remains a mystery.
    ==
    Scant doubt he was murdered as well. There is reason to believe from his wife’s account he was involved in some sort of business dispute, but she did not know what it was. The two people he had dinner with the night he disappeared said in one account to the authorities that he left in a cab and in another account that they took a cab and he left the restaurant on foot. He and his clerk did office work that day, but nothing in the clerk’s account of what they were doing was illuminating, though it did sound odd. There were two police searches of his apartment, the second of which found some valuables not found in the first search (cash and securities, IIRC); what that says about his wife’s activities who can say. He was a recent addition to the trial bench in Manhattan. The other judges would have known or surmised something about the machinations which got him his judicial berth, but they likely couldn’t say much about that without tainting themselves.

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