Julie Kelly on the Anniversary of January 6

BUCK: We’ve got Julie Kelly joining us, senior writer at American Greatness. Her latest piece, which is posted at ClayAndBuck.com: “January 6: A Day That Will Live in Alchemy.” Julie, appreciate you joining us. First off, you know, what are you thinking about today as you’re going to be hearing, I’m sure a lot of Democrats memorializing, commemorating this anniversary?

KELLY: Yes, well, Happy Fedsurrection Day to both of you.

BUCK: (laughing)

KELLY: Thank you for having me on. You know, look, their narrative is quickly crumbling and I think they know that. That’s why they’re so desperate to lie about what happened and give out these presidential awards, which Joe Biden is doing today. Because not only is the narrative crumbling — you know, thanks to some reporting and exposing the truth, but also the weight of their own evidence, which is contained in their January 6th final report, the committee, and also some of these transcripts that are being released that completely contradict what these people have been saying for two years, which is that everyone was caught off guard, that Donald Trump incited this quote-unquote, “insurrection” after his speech on January 6, that no one had intelligence, that no one was preparing for this. This all is a lie, and it’s interesting because it’s being exposed as away from their own body of evidence.

CLAY: Julie, you had a tweet thread up that got me really fired up. There are around — and you would probably know better than me — 900-some-odd defendants so far for January 6. You said that the Department of Justice has made it be known that they plan on charging up to a thousand more people with violations for January 6th and then that part of the impetus for that is that they now have billions of more dollars in the Department of Justice to spend, which many Republicans signed off on. Tell us what the latest is on how many more defendants there could be and what the Department of Justice is signaling about their intentions going forward.

KELLY: Sure. So last year, Matthew Graves — who is the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, a Biden appointee, and they are handling every January 6th case. He indicated that his office thinks that there are up to 2,000 Trump supporters, January 6 protesters who broke the law that day. So, they are going to accelerate their criminal investigation. This week, the head of the Washington, D.C., FBI field office said in a statement commemorating January 6 that their FBI investigation would go on for years, and they are arresting people nearly every week.

I write about in my piece you talked about today a couple from Washington who was under FBI investigation for 14 months. They interrogated coworkers. Agents looked at hours of surveillance video and bodycam footage. They even got a search warrant on this couple’s cell phone devices to confirm they were inside the building on January 6. And what are they ultimately charged with? Four low-level misdemeanors. No violent charges, no weapon charges, no attacking police. Four misdemeanors. This is what they are going to continue to do throughout 2023 as they continue to expand the caseload, and this is all to support the idea that Trump supporters are basically domestic terrorists.

CLAY: So, Julie, building off of that question, the vast majority, I would imagine, of people who’ve been arrested for January 6-related offenses have been arrested for taking their own photos, and many of them posting them on social media as a part of that process. Right? Can you ever remember more people being charged with crimes that they documented themselves? In other words, if you really thought you were doing something — for everybody out there listening and I’m curious, you, too, Julie. If you really thought you were committing a crime. Very few times do people record themselves or Photoshop themselves — or photograph themselves, I should say — committing a crime. That’s where most of these charges are coming from, which to me is representative of how nonviolent most of the people being charged with crimes are.

KELLY: That’s such a great point. Yes, of course. You would never record yourself robbing a bank or doing anything legitimately illegal. You certainly wouldn’t do it while there’s police officers standing right there doing nothing to stop you from committing that crime. But, of course, that’s the case for hundreds of American citizens who are ensnared in this really destructive retaliatory investigation and prosecution by the Department of Justice. The couple I write about today walked in the Capitol Building through an open door. They walked around some hallways.

The women chatted with a Capitol Police officer. The man shared with a D.C. police officer. They weren’t arrested. They weren’t told to leave the building. Eventually, police led them to another door where they exited. They didn’t commit any violent crime and yet here they are under 14 months of FBI investigation before presumably their home was raided by FBI agents and then they’re hauled off to court, accused of four misdemeanors but in the process, destroying their lives because the regime has successfully branded these people insurrectionists, traitors and terrorists.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Julie Kelly. Her book is January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right. Julie, what is this status…? Because you’ve been one of the people doing the most, I think, out there to get the word out about what’s happening to J6 defendants who have been held in incredibly harsh conditions and, in many cases, for nonviolent crimes. What is the status of J6 defendants in what I believe you’ve called before the D.C. Gulag system that they’ve been held in, including in solitary confinement?

KELLY: Well, the situation is a little more fluid than it was a year ago when we first started reporting on it — or really, I guess now almost two years — because you have people who have been sentenced or agreed to plea deals and they are then transferred to a permanent prison outside of the D.C. Gulag. At the same time, you have defendants who have been held under pretrial detention who are now being moved to the D.C. Gulag because every trial is taking place in Washington, D.C.

