Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Tim Pearce.
The official line that hundreds of plainclothes FBI agents were sent to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for
"crowd control" is
"BS," according to a veteran reporter who has scrutinized the events of that day.
The Blaze's Steve Baker is one of the preeminent investigative reporters on the events of January 6. Baker and his colleague, reporter Joe Hanneman, have combed through footage, testimonies, court documents, and other evidence related to that day, reporting their findings at The Blaze.
The official story given by FBI Director Kash Patel about the role 274 plainclothes FBI agents played on January 6 is false, Baker told Morning Wire in an interview that aired on Sunday. The 274 plainclothes officers were only acknowledged last month to have been in the crowd on January 6, nearly five years after the Capitol riot.
"The one thing that I can tell you that we have done more of than anybody else on the planet, Joe and I have had more access to Capitol CCTV, the actual viewing room there, that the congressional committee allows access to than any other journalist," Baker said.
"Our first reaction when we saw this tweet from Patel saying that they were out there doing crowd control, Joe and I, we erupted in our private DMs."
"We were like, 'This is BS. This is not true.' Because if we had seen them at any one point during that day, we would have made note of it, certainly mentally, but it would have been part of our documenting of what we saw and doing thousands of hours of video review. It just never happened," he said.
Last month, Patel addressed reports that hundreds of plainclothes FBI agents were ordered into the crowd around the U.S. Capitol that day. The FBI director said that the plainclothes agents were given orders against bureau standards and forced into an unreasonably difficult situation because of
"corrupt leadership."
Patel wrote in a post on X:
"274 FBI agents were thrown into crowd control on Jan 6 against FBI standards. That failure was on corrupt leadership. Thanks to agents stepping up, the truth is coming out."
That post drew backlash from Baker, who responded:
"This is 1000% bulls***. No one has had more time in the Capitol CCTV viewing room than me and my partner, [Hanneman]. We've never seen a single frame of video showing plainclothes FBI assisting uniformed LEOs in either 'crowd control' or protecting the Capitol," Baker wrote.
Notably, Baker distinguished plainclothes FBI agents from undercover agents. Plainclothes agents are not meant to blend in totally. They should still be easily identifiable as FBI agents, either by their badge, a hat, a jacket, a bulletproof vest, or some other clear marking or piece of clothing.
If the 274 agents were sent to do crowd control, they should have been easy enough to pick out from Capitol security footage or from any of the numerous videos taken by bystanders that day. Baker was at the Capitol on January 6 - he pleaded guilty in November to four misdemeanor counts related to the day's events before being pardoned by President Donald Trump - and never saw a plainclothes FBI agent assisting with crowd control.
poll#201
