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The January 6 commission expanded its fishing expedition still further last week with its request of phone records from President Trump’s former Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows.
The House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the Capitol has instructed telecom and social media companies in recent weeks to preserve records of Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The move positions the select committee on the doorstep of the Oval Office as it pursues a far-reaching inquiry into whether Trump and his White House helped plan or had advance knowledge of the insurrection perpetrated by the former president’s supporters.
House select committee investigators signaled their intention to examine potential involvement by the Trump White House and House Republicans when they made a series of records demands and records preservation requests for Trump officials connected to the Capitol attack.
In the records preservation requests, the select committee instructed 35 telecom and social media companies to avoid destroying communications logs of several hundred people, including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and 10 House Republicans, in case it later issues subpoenas.But the previously unreported inclusion of Meadows on the list of people whose records the select committee wants preserved suggests the panel will seek more information on the most senior aide in the Trump administration and could upturn every inch of the West Wing in its inquiry.
The former chief of staff is among several top White House officials who may hold the key to unlock inside information pertaining to the extent of the former president’s involvement in the Capitol attack that left five dead and nearly 140 injured.
With this request, the Commission added Meadows to the never-ending list of individuals the Commission wants to investigate in its increasingly desperate attempt to preserve its flailing collusion narrative—namely, that senior White House officials and/or Trump-aligned members of congress were somehow complicit in the events of January 6. The ever-expanding list already includes Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert and many others.
The commission, led by Bennie Thompson, a high-ranking Mississippi Democrat, has demonstrated no compunction over wielding its subpoena powers against hapless civilians with threadbare connections to January 6. In the past month, the commission has pursued a huge swath of innocent third parties with reckless abandon:
- The commission demanded highly sensitive network and user data from social media sites and forums such as Gab, Parler, 4chan, 8kun and TheDonald.win.
- All phone records concerning the time, location and duration of calls—including the content of texts—have been demanded from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.
- All communications and documents between White House staff and dozens of outside Republican influencers have been demanded. The level of obscurity of these contacts extends all the way down to gay rights activist Brandon Straka, InfoWars host Owen Shroyer and black MAGA rapper Bryson Gray.
But the Commission’s never-ending appetite for phone records of anyone remotely associated with 1/6 belies the fishiest and perhaps darkest aspect of this otherwise merely farcical fishing expedition.
That is, the Commission seems to have requested data from the communications devices of everyone who set foot in DC on January 6, except for Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oathkeepers, which is the largest militia group associated with the events of 1/6 . Stewart Rhodes looms so large over the Oath Keepers that he is said to effectively be the Oath Keepers. Given that the Oath Keepers are the most widely prosecuted organized militia group charged with carrying out a conspiracy to obstruct the Senate vote on January 6, the omission of Rhodes from the Commission’s fact-finding expedition is quite strange, to say the least.
Under normal circumstances, of course, we might chalk this up to standard congressional incompetence.
However, the commission’s seeming neglect of Rhodes must be considered in light of the fact that after more than eight months, the Feds have refused to indict Rhodes for a single charge related to his span of alleged activities leading up to, and on the day of, January 6. From our reporting on June 30th of this year:
The Justice Department argues that Stewart Rhodes both substantially organized and activated an imputed plan to use violence, on 1/6, in real-time, through a series of encrypted Signal messages beginning at 1:38 p.m., as Trump concluded his rally speech on the National Mall, and 62 minutes before Oath Keepers lieutenants allegedly formed a “military stack” to rush the Capitol doors.
These facts alone, as alleged, are more than legally sufficient to secure an indictment of Stewart Rhodes. We will walk you through the mountains of direct and circumstantial evidence built on top of these allegations, but readers must understand this: the only reason Stewart Rhodes is not in jail *right now* is because of a deliberate decision by the Justice Department to protect him.
And yet, while protecting Rhodes, the Justice Department has used Rhodes’s extraordinary breadth of January 6 activities to throw the book at his alleged underlings.
For example, while regime media and blue-check journalists (and Rhodes himself) have tried to justify Rhodes’s strange protection by the Justice Department on grounds that Rhodes never went in the Capitol building, this fails to take into account the basic fact that several of Rhodes’s indicted alleged lieutenants never went inside the Capitol either.
Somehow these underlings are being prosecuted on conspiracy charges, while Rhodes remains unscathed.
For example, 65 year old fully-disabled defendant Thomas Caldwell never went inside the Capitol. Yet, incredibly, the government argued in a public filing that Caldwell should have his bail denied on the grounds that he joined in “a plan to use force” activated by “Person One,” that is, Stewart Rhodes. The government began:
Evidence that the government will disclose to the defense this week—a Signal chat called “DC OP: Jan 6 21”—shows that individuals, including those alleged to have conspired with the defendant, were actively planning to use force and violence. The participants in this chat include: Person One, Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins, and regional Oath Keeper leaders from multiple states across the country. To date, there is no evidence that Caldwell participated in the chat, but the investigation is ongoing. The chat discusses members and affiliates of the Oath Keepers coming to Washington, D.C., for the events of January 5-6, 2021, to provide security to speakers and VIPs at the events.
Yes, you read that right. In order to establish Caldwell’s participation in a conspiracy to use force and violence, the government cites statements from a chat that Caldwell didn’t even belong to! But Person One, i.e., Stewart Rhodes, did belong to the chat in question. The government has incriminated Caldwell on the basis of other people’s statements—principally those of Rhodes. The government continued:
There is no discussion of forcibly entering the Capitol until January 6, 2021. However, there is talk about being prepared for violence. Person One warns the group, “DO NOT bring in anything that can get you arrested. Leave that outside DC.” He goes on to say, “We will have several well equipped QRFs outside DC. And there are many, many others, from other groups, who will be watching and waiting on the outside in case of worst case scenarios.” Person One also says, “Highly recommend a C or D cell flashlight if you have one. Collapsible Batons are a grey area in the law. I bring one. But I’m willing to take that risk because I love em. Good hard gloves, eye pro, helmet. In a pinch you can grab Mechanix gloves and a batters helmet from Walmart. Bring something to put on your noggin. Antifa likes brikes.”
Remember, these excerpts are not from an indictment of Person One (Rhodes)—rather, they are from a government document attempting to deny Rhodes’ alleged Oathkeepers underling Thomas Caldwell bail. The document continues to cite the statements and actions of Person One (Rhodes):
These messages echo the words of Person One in the call for action he posted to the Oath Keepers website on January 4, 2021, in which he stated: “It is CRITICAL that all patriots who can be in DC get to DC to stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup, through the massive vote fraud and related attacks on our Republic. We Oath Keepers are both honor-bound and eager to be there in strength to do our part,” including “prepar[ing] to do whatever must be done to honor our oaths[.]” (ECF No. 18 at 2.)
These statements and messages all show that the co-conspirators joined together to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote, and they were prepared to use violence, if necessary, to effect this purpose. It does not matter whether they planned to use this violence to support the president when he invoked the insurrection act or to attack the Capitol if the vice president allowed the certification to go forward—under either scenario, they were plotting to use violence to support the unlawful obstruction of a Congressional proceeding.
So far the document has leaned almost exclusively on Rhodes’ statements in a chat group Caldwell didn’t even belong to in order to link Caldwell to a conspiracy to use force and obstruct election certification on January 6. Person One is the star of the show here, and the government continues to use his statements to attempt to bury Caldwell:
The Signal chat referenced above shows that the group—which included at least two individuals alleged to have conspired with Caldwell—was activating a plan to use force on January 6. At approximately 1:38 p.m., Person One wrote, “All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough.” At 2:14 p.m., an individual leading the coordination of the security details run by the Oath Keepers on January 5-6 stated, “The have taken ground at the capital[.] We need to regroup any members who are not on mission.” Person One then reposted that message and instructed the group: “Come to South Side of Capitol on steps” and then sent a photograph showing the southeast side of the Capitol. At 2:41 p.m., Person One posted another photograph showing the southeast side of the Capitol with the caption, “South side of US Capitol. Patriots pounding on doors[.]” At approximately 2:40 p.m., the individuals in the “stack,” to include co-defendants Kelly and Connnie Meggs, Jessica Watkins, Graydon Young, Laura Steele, Donovan Crowl, and Sandra Parker, forcibly entered the Capitol through the Rotunda door in the center of the east side of the building. On the other side of the Capitol, at 2:48 p.m., Defendant Caldwell wrote to his Facebook contacts, “We are surging forward. Doors breached.”
Some might argue that Rhodes’ statements and actions are no big deal. There might be some validity to this claim in a world in which the Government and media alike weren’t acting as though 1/6 were the new 9/11. Given the media and government’s hyperbolic hysteria over 1/6, and given the associated indictments of all kinds of minor figures for trivial 1/6 related offenses—it is a big deal, or at least a big question, that the founder and head of the main “boogeyman” militia group associated with 1/6 remains unindicted. The Feds’ decision not to indict Rhodes is still more bizarre when one notes, as we have above, that the government is more than happy to cite Rhodes’ statements as constitutive of a criminal conspiracy on the basis of which to incriminate, indict, and deny bail to alleged Oathkeepers underlings.
Perhaps even more bizarre than the Feds’ protection of Rhodes from indictment is the fact that the FBI still does not appear to have searched Rhodes for evidence related to his own role in January 6. The search warrant for a single iPhone that Rhodes was served in May—cited by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times as evidence of an investigation into him—appears to be deeply misleading. According to statements made by Rhodes’ attorney Kellye SoRelle to Mother Jones, that warrant, issued four months after January 6, was for dirt on other people indicted over the day’s events. Not on Rhodes himself.
And for that matter, how do we account for the fact that the Feds haven’t bothered to search Rhodes beyond a single cell phone taken four months after January 6? The Feds’ lack of interest in Rhodes’ communications is downright remarkable in comparison to the aggressive treatment visited upon major and minor figures alike, no matter how remotely associated with 1/6.
If you will recall, the Feds raided Rudy Giuliani’s apartment and seized all electronics as part of a sham investigation into the mayor’s activities regarding Ukraine.
Federal investigators in Manhattan executed a search warrant Wednesday at Rudy Giuliani’s apartment as part of a probe into the former New York City mayor’s activities involving Ukraine, his attorney told NPR.
Robert Costello said the FBI conducted the raid at Giuliani’s apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at around 6 a.m. and seized electronic devices. He said the search warrants are connected to an investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act tied to Giuliani’s Ukraine-related work. [NPR]
Recently, yet another innocent MAGA couple accused of no crimes had their homes raided and electronics confiscated with a search warrant. On August 10, more than seven months after 1/6, 40 FBI agents raided a Georgia family’s home, held their 11-year-old daughter at gunpoint using laser sights, and seized ‘every electronic device,’ including cell phones, computers, and even the 11-year-old girl’s tablet.
The FBI’s reason? The couple had attended the ‘Stop the Steal’ protest on January 6, and even though they did not participate in any riot, they had been in “frequent communication” with a Georgia Three Percenter militia leader who was at a smaller protest at the Georgia State Capitol that day. Even though the couple were not involved in any illegal acts, and were not even members of the Three Percenter militia, their mere contact and association with an unindicted militia leader suspected of having “other people do his dirty work” was enough to have electronic and communications device in their house seized.
Such unnecessarily aggressive behavior on the part of the Feds is appalling. We do not wish this treatment on an 11-year-old girl, nor on Mr. Rhodes, nor anyone else for that matter. We cannot help but wonder, however, why the Feds seem more interested in the electronics of a random 11-year-old girl than in the communications of the founder and head of the militia group that features most prominently in the government and media’s boogeyman narrative of 1/6. We will address this issue of search warrants further in a forthcoming investigative report.
Is the fact that the Feds seem to want to indict everyone but Rhodes, and raid everyone else’s electronic devices except for Rhodes, connected to the fact that the January 6 commission now seems eager to seize communications from everyone in the MAGA universe but Rhodes?
Here, the “congressional incompetence” argument goes out the window. It’s as though the Commission is unaware of Rhodes. In fact, they are acutely aware.
Remarkably, Rhodes plays a central role in the theory of the case personally advanced by the head of the January 6 commission itself: the aforementioned Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss).