My guess, Clay and Buck, is that there are roughly 100 people behind bars right now, either under pretrial detention orders, which means they’ve been denied bail or bond, or because they have been sentenced for either a plea deal or conviction by a judge or a jury. And so this is the sort of caseload, though, the DOJ wants to expand, right? They want more people in prison. They want more people in the D.C. Gulag. They are political prisoners because we’ve never seen this happen before in the United States.

CLAY: Julie, do we get the sense that Republicans eventually…? By the way, 12 people have flipped towards McCarthy out of the 20; so, it’s going to be very close in this 12th the vote as to whether or not he’s going to be the speaker. Maybe he’s not going to get there, but it seems like he’s going to be the speaker eventually. When Republicans take back the House — obviously, the Senate not going to happen, but — do you get the sense now that we’re through the midterm election that some Republicans may start to take note of what’s happening to the January 6 defendants, or do you think many Republicans are still going to just turn their back on these people and pretend that these abuses of Department of Justice power are not happening?

KELLY: I think many will continue to turn their backs, and that includes Kevin McCarthy. And one reason why is because they bought into the insurrection narrative early on. You will recall the Kevin McCarthy calls it an “insurrection” from the House floor, and he said Donald Trump is partially to blame. Well, now that we know what we thought we saw on January 6 is not actually the truth, but there was a lot of operations and machinations behind the scenes for months before what happened that day, they have too much bias. So they’re not going to come back now and say, “Oh, this looked like mostly an inside job and we’re going to figure out what happened.”

I was encouraged, though, by House Republican report that was authored by Jim Jordan and Jim Banks and a few others that looked at the security — I believe intentional security — failures on January 6th. They got some interesting records, including that of Paul Irving, who was the House Sergeant at Arms responsible for securing the Capitol. I’m hoping, though, that that report is a start. Instead of, “Well, here. We looked at it and now we’re done examining January 6.” That can’t be because we know there’s so much more to find out, so many unanswered questions. And the people who are innocent Americans who are having their lives destroyed by this criminal prosecution, they deserve most of all to find out what the government was doing, what it was responsible for, so they can clear their names and get the actual truth out.

BUCK: Julie, what is your opinion of the Ray Epps controversy, the Ray Epps situation?

KELLY: I just think it’s fascinating to read his transcript and see how people like Adam Kinzinger basically act as his defense attorney, you know, asking these leading questions where he could sort of claim his innocence, which, of course, you know, as far as we know, he is innocent. It doesn’t, he says numerous times he was not working for a federal agency. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t working for some other interest group. But what’s interesting to me is two things:

The text that he sent to his family that said he helped orchestrate what happened, which is the same sort of text or message that’s been used as evidence against January 6ers. But also, it looks like he was on restricted grounds for at least an hour, not to mention the fact that he was involved in the first physical breach of the exterior perimeter of Capitol grounds. But then he was on technically restricted grounds for over an hour. Now, there are several people who didn’t go inside the building who face criminal charges for being on restricted grounds. So it’s just unclear why Ray Epps not only has been defended by January 6 propagandists, but remains uncharged to this day.

CLAY: Last question for you, Julie. You’ve been pretty adamant that you believe Donald Trump is going to be charged in relation to these investigations. What do you think the time frame on that would be? Yeah, because I was having an interesting conversation recently where my fear — and I’m curious whether you would agree with this and Buck and I have talked about this some — is that instead of trying to knock Donald Trump out of the running for the Republican nomination, that the calculus is actually to charge him closer to the primary season and count on Republicans rallying around him and then getting him the nomination. In other words, I don’t think that Democrats want to knock Donald Trump out of contention for the presidency. I think they want Joe Biden to run against Trump again because they think that they will beat him again. And if that were true, then the timing to indict him would actually be like, you know, August or September of this year if they were going to indict him. What do you think and what do you expect?

KELLY: I think that’s such an interesting angle. It’s honestly not one I’ve thought about until you guys brought it up, I think, during our last interview. But it makes a lot of sense. So the idea that they don’t want Donald Trump to run, you know, they say insurrection and he is disqualified because he was involved in this insurrection, means that very well could be that they are signaling something other than what they really want.

CLAY: Yeah, and the reason why I mean, that, Julie, is they got involved in every primary that they could in 2022 to pick people who had defended Trump because they thought they were weaker candidates. I think they’re trying to cut down Trump to make him a weaker candidate, but they actually want him as the nominee.

KELLY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And to your point, then the indictment will probably be, you know, at summertime or after summer. I actually thought it would be happening. I thought it already would have happened by now. But I think the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the classified documents investigation, now the appointment of a special counsel has just intentionally delayed what I think is the inevitable.

BUCK: Julie Kelly of American Greatness. Julie, thanks for being with us.

KELLY: Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend.