The FBI has arrested and charged nearly a thousand individuals in its investigation of the January 6th “insurrection.” Some of these people have been tried and convicted of various low level crimes and a few have been handed draconian sentences for misdeeds that — although criminal — fall far short of being treasonous.
Meanwhile, many dozens of the poor souls ensnared in the FBI’s dragnet operation have languished in jail for over two years awaiting trial — a circumstance that makes a mockery of the constitutionally guaranteed right to a fair and speedy trial.
The above assertions and the data used in subsequent parts of this essay are based on information provided at the following URL:
https://extremism.gwu.edu/legal-proceedings-tracker
Among those who have already pled guilty to one charge or another, most were confronted with a multiplicity of charges that the bottomless pockets of the federal government are able to make and prosecute. Those individuals were pressured to accept the bitter truth that they did not have the resources to fight and chose instead to “confess” to a single crime rather than face the prospect of being found guilty of many and having to do hard time. They were able to escape severe punishment by compromising themselves and the FBI was able to rack up a higher and higher score of convictions, a supposed indicator of their great success at achieving “justice” by convicting a considerable number of “insurrectionists.”
But what is insurrection? An insurrection is a clandestine, organized effort to topple an existing regime by using force. In the modern world, the application of force to achieve such an end generally involves the use of firearms or other equally potent tools of intimidation.
The January 6th insurrection is quite remarkable in this regard; it is an insurrection attempted by a cadre that was unarmed. Surely they knew the defending cops would have guns. These conspirators and their lackeys evidently were convinced that they could effectively prosecute a successful insurrection using pepper spray, baseball bats, flag poles and one or two stun guns. If that was their mentality, the FBI sure has been slow to sketch out the planned rebellion of such numbskulls.
We are supposed to believe that the people who broke into the Capital building — or in some instances were ushered in by cooperative law enforcement personnel — were hell-bent on killing or capturing prominent political figures like Pence and Pelosi, and installing in their stead hand-picked individuals who would insure the reelection of Donald Trump.
Two and a half years have passed. By now the FBI ought to have been able to identify the leaders of the clandestine movement, assemble the incriminating evidence of their coordinated efforts to prosecute the plan, and flesh out the commands issued to the many hundreds of followers who have been corralled by the FBI, charged with crimes, and tarred as conspirators. But no, we hear nothing outlining — even in the crudest of terms — the framework of the grand scheme.
In spite of the huge number of arrests, in spite of the prosecution of many supposed insurrectionists, in spite of many individuals striking plea deals -- in spite of all this, the FBI has yet to openly identify the core leadership of the illegal movement. And more importantly, it has failed to lay out a profile of the planned rebellion.
Instead, the FBI and the Justice Department have insinuated that toxic nationalists were behind most all the misdeeds that happened at the capitol on January 6 and were orchestrating the bad behavior of the hundreds of arrestees. But these government agencies have done so in such a weasely way that they can claim plausible deniability. Without providing any description of how, where, and when a failed insurrection played out, they have saddled hundreds of convicted individuals with a public perception that they were motivated by insurrectionist aims when there is no evidence to that effect.
The FBI has implied that the Oath Keepers were behind it all. It has prosecuted over a dozen of them and to date a handful have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy -- two or more people conspiring to overthrow or seize control of the federal government. Punishment for engaging in seditious conspiracy is up to 20 years of prison time.
No, wait; the FBI has also zeroed in on another group called the Proud Boys, and prosecuted some of them as well for seditious conspiracy — but a lesser number than in the case of the Oath Keepers. So which group was at the heart of the insurrection, the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys? Are we to presume they worked together or should we think these two groups were plotting totally separate insurrections?
The FBI has obtained seditious conspiracy convictions for leaders in both groups but even at the end of their trials nothing got revealed to the public regarding the leadership structure, the operational plan, or the network of underling co-conspirators. We are left to think that both groups were somehow involved in trying to topple our government but with nothing in the way of hard evidence regarding the plan.
According to the law, an actual insurrection is an attempt to overthrow or seize control of the federal government. There is nothing in this law about having conspired to do so but it does hold as guilty anybody who is shown to have incited or assisted any such rebellion. Punishment is up to 10 years of prison time and prohibition from holding public office.
Even though actual insurrection is obviously more serious than merely planning one, the big punishment is for the planners and the organizers. This makes sense, but only if the planned conspiracy to overthrow the government actually does occur, or tries to occur. In that instance, there would need to be clear evidence that a person being tried actually played a role in the planned insurrection. Nobody has been charged with insurrection, much less found guilty, so it is obvious that the many hundreds of convicted January 6ers played no part in implementing plans drawn up by either the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys.
The FBI has some Oath Keeper ringleaders who it bashfully intimates did plot a rebellion but it is having a dickens of a time finding the actual rebellion. Nobody has been charged with insurrection.
To make the charge of insurrection stick, it has to be shown that individuals went to the capital with the intention of staging an overthrow of government. The inner circle of the Oath Keepers doesn’t fit the bill because in spite of bringing weapons to Washington, DC, they explicitly did not bring them to the capitol. If they were coup-minded it is inconceivable that they would have left their guns back at the hotel. If they had proxies to do their dirty work and kept their own hands clean, the Justice department would have had to prove a specific link between the unlawful act of each defendant and the guidance provided by the ringleaders. But the Justice Department has not even tried to do this -- instead relying on conviction in the court of public opinion.
Furthermore, if the FBI really has uncovered the plotting and execution of a true conspiracy, then a list of the individuals found guilty of insurrection should consist overwhelmingly of individuals who were in cahoots with each other. Only about a dozen of the many hundreds who have been convicted of a January 6th crime have been shown to have a connection to either the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys. This suggests that virtually all of the supposed insurrectionists were actually rioters — bad enough, but in no sense bordering on the treasonous.
If the Oath Keepers and/or Proud Boys are the FBI’s designated ringleaders of an insurrection, then where are the emails or cell phone contacts linking them to the 1,000 arrestees who have been indicted for the Jan 6 “insurrection?” If the Oath Keepers and/or Proud Boys are not the FBI’s designated ringleaders then who are?
By allowing anybody who was successfully prosecuted for riotous behavior to be labeled as an insurrectionist, the FBI exposes its intent: to redefine a riot as an insurrection.
Here is a complete list of the individuals involved in Jan 6 who have received jail sentences of five years or more, along with their status as Oath Keepers.
Only two of the top 17 convicted Jan 6ers are Oath Keepers — the first and third names on the list. There are 27 more individuals who have received sentences in the 1-5 year range, four of whom are Oath Keepers. Even though the FBI has put a lot of time and effort into exposing the Oath Keepers, they make up less than 15% of all those who received jail sentences of one year or more, and do not strongly cluster at the top of the list. Oath Keepers claim first and third on the above list largely because the government was able to saddle them with the seditious conspiracy charge, which carries a lengthy jail sentence.
Peter Schwartz, the person who has received the second longest jail sentence was not an Oath Keeper. After spending 23 months in jail awaiting trial, he had his day in court — an uphill battle for a Trump supporter who had to face a District of Columbia jury drawn from a population that voted 92% for Biden and 5% for Trump. The daunting challenge of pleading not guilty in such a situation is why so many of the FBI’s riotous 1,000 opted for a plea deal. Those like Peter Schwartz who chose to leave it up to a jury were very few in number. (Oath Keepers, incidentally, generally chose trial over a plea deal.)
Peter Schwartz was charged with the following crimes:
1) Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon;
2) Civil disorder;
3) Obstruction of an official proceeding;
4) Entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon;
5) Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds;
6) Engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds;
7) Disorderly conduct in the capitol grounds or buildings;
8) Impeding passage through the capitol grounds or buildings;
9) Act of physical violence in the capitol grounds or buildings.
When one reads through this highly repetitive list of charged offenses, it becomes obvious why so many of the arrested choose to take a plea deal. It’s clear that Peter Schwartz was being charged for assaulting officers with a weapon (pepper spray!), but here we have a list of nine “different” offenses, each of which carries its own separate punishment. Kamala Harris would be driven into fits of ecstasy while constructing a Venn diagram for these nine charges.