Five months before he was tapped as chairman of the Commission, Rep. Thompson filed a lawsuit in his personal capacity, with himself as lead plaintiff, against four parties: Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the Oath Keepers organization, and the Proud Boys organization. In his complaint, Thompson alleges an “Alley Oop” theory of January 6. According to this theory, Trump and his agents on the inside conspired with the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and agents on the outside to incite a crowd to attack the Capitol:
The insurrection at the Capitol was a direct, intended, and foreseeable result of the Defendants’ unlawful conspiracy. It was instigated according to a common plan that the Defendants pursued since the election held in November 2020, culminating in an assembly denominated as the “Save America” rally held at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, during which Defendants Trump and Giuliani incited a crowd of thousands to descend upon the Capitol in order to prevent or delay through the use of force the counting of Electoral College votes. As part of this unified plan to prevent the counting of Electoral College votes, Defendants Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, through their leadership, acted in concert to spearhead the assault on the Capitol while the angry mob that Defendants Trump and Giuliani incited descended on the Capitol. The carefully orchestrated series of events that unfolded at the Save America rally and the storming of the Capitol was no accident or coincidence. It was the intended and foreseeable culmination of a carefully coordinated campaign to interfere with the legal process required to confirm the tally of votes cast in the Electoral College.
The very first page of the Thompson v. Trump complaint has a big, fat “ATTN: Stewart Rhodes” on it, when targeting the Oath Keepers organization:
Yet now that the “Thompson“ in Thompson v. Trump is chairman of the January 6 commission—with total subpoena power to investigate Rhodes—suddenly “Attn: Stewart Rhodes” has given way to “pay no attention” at all.
Could it be that this is because Rhodes, if later discovered to have an undisclosed relationship with a Federal intelligence or law enforcement agency, would demolish Thompson’s entire “Alley Oop” theory, revealing the “slam dunk” to be orchestrated by the Feds themselves?
Thompson’s commission has even sought communications and records relating to random low-level Oath Keepers like Kenneth Harrelson. Yet they made no requests for communications or records on Harrelson’s boss in the Oath Keepers chain of command, Stewart Rhodes.
Ironically enough, Harrelson’s mother challenged Rhodes in July to explain why he mysteriously abandoned her son as the dust settled on criminal charges all around Rhodes’ lieutenants. Oddly, there seems to be greater scrutiny of Rhodes from friends and family of the Oath Keepers than there is from the FBI, the Justice Department, or the January 6 commission.
Rhodes’ communications would seem to be among the single most important and revealing missives in the entire country for members of the Commission to review. If Thompson is hellbent on proving his “Alley Oop” case, Rhodes couldn’t have been more clear that his men’s actions on January 6 were about “sending a message” to Trump.
According to the Justice Department’s indictment, the very night of January 6, Rhodes reassured his men that they had done the right thing, and they had “helped to send a message” by “entering their own Capitol.” At 7:41 p.m., three hours after the last protester left the Capitol, the Justice Department says Rhodes texted his exclusive Oath Keepers senior leadership chat:
We have one FINAL chance to get Trump to do his job and his duty. Patriots entering their own Capitol to send a message to the traitors is NOTHING compared to what’s coming if Trump doesn’t take decisive action right now. It helped to send that message to HIM. He was the most important audience today. I hope he got the message.
Rhodes’s own words in this single text message alone go well beyond admissions from any individuals pursued to date by the Commission. But the Commission is going after MAGA gay rights activists and YouTube rappers instead?
The Commission’s first hearing explicitly focused on the testimony of four Capitol Police and DC Metropolitan Police Officers. There is a serious ongoing investigation into whether, why and to what extent certain first-responding police officers appeared to coordinate with protesters. Last week, it was announced that at least six Capitol Police officers will face disciplinary action for complicity in the riots.
Yet Stewart Rhodes went on camera in a livestream two months ago and confessed to having armed police officers in DC who were secretly members of his Oath Keepers “Quick Response Force” for the January 6 operation:
How could the Commission hold a 3+ hour hearing on police response to January 6, allege complicity of Trump insiders with militia outsiders, and then stick their ostrich necks in the sand to avoid the chief militia leader saying he had cops on stand-by as a “lethal force of last resort”?
Enter the Reuters “FBI Leak” Bombshell
One could give Bennie Thompson and his Commission the benefit of the doubt and argue that perhaps they simply have not yet gotten around to demanding Rhodes’ communications and records. Just like the Justice Department hasn’t yet gotten around to indicting Rhodes and the FBI hasn’t yet gotten around to performing even a routine, basic check-the-box sweep of his personal and home electronics.
But chairman Thompson should have very good reason to be interested in Rhodes right now, after last month’s bombshell Reuters report.
According to Reuters, four sources close to the FBI’s investigation said that there was “no evidence that [President Trump] or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence” that happened that day:
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) – The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.
Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.
“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”
…
Senior lawmakers have been briefed in detail on the results of the FBI’s investigation so far and find them credible, a Democratic congressional source said
…
In public comments last month to the Democratic-led congressional committee formed to investigate the violence, police officers injured in the mayhem urged lawmakers to determine whether Trump helped instigate it. Some Democrats have said they want him to testify.But the FBI has so far found no evidence that he or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence, according to the four current and former law enforcement officials.
Reuters drew upon four FBI sources (albeit, anonymously) to tacitly undermine basically every aspect of the Bennie Thompson “Alley Oop” narrative. The single element of the “Oop” left intact was the FBI’s belief that “collusion” appeared to occur among certain elements of militias groups that day, such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys:
FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said…
Thus, one would think that chairman Thompson, were his commission truly focused on “truth” as we have been repeatedly told, would be laser-focused on Rhodes’s role more acutely than ever before.
Such a focus on Rhodes and other mysteriously unscathed “kingpins” in the militia conspiracy cases would at least partially assuage regime-aligned “disinformation” reporters on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the Reuters report. Such journalists have been pushing the militia coordination narrative for months, and went apoplectic over the FBI leak to Reuters suggesting that Trump and in his circle had no “collusion” role in 1/6 whatsoever.
For example, Alan Feuer, the New York Times January 6 beat reporter, sputtered about how the Reuters report couldn’t possibly be true. Alan nonetheless took solace in the Proud Boys indictment. The Proud Boys were coordinating to rile up “normies” and “let them loose”:
This is the full exchange–made before the Capitol attack–about a desire among the Proud Boys for the "normies" to wreak havoc on Jan. 6. pic.twitter.com/cU18G3g7t4
— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) August 20, 2021
Here’s a blow-up of that picture:
Lost on the hapless NYT reporter is that all of the people in his own yellow highlights—most notably, the mysterious Person-1 and Person-2 doing the much-ballyhooed “coordination” and incitement—are currently being protected by the Justice Department. There are no charges filed against these Proud Boys and nothing but total radio silence on whether any charges are pending. Could it be, as Revolver explained back in June, that as is typical in militia world, many of the very personalities aggressively cited as “plotting” the attack were Federal informants all along? Could that explain their present immunity?
SPerhaps the loudest media meltdown over the FBI’s ‘no collusion’ leak in the Reuters piece came from journalist Seth Abramson. Abramson is indisputably the Beltway’s most prolific “insurrection” screed writer. He turned to 1/6 after penning a full trilogy of laughable Russiagate fanfic novels during the Trump era—“NYT best-sellers” Proof of Collusion, Proof of Corruption and Proof of Conspiracy. With nearly a million Twitter followers and daily retweets from Democrat Congressmen and NeverTrump Neocons alike, Abramson tweeted out a frantic 87-tweet thread as the Reuters report dropped. His thread linked 85 separate articles arguing the FBI’s “no collusion” leak couldn’t be true.
Reuters, the world’s largest multimedia news provider, is regularly ranked by Regime media as having a perfect score for “factual reporting” and “zero media bias.”
But in the space of a single article, Reuters had become a Threat To Democracy™, according to our highly-fevered intrepid Twitter reporter hero:
Abramson and hundreds of others even amplified a narrative that Reuters, long a partner of US and UK intelligence services, had suddenly been taken over by the Russians. “Serious” thinkers on the left openly implied that Russians had planted four fake FBI sources in Reuters to protect Trump from the January 6 Commission:
It should go without saying how ridiculous and unhinged this narrative is. In order to fully understand how morally and factually bankrupt the media network cheerleading the January 6 Commission really is, one must learn their basis for labeling Reuters, the Regime’s “most trusted news source” last month, as “Russian disinformation” this month.
Back in June 2020, Reuters allowed Russia’s TASS News Agency to join its Reuters Connect platform. Reuters Connect gives paying customers deep cut access to region-specific news. TASS joining Reuters Connect made Russia its 18th country partner, alongside France, Spain, China, Turkey, Malaysia and others.
In the fevered minds of unhinged liberal regime apparatchiks like Seth Abramson, then, the entire Reuters FBI leak can be dismissed as Russian in origin.
Abramson, in a separate tweet thread, implored January 6 Commission representatives to come forward and repudiate the FBI leaks to Reuters immediately:
And reject it they did. Last week, Commission chair Bennie Thompson and vice chair Liz Cheney wrote in a joint statement that their anonymous sources in the government actually supersede Reuters’ anonymous sources in the government. From CNN:
SThe top members of the select committee investigating the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill refuted recent claims by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that former President Donald Trump has been cleared by the Justice Department of any role in the insurrection.
“(McCarthy) has suggested, based on an anonymous report, that the Department of Justice has concluded that Donald Trump did not cause, incite, or provoke the violence on January 6th,” the statement read. “When this anonymous report was first published, the Select Committee queried the Executive Branch agencies and congressional committees involved in the investigation. We’ve received answers and briefings from the relevant entities, and it’s been made clear to us that reports of such a conclusion are baseless.”
What does this portend for the disgraced Commission? To know this, we must learn a bit more about its chairman Bennie Thompson.
Meet Chairman Bennie Thompson
Much of MAGA’s antipathy for the January 6 commission has been trained on the vice chair of the January 6 Commission, Liz Cheney. And for good reason. Revolver has long argued that Liz Cheney is very much a driving force of the GOP coup against the America First movement.
But the limelight on Cheney has left in the dark the commission’s actual Chairman: Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi). And it is from Thompson we may be able to deduce the roadmap of the months ahead.
One option is that Chairman Thompson will pay nothing but lip-service to the concerns of reporters like Seth Abramson and Alan Feuer that the Commission has abandoned any grand collusion narrative involving Trump and his inner circle. If there is no evidence of collusion with Trump and his inner circle, Thompson might revise his bizarre neglect of Rhodes and focus on the leaders of militia groups as a consolation prize. A serious inquiry into Rhodes, however, risks blowing the entire government and media narrative out of the water. Indeed, it would risk turning the great 1/6 insurrection into another orchestrated Fed job like the recent “Michigan Kidnapping Plot,” in which a whopping 12 out of the 18 “plotters” have been revealed to be Feds and/or informants.
The most likely course, then, is that the Commission pays lip service to the fevered conspiracy that Trump’s inner circle colluded to sack the Capitol, and Rhodes will remain an untouched third rail. A brief review of Thompson’s history and biography suggests this maximally compliant approach will be the case.
Thompson is a key component in the establishment DNC’s merger with the national security state after 9/11, using the pretext of fake “domestic terrorism”. As an untouchable incumbent in Mississippi with 28 years in Congress, Thompson was the chair of the Homeland Security Committee from 2007-2011 and has been back in charge again since 2019.
Essentially, whenever Democrats have a majority in the House, Thompson is put in as the hatchet man to control oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.
Bennie Thompson scratches the back of an ever-expanding US national security state. In turn, Thompson is rewarded with plush committee chair roles and an expanding DHS turf of his own.
Indeed, Thompson was tapped to serve as the Permanent Chair of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. In the 2020 election, Thompson presided over all official business of the convention that made Joe Biden the Democratic nominee for President.
Ironically, in 2004, Thompson was one of only 31 House Democrats who voted to overturn the results of the Bush-Gore election. But today, the vast Department of Homeland Security agency reports to him. And that agency now calls anyone who claims fraud in the 2020 election “Potential Terror Threats.”
See how that works? When Bennie Thompson does it, it’s democracy. When you do it, it’s terrorism:
In 2007, Thompson’s first act as chair of the Homeland Security Committee was to sponsor a bill that granted sweeping new police powers to DHS, using the pretext of 9/11.
