Select Secrets

Today, I do something I haven’t done this entire January 6 journey: I write a blog without hyperlink/footnote and that is solely my opinion. The message I want to get across is that January 6 has become an event of “select secrets.”

Start with the “Select Committee” on January 6. According to various news reports, more than 250 witnesses have been “interviewed” (original term was “deposed”) and countless documents have been submitted. Who knows even if that top line is accurate? The entirety of the work of the Select Committee is select secrets. It began with a July day of publicly-broadcast interviews of four officers, and then it deep-sixed itself.

Oh, the “Select Committee” selectively releases “subpoenas” (that read more like the first draft of letters home by teenagers). And it makes a show of “considering contempt.” But the Select Committee is as secret as its published telephone number in that no calls from this analyst have ever been answered during regular business hours and no voicemail has been returned. (Could that be because my voicemail wants to know how to access testimony?)

Then there are the plea deals. As of December 1, more than 700 persons have been charged with federal crimes by the US DOJ and more than 100 persons have accepted plea deals. “Plea deals” in this situation of mass arrests is an intentional ploy by DOJ to not go to trial. To not even have to complete discovery. Definitely to not fulfill its most basic responsibility as prosecutors to quickly provide all exculpatory materials (also known as “Brady materials”). When you take a plea, the case ends in its tracks and so does the public record of the proceeding.

To add to the crazy, there are multiple, multiple cases in nothing more than extensions with zero advance in the litigation. When I sensed this started, I reached the decision to start calendaring cases, as I do when I represent parties. In several cases, I have also attempted to contact defense counsel, courtroom deputies, and even judge’s staff when the public case docket didn’t properly reflect that a status conference wasn’t happening. Crickets. Only one attorney responded, and it was to push my question to his co-counsel, who then didn’t respond. In the instance of the one administrative assistant who did answer the telephone, she promised to get back to me the same day. Guess what happened?

Worse, those taking plea deals are not being sentenced. Several cases I am tracking are repeatedly pushing out on consent of DOJ plus defense counsel by leaps of months. One case is so screwed up that the court ordered a status update, neither counsel filed any documents, and the court didn’t issue any sanctions or even any timely directive. Weeks after the deadline, the court issued another deadline. Eventually a single piece of paper was filed by DOJ and it was a consent to another extension.

I have been working on the events of January 6 since the outbreak of the events that day, and I have done so on a more than full time basis. I’m working independently. I’m investing my own money into book publishing, travel to multiple venues from New York to South Carolina, advertising and marketing materials, paper and postage, etc. Kevin and I constantly discuss continuing the work (in spite of my book not hitting the New York Times best-seller list – LOL) because no one else who we can identify in the space that I’m in.

What I do is data gathering, including masses of litigation collection and review, source vetting, news shredding, and dot-connecting, all in the context of the last twenty years of post-9/11 civil and criminal rights destruction.

What you are looking at during this stage of the events post-January 6 is exactly what happened post-9/11. FBI, not CIA. US courts, instead of international tribunals. US prisons, instead of black sites and Guantanamo Bay. And a media once again so stupid as to treat government press releases and selected leaks as “news” and “newsworthy” without fact-checking and without seeking out the other side of the story. Without so much as reading a defendant case file that is publicly-available through PACER. And I’m talking about everyone from Tucker Carlson of FOX News (who may be the worst offender of everyone) to Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post.

What’s happening right now – between the Select Committee and the US DOJ – is scarier to me than the pandemic, even considering Omicron. These secret proceedings reflect a systemic disregard for our civil and criminal rights and a willingness to inflict collateral damage. Forget whatever the “truth” may be about the 2020 elections. Twenty-plus election lawsuits failed in federal courts to get past failures of even the pleading requirements. We’re standing in the midst of a more destructive capability.

Getting at the DOJ and the FBI and the CIA for meaningful reform is a bigger subject than I can hit this morning before daybreak.

But, I think we are going to have to mount a frontal demand of the Select Committee to release all videos, transcripts, and documents. NOW.

It is impossible to participate in our critical role of public discourse if we are deprived of whatever raw information exists. (Bad enough we can’t conduct our own interviews and go through peoples’ filing cabinets (a/k/a phones).) If all materials generated by the federal government and others post-January 6 are not released, we cannot participate in the after-action or the go-forward. We are then converted into the Doctor Dolittle “Push-Me-Pull-Me.” We, then, are unable to properly form opinions on proposed legislation and candidates up for election. That is precisely the environment when bad things happen in Washington.

If this chapter completes itself in secret, the US becomes the USSR of old, where we substitute the word “Congress” for “TASA.” The term “history” will then be replaced by “state-sponsored fairytale.”

I am not suggesting the federal government has collapsed or that democracy is dead or that the zombie apocalypse is upon us. Keep your rounds in the box. We have an awe-inspiring Constitution and every opportunity to move the bow of this ship by working from within.

To do that, we have to come to terms not only with January 6, but also with post-9/11 intelligence agencies under the direction of four presidents, private contractors that were given immunity, and prisoners languishing without charges and trials. History, right now, is doing little more than repeating itself.

We either stand for what we claim to be defending or we do not. If we do, then the Select Committee must conduct its operations in the light of day. It’s 6:24 AM, here on the east coast of the US as I write this. I’m waiting for the first bird to sing.

Call (202) 225-7800 today. Demand the Select Committee immediately release all videos, transcripts, and documents.