With its bottomless resources and countless laws to choose from, it is easy for government prosecutors to bully most anybody into “confessing” to one or two of the more reasonable charges, even if that person knows he is innocent. I am not suggesting that Peter Schwartz was innocent (he was not) -- only that he refused to play the Justice Department’s game and paid the price by incurring the second longest sentence so far, a sentence that probably surpasses that for most second degree murder convictions.
Returning now to that list of 17 individuals with jail sentences of five years or more, it is telling that none of them had any association with the Proud Boys. Three of them (McGrew, Sandlin, and Jensen) had a vague attachment to the QAnon phenomenon, but the FBI made nothing of that and failed to expose any sort of conspiratorial connection between the three.
On the other side of the ledger -- that is, affiliations that don’t really fit with either seditious conspiracy or insurrection -- there are three men (Schwartz, Head, and Young) who already had criminal records, indicating a propensity for activity that is illegal rather than ideological.
There are also three on the list who were cops or former cops, but the FBI has made nothing of this. Of course, many cops have become disillusioned by the widespread move to blame the police for our crime problems and the many actions taken to defund police departments, but, once again, the FBI has not articulated any significant communication or cooperation between these three.
It is a remarkable fact that the list of 17 individuals with jail sentences of five years or more came from all over the place — 17 individuals from 11 different states plus DC. The following map shows in red the states of residence of those J6ers serving five or more years of jail time. It also shows the additional states of residence for those serving one to five years. When, in spite of the fact that a handful of states hold the majority of the national population, over half the states get represented in a prison population of only 58, then it stretches credibility to think that they were involved in a coordinated conspiracy to overturn the government.
Without the facts needed to prove an insurrection occurred, the FBI has been coyly casting shade on the Oath Keepers, and then prosecuting as many other people as possible for riotous acts, thereby leaving the impression that there was an insurrection afoot and that anybody illegally in or about the capital was one of its foot soldiers. This has proven to be an effective strategy since democrats and the mainstream media had already latched on to the idea that anybody who supports Trump is evil, racist, and authoritarian -- a mentality that makes it easy for them to believe anything that fits this preconceived notion.
To date, the best the the FBI has been able to do is identify a small cadre of Oath Keepers who communicated a desire and willingness to forcefully participate if in fact an insurrection did occur, but then when they appeared on the scene they somehow forgot to bring along their firearms. They brought firearms to DC, but failed to carry them when they raided the Capital? They were not young bucks — Perhaps they had a senior moment.
The hundreds of folks who have been charged with multiple counts of wrong doing supposedly represent the scope and scale of the insurrection, but the FBI is extremely tight-lipped regarding their affiliation with the Oath Keepers, or indeed any other secret cell of insurrectionists. For the most part, they appear to be individuals guilty of the sorts of crimes committed in any protest that turns riotous (such as the many dozens that involved Antifa and the BLM movement in the long, hot summer of 2020).
The massive protest movement that assembled outside the capital building that day consisted of people who believed there was hanky panky surrounding the election of Joe Biden. But even the relatively small proportion of that larger crowd that found entry into the Capital building did not behave so heinously as to kill anybody. The only person actually killed at the Capital on that day was an unarmed white woman — a white Trump supporter named Ashley Babbit who was shot for no known reason by a black policeman named Michael Byrd (Fox News, Oct 13).
The tell that exposed the insurrection trope as little more than a fabrication made by those who hate Donald Trump was the intentional effort to cast the Capital Police Officer named Brian Sicknick as a victim of Trumpian violence. At first he was reported to have been killed by savage Trump supporters who beat him over the head with a fire extinguisher (New York Post, Jan 11). But then when his head failed to deliver evidence of such a thing, the press somehow shifted to a new narrative claiming he was done in by bear spray or some such chemical irritant dispensed by rioters (The Guardian, March 15). In the end that too proved to be false. Brian Sicknick died a day after the riot as a consequence of two heart attacks (NPR, April 19). Maybe they were brought on by the riotous chaos the preceding day but they were not the consequence of trauma willfully or accidentally inflicted by Trumpsters.
But never mind: Mr. Sicknick was too good a symbol to be quashed by mere facts. His body was brought to lie in state at the Capitol building as a hero who did is best to thwart the efforts of a “deadly” insurrection (NPR. Feb 3). Deadly for Ashley Babbitt, but not for Brian Sicknick.
The only other person to die due to violence during the “invasion” of the capitol was Roseanne Boyland, a Trump supporter who was crushed by the crowd of invaders of which she was a part (New York Times, Jan 15).
One death was the result of what appears to be second degree murder (Babbitt), one the consequence of a surging mob (Boyland). Both women, both white, both Trump supporters. No police died.
Three other people died that day at the protest and riot, but two of them succumbed to natural causes and the third suffered from a drug overdose. They too appeared to be sympathetic to the riotous mob. If there really were an insurrection, all these deaths would have been touted as the just reward for their evil efforts.
By the end of 2022, roughly half of those arrested in connection with the January 6 insurrection had been sentenced to jail time. For them, numbering close to 500, the median sentence was 60 days. That sounds reasonable for rioters; hardly adequate for insurrectionists.
Obviously the great bulk of the 1000-man “army” was guilty of nothing in the least associated with an insurrection. Plus, over 100 more individuals in that larger group have paid fines or done community service or in some other way paid their debt to society without going to jail. It really looks like the bulk of the catch brought up by the FBI’s dragnet consists of little more that what fishermen call bycatch — unwanted denizens of the marine world who really ought to have been tossed back into the sea.
But no. The FBI needs numbers to establish the credibility of the threat from insurrectionists. Anybody who was naughty in or around Washington, DC on January 6 needs to be corralled and prosecuted so as to juice the numbers.
The reality is that January 6th was not an insurrection. It was a protest by a large crowd, a part of which pushed its way into the capital building when it should not have. They did break windows, and assault some police, but once inside most of the intruders appear to have simply wandered around in wonder. There are precious few videos released so far that betray any concerted, clearly-designated actions designed to effectively topple the regime -- or even hamstring its activities using a premeditated plan of action.
Consider, for example, this video of Jacob Chansley, the notorious QAnon Shaman who was treated by the legacy media as an insurrectionist (Fox News, March). Like so many others, this supposed insurrectionist wandered around aimlessly within the capitol rather than executing a designated role in the supposed insurrection.
A far more sensible interpretation of the January 6th riot is that it was a section of a large protest that got out of hand and became to some degree violent in its desire to convey its message that the election had been compromised. The large number of people who gathered outside the capital that day had come to protest this very issue.
People who become violent during a protest do need to be held accountable for their crimes but to call every crime of aggression an insurrection is going much too far. There is circumstantial statistical evidence that those who have been rounded up and charged by the FBI were not bent on overturning our system of government.
We know where these individuals came from and if they were part of some cabal set upon overthrowing our system of government they would probably be people who could easily maintain contact with each other directly and without resort to traceable means of communication like phone or e-mail. In other words, they would most likely have been in physical proximity to each other so that planning and scheming and recruiting could be done with minimal risk. If the conspiracy were hatched and nurtured using cell phones or social media, the FBI would have been onto it in a flash and could now show the American public the damning evidence.
In other words, we might expect those who participated in an insurrection to have lived in close proximity to each other -- either that or in a handful of locations that might be distant from each other but still linked by couriers regularly traveling between a core center and a set of satellite affiliates. Obviously, though, links between isolated centers would increase the risk of discovery of the larger plot.
Using data available at the George Washington University website on extremism, I have identified the numbers of FBI arrestees that live in each state. Using government tabulations of 2020 presidential election results, I have obtained the number of individuals who voted for Trump in each state. This allows for the calculation of the arrestee rate among Trump supporters on a state-by-state basis.
