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June 19, 2021

There's more information about the FBI and its role in January 6

By Andrea Widburg

On Tuesday, Revolver and Tucker Carlson made a stunning claim: they argued that the FBI's charging papers against the people they arrested for entering the Capitol on January 6 (almost all of whom are still in solitary confinement) reveal that the FBI may well have been the ones encouraging people to engage in the activity the Democrats now claim was an "insurrection."  Having an "insurrection" now justifies A.G. Merrick Garland's forming an anti-extremist task force that targets people who doubt the November election or think the federal government is too big.  There's been legitimate pushback against this narrative, but Tucker has more information that still makes it possible that January 6 was indeed an FBI set-up.

For the background to this post, you can read my post from June 16, or, if you have the time, I urge you to watch Tucker's monologue:

The pushback came from one of RedState's excellent writers, a person who writes under the name "shipwreckedcrew."  He's a former prosecutor (which gives him credibility), and he contends that both the Revolver and Tucker misunderstood the FBI's documents.  Instead, he says the presence of unindicted co-conspirators can mean several things, none of which puts the FBI in a bad light:

Having written between 500 and 600 indictments, I'll say this:  You call someone an "unindicted co-conspirator" in an indictment when 1) you're not sure of their true identity; 2) they are not yet under arrest, you're not certain where they are, and you think they might flee if they see their name in an indictment; 3) they are cooperating; 4) you have charged them in a different case with other defendants for tactical reasons — you can't name them in two cases for the same conduct; 5) you are not sure as to that specific person that you will have sufficient admissible evidence to convict them at trial when you go to the grand jury; 6) the person is not an actual conspirator because they didn't know what crime was being conspired about by the others — they only knew something illegal might be happening soon.

This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Mark Wauck, a former FBI agent, agrees with shipwreckedcrew that both Tucker and the Revolver misunderstood the concept of unindicted co-conspirators.  By definition, they cannot be agents and informants.  That is, if an agent or informant is working against a conspiracy, he can't be a co-conspirator, unindicted or otherwise.  However, Wauck throws in some other information that's important:

That, of course, is how it's supposed to work. However, UC agents and informants have been known to go overboard and — contrary to instructions — actually cross the line into advancing the conspiracy in ways that would not have occurred but for their actions. That type of conduct will get the case dismissed. This can get factually very complicated, so I'll leave it at that.

And that's where Glenn Greenwald and Tucker come in again.  Glenn Greenwald has a long, detailed Substack post detailing the innumerable times the FBI has crossed the line from getting close to criminals to engaging in criminal activity.  It's too long and complicated to summarize but I strongly suggest that you read the whole thing.  (Years ago, an FBI agent told me how they caught a terrorist by working with him to plan a bomb attack, so I don't doubt Greenwald's veracity.)

Tucker, meanwhile, did not address whether he and the Revolver misunderstood the charging documents.  Instead, in his Friday monologue, he followed the same thread Greenwald did, providing information about FBI agents and informants encouraging people to commit crimes and then arresting them even when they hadn't acted on the FBI's encouragement.  He also discussed at least one case (the Garland, Texas shooting) in which the FBI agent did everything short of firing a gun.  When the FBI does this type of thing, it isn't police work or due process; it's police state activity.

From there, it was easy for Tucker to move to the issue of the Merrick Garland "extremist" task force, which defines as a dangerous extremist anyone who opposes Biden, whether that means worrying about the veracity of the November election or being concerned about the federal government's expansive size and reach.  Again, I encourage you to watch and learn.  Information, after all, is power.

Image: Twitter screen grab.

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