But stopping foreign terror threats like a 9/11 attack—you know, the reason DHS was supposedly created—never seemed to be the real priority for the Congressman actually overseeing the agency. Thompson has oddly always emphasized the “domestic” element of DHS’s duty to “defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
As just one example, in the clip below from 2013, Thompson chastised the Republican-led Homeland Security Committee for its insufficient emphasis on homegrown domestic threats:
Perhaps Thompson’s perennial crusade against average Joe Americans stems from a personal jihad based on race. In addition to being an aggressive attack dog for the US national security state, Thompson’s other passion appears to be one-sided, full-throttle black racial activism. Racists are terrorists, according to Thompson, and everyone who disagrees with his agenda is a racist.
In 1975, Thompson filed a lawsuit that shook more than half a billion dollars out of the state government of Mississippi. Here’s how Thompson’s website describes it:
In 1975, having firsthand knowledge of the disparity between funding, equipment, and supplies provided to historically black universities and those provided to white colleges, Thompson filed a lawsuit to increase funding at Mississippi’s historically black universities. With Thompson as lead plaintiff, the case was subsequently settled for an unprecedented $503 million.
Racial procurements and set-asides are a constant staple of Thompson’s Congressional appropriations requests. Thompson’s War on Domestic Terror speeches are padded with rhetoric about fighting racists in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and drawing inspiration from Medgar Evans.
From his cushy perch in Congress, Thompson openly called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” for siding with Republicans. When questioned about the appropriateness of a Congressman using that slur, Thompson simply doubled down:
As we have reported extensively at Revolver, the biggest and most important trend in American politics is that the ruling class is repurposing the American national security state domestically in order to target Regime critics—principally Trump supporters.
READ MORE: Dark New Dem Bill Uses “Counter American Intelligence” To Wage War on MAGA
On the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush, architect of the first war on terror made the transition explicit—1/6 is the new 9/11. The national security infrastructure created in the aftermath of 9/11, which includes the DHS, now has a new purpose—to target Trump supporters, especially in the wake of 1/6.
Rep. Thompson hits the sweet spot for running the kangaroo court that is the January 6 Commission, satisfying both the Deep State and the Democratic establishment. He is a simp for the US national security state, and a pimp for racial crusades that dehumanize Trump supporters as punchable, criminal white supremacists.
In other words, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath when it comes to Thompson doing anything to upset the FBI or other domestic intelligence equities. There seems to be nothing those government equities fear more than Thompson deciding to walk his talk and shine a Congressional spotlight on Person One aka Stewart Rhodes.
The January 6 Commission’s Untouchable
The upshot of all of this is that disgruntled disinformation journalists like Seth Abramson and Alan Feuer will be left to marinate in a a stew of cognitive dissonance regarding the January 6 narrative. Indeed, the most efficient, elegant, and obvious explanation for both the Feds and Congress ignoring Rhodes is the one explanation these Regime apparatchiks simply cannot allow themselves to entertain.
But for those who can see clearly, a very different picture starts to emerge. If the Oath Keepers are a dangerous militia as we’ve been told, why is their kingpin still an untouchable figure to Congress—a He Who Shall Not Be Named? And why is the government only interested in searching or pursuing Rhodes’ alleged underlings, if the “goldmine” of evidence sits with Rhodes himself?
There may in the end be some exotic yet innocent explanation for the seeming protection the Feds have afforded Rhodes from indictment and from search and seizure. We maintain an open mind and are ready to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
But we have seen this movie before in the so-called Michigan Kidnapping Plot that occurred just months prior to January 6. In that “plot”, at least 12 undercover informants were outed in the months after the initial arrests after accidental disclosures from the FBI. There, the Feds for months afforded virtually identical protection to Steve Robeson, the alleged leader of a Wisconsin Patriot Three Percenters militia group, as they seem to be giving to Rhodes in the wake of January 6. Robeson’s inexplicable protection ended up having a very simple explanation in the end, which tied up all the strange loose ends surrounding the FBI’s failure to either properly search or indict him. That explanation, as Revolver will cover in our next report, was that Robeson had been working with the Feds all along.
Given the weight of evidence in the case of Rhodes, the onus is now on the Justice Department, the FBI, or the Commission to come forward and either dispel or confirm this striking parallel immediately.
If the January 6 commission won’t do its job and get to the bottom of this, we at Revolver News will. Our ground breaking, national-narrative shaping coverage of 1/6 is only getting started. Strap in and stay tuned, there’s much more to come.
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