How the State Sacrificed 12 People to Save the Official Lie of January 6th
A Question of Staging
I’ve spent more time than I care to admit in the back of a D.C. courtroom over the past few years, watching the gears of federal justice grind up American citizens. I’ve listened as judges, robed in the unimpeachable authority of the state, tell men their First Amendment rights are not a valid defense.
I’ve watched them openly mock defendants as “conspiracy theorists” for daring to suggest that the crowd on January 6th, 2021, was not entirely what it seemed.
In the case of John George Todd, I saw Judge Beryl Howell practically go cataleptic when the defense brought up the “ghost bus” theory promoted by Representative Clay Higgins.
This isn’t an isolated incident; it’s a pattern. In every case our legal team has been involved with, we’ve filed motions to get information on the presence of plainclothes federal agents. Every single motion was denied. The topic is forbidden.
It’s a story I’ve heard in different forms from dozens of defendants, but a recent account from a defendant named Don Hazard crystallizes the entire charade. He told me his attorney came to visit him in the D.C. jail with a bombshell. A memo, she said, had come across her desk inside the public defender’s office. It detailed “a lot of law enforcement involvement at the Capitol,” including agents in “plain clothes dressed like us and acting as bad actors / instigators.”
At Hazard’s sentencing, his attorney tried to bring it up. The judge immediately shot her down. She tried a second time, rephrasing, and was shot down again. After moving on for a moment, she made one final attempt to get this crucial context on the record. The judge shut her down a third time. He didn’t just deny a motion; he refused to even hear evidence that could undermine the entire prosecution.
And then, just last week, the conspiracy theory got a number: 274.
That’s how many plainclothes FBI agents a senior congressional source claims were embedded in the crowds that day. Not “confidential human sources,” the weasel-worded term the DOJ Inspector General prefers, but agents.
I spoke with Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, about this revelation.
“This should be seen, like President Trump says . . . as a watershed moment
because it helps blow the lid off the fact that there really was a Fed-surrection.It was a manipulated event.
They manipulated the crowd of sincere patriots into going in the Capitol, and they agitated them both from the side of law enforcement, using excessive force, and then the crowd, undercover officers, urging them forward, urging them to commit acts of violence against police.”
Stewart Rhodes
Rhodes’s assertion echoes the core sentiment of many J6 defendants: that they were set up, provoked, and steered into a trap. He even suspects some undercover officers were “also committing violence against the uniformed officers.”
Suddenly, the desperate legal filings from men like Ryan Zink don’t look so crazy. His defense team’s motion demanding the identities of undercover agents and the more than 100 Antifa activists they claim were present wasn’t a fringe legal theory; it was a demand for basic discovery in what is looking less like a riot and more like a stage-managed production.
As Zink himself put it, if key actors were government agents, that’s not just a Brady violation for failing to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence; it’s judicial misconduct on a staggering scale. This failure to disclose, and everything else they actively kept hidden, poisons the well of justice.
This is the backdrop against which we must view the entire January 6th saga. It explains the mysteries that the FBI, despite its supposedly legendary competence, can’t seem to solve. Take the pipe bombs, planted outside the RNC and DNC headquarters. We now have a witness statement suggesting one was planted the day of, not the night before, yet the most surveilled city on Earth can’t find the bomber.
Meanwhile, they can track down hundreds of Americans, most of whom were simply trespassing (in “The People’s House,” no less), and prosecute them to the full extent of the law.
The official story is sealed tight by a judiciary that refuses to hear otherwise. But for those of us who have witnessed these trials and heard these stories directly from the men who lived them, the narrative is crumbling.
It’s no longer a question of what happened on January 6th. It’s a question of staging.
The Unpardoned
The presidential proclamation on January 20th was supposed to be the end of it, a grand gesture to correct a “grave national injustice.” For over 1,500 people, it was. But for 12 men, it was something else entirely. To understand what, you have to listen to the people who were actually inside the machine.
Take the case of Rebecca Lavrenz, the 72-year-old “J6 Praying Grandma.” She spent 10 minutes inside the Capitol, praying. For this, a judge sentenced her to home confinement, a year of probation, banned her from the internet, and levied a staggering $103,000 fine. Her real crime, the judge made clear, was her speech after the fact, when she had the audacity to question the integrity of the system that was crushing her. She is the face of the injustice the proclamation was meant to correct.
And she, like more than a thousand others, received a “full, complete and unconditional pardon,” which erases the conviction as if it never happened. But these 12 men did not. The alleged leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys received only a commutation of their sentences to “time served.” This is a critical distinction. A commutation ends the prison sentence, but the conviction—the legal finding of guilt, the felony record, the stigma—remains forever. This group originally numbered 14, but Thomas Caldwell recently received a full pardon, and Jeremy Bertino was always an outlier, considered a snitch for the DOJ, effectively removing him from the group of loyalists.
Why are these 12 men still carrying the burden of their convictions? I asked Jeremy Brown, the retired Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and FBI whistleblower who was granted a full pardon, why he thought the 12 leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were left behind with only commutations. His answer cuts through the political noise and gets to the bone.
“They weren’t ‘Pardoned’ because the ‘J6 Pardons’ were simply a political stunt,” Brown told me, “meant to 1) Codify the false narrative and 2) sweep J6 under the rug, just like the 9/11 Commission Report did for 9/11.”
This isn’t an accusation; it’s a diagnosis. Brown argues that by leaving the 12 men branded as convicted felons for “seditious conspiracy,” the stunt achieves its first goal. The official story, the one that required a vast conspiracy to justify the largest political prosecution in American history, remains legally intact. As Brown put it, “The Patsies remain the Villains.”
Stewart Rhodes, who is among these 12 unpardoned men, pulls no punches on this. He spoke directly to President Trump.
“We’ve been singled out by someone on your staff to be given commutations only, not pardons. And I believe the reason why is because someone in your circle wants that false narrative to live on, that there really was some kind of plot, which is why we were not pardoned.”
Rhodes pointed out the outrageous hypocris.
“The ones that fought the cops that day, some of them really did… at least they actually did it. With us, there was no plot. There was no plan. We didn’t assault police officers. In fact, all of us that are still waiting for pardons, none of us assaulted police officers. The ones who did got pardons. The ones who didn’t among us, because of who we are, were singled out for commutation only.”
The second goal, sweeping it under the rug, is perhaps even more cynical. By pardoning the masses, the political class gets to declare victory and move on. Brown is scathing on this point, accusing the “Political Actors and Actresses” of luring patriots into a trap, ignoring them for years, and then exploiting them for “political gain and billions in donations… none of which went to help anyone but themselves.”
This is the dirty secret of the whole affair. The clemency wasn’t a pure act of justice; it was a calculated political move, a pressure release valve.
And the spin continues. Brown calls the official statements “a well crafted absurdity meant to gaslight us into insanity.” He directly accuses President Trump of “lying about ‘just learning’ about FBI involvement” and the new FBI Director of “lying when he tells us the FBI now works ‘Crowd Control’.” This echoes the profound skepticism I heard from Stewart Rhodes, who, referring to Kash Patel’s claims, called them “100% bullshit.” The men who were there, who were targeted, simply do not believe the new management is giving them the straight story.
This isn’t just about freedom from prison; it’s about restoring fundamental rights. As Rhodes powerfully articulated, “We need our rights restored. Seven of us are veterans. We’ve had all of our disability payments destroyed by the VA… we can’t even be buried in a veteran cemetery… Commutation is not enough.” He emphasized that he and his fellow loyalists, who refused to “bear false witness” against President Trump, were punished, while those who took deals and “signed on to a stack of lies” received pardons.
This is a political calculation, plain and simple. Granting full pardons to men convicted of sedition would have been a political gift to the opposition ahead of the midterm elections. It would have fueled attack ads from coast to coast. By waiting, the administration gets to have it both ways. Don’t be surprised if, after the midterms are safely in the rearview mirror, a second, quieter round of pardons makes these 12 men legally whole. Justice, it seems, is now subject to the electoral calendar.
The Sovereign Soul
When a government and its institutions betray the trust of the people on such a fundamental level, what happens next? This is no longer a theoretical question. We are living through the answer.
I believe in two foundational principles. The first is that Free Will is our most important gift from God. It is the ability to perceive, to reason, and to choose our own path. The second is that Free Speech is the most important gift from our Founding Fathers. It is the mechanism by which we exercise our free will in the public square, test ideas, and hold power accountable.
What we are witnessing is a systematic assault on both.
Consider the evidence. In Part I, we see a justice system that actively suppresses inquiry. By refusing to allow defendants to question the presence of federal agents, the courts are not just denying a legal defense; they are denying reality itself. They are attempting to subvert the Free Will of jurors and citizens by presenting a curated, state-approved version of events.
In Part II, we see a political class that uses the awesome power of presidential clemency not as a tool of mercy, but as a cynical device to create permanent scapegoats and manage election messaging. This is a profound insult to the intelligence of the American people, an attempt to manipulate our perceptions for political gain.
As Stewart Rhodes put it, referring to Kash Patel’s spin on the 274 FBI agents:
“This is 100% bullshit. No one has had more time in the Capitol CCTV viewing room than me and my partner… We’ve never seen a single frame of video showing plainclothes FBI, assisting uniform LEOs in either crowd control or protecting the capital.”
He believes Patel is “compromised” for carrying water for the “deep state” by spinning this as a mere “crowd control” mission rather than acknowledging potential instigation. This manipulation, he argues, is what makes the entire process a “show trial.”
This is where the idea of the sovereign soul becomes not a legal theory, but a moral necessity. My belief in sovereignty is not about filing strange documents or declaring myself exempt from traffic laws. It is the recognition that our ultimate allegiance is to God, the source of our Free Will, and to the truth that this faculty allows us to perceive. Our rights are not granted by the state; they are endowed by our Creator.
When the state dedicates itself to a campaign of deception—when it stages events, silences dissent, and punishes those who speak out, like Rebecca Lavrenz—it is attacking the very foundation of a moral society. It is attempting to sever the connection between our God-given Free Will and the truth.
At that point, what is the proper response of a free person? It is to reassert our sovereignty. Not a sovereignty of legal loopholes, but a sovereignty of the soul. It is to declare that our conscience will not be bound by a corrupt system, that our minds will not accept a manufactured reality, and that our voices will not be silenced. It is to stand firm on the two greatest gifts we have been given—the will to choose what is right, and the speech to declare it
President Donald J. Trump, we implore you to give them the full pardon they deserve:
Oath Keepers: Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, Roberto Minuta, Edward Vallejo, David Moerschel, and Joseph Hackett.
Proud Boys: Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola.