If the many hundreds who were arrested for participating in an insurrection tend to cluster in a single state or in a small handful of states, then there would be reason to suspect the existence of an insurrectionist plot. If, on the other hand, those arrested and charged in connection with January 6th widely distribute among all the states, it would suggest that they may be little more than Trump supporters who got carried away by mob frenzy on that particular day. Mob frenzy, incidentally, is a characteristic of mobs in general, not a behavior limited to people of a certain belief.
This simplistic form of statistical analysis makes assumptions that are too crude to be considered as anything more that merely suggestive. But we’re searching for evidence that an insurrection actually happened and to date the FBI has been unwilling to persuasively document that one did.
The map below shows the arrestee rate per million Trump voters for each state in the country. Two small population states were the source of no arrestees. As for the other 48, they fell in the range of 1.4 to 24.9 arrestees per million Trump voters. The overall average was about 10 arrestees per million Trump voters.
One might think that the heavy concentration of high arrestee rates in the northeast (excluding New England) confirms the idea that insurrection was planned and orchestrated in that particular region, but an adjustment to the data based on a well-known confounding variable would discount that interpretation.
Individuals who have gathered together for some reason (shopping, church attendance, a national conference, a protest march, etc) invariably arrive in greater numbers from nearby than they do from afar. A well-known phenomenon referred to as friction of distance, or distance decay, describes a pattern that is nothing more than common sense: the farther someone has to travel to attend an event the less likely he is to incur the increased cost of travel and time spent making the trip.
Investigators have looked at this phenomenon over and over and although the decline in numbers with distance traveled to attend varies enormously depending on the nature of the draw and the available means of transportation, in virtually all cases the pattern of decline with greater distance is best described as logarithmic rather than linear. Attendance declines precipitously for those relatively near to the destination but less and less so the greater the distance becomes.
In the case of arrestees traveling to the Capital for January 6th, it is presumed that they came from home. Shortest possible distance estimates were made of a line between Washington, DC and the rough center of each of the states. Using this data, the following scatter diagram describes the power of this phenomenon and a logarithmic curve has been fitted to the array of fifty points representing the fifty states.
This visual representation makes it clear that what really matters when trying to identify what might be source states for an insurrection is how far above that curved line a given state sits. Of all the states, Florida is the one highest above the predictive line, but even Florida only seems to be double what the curved line suggests might be expected. This is considerable, but not striking to anyone who regularly inspects data originating in the social sciences.
The fact that the arrestees have been drawn in significant numbers from so many states suggests that the January 6th event was a nation-wide expression of national concern by Trump supporters that the election was rigged. They came from everywhere and they seem to have been motivated by the same issue as the many thousands who attended the protest but did not enter the capitol: electoral fraud.
The wide array of states that ended up having solid representation in the cast of characters referred to as arrestees, was partially a consequence of FBI procedure. The agency’s chief honchos bought in to the idea that an insurrection took place and to make the case that it was a serious threat to the country they marshaled the full force of the FBI to combat it.
The FBI used its network of over fifty regional offices to track down possible insurrectionists, regardless of how peripheral their behavior may have been relative to the core charge of insurrection. These capitol-entering rioters were all cast into the same bucket and treated as confederates in an evil plan.
When FBI regional office territories are used instead of states to establish measurement of arrestees per million Trump voters, even more of the variability in the arrestee rate gets explained. Here is a scatter diagram for Field Office territories along with its calculated distance decay curve.
This scatter diagram suggests that using FBI field offices rather than states shows a distribution of territorial rates that conforms even better to its calculated logarithmic curve. The obvious inference one might draw from this is that the FBI nationwide search for Jan 6 insurrectionists motivated regional offices to compete with each other to achieve the greatest success in finding people to arrest.
It is well-understood in scientific investigation that one tends to find whatever one is looking for. The FBI wanted to find Trump supporters who were bent on insurrection and they found them most everywhere. The only trouble is that most of these supposed insurrectionists were nothing more than protesters regarding election irregularities. If they were insurrectionists, why were they not charged for that specific crime?
These maps and scatter diagrams do not prove a thing, but they do suggest that those who entered the capitol and got arrested were drawn from all around the country. Those who have received the longest jail sentences came from states as highly dispersed as the distribution pattern of all arrestees. In a real insurrection, one would expect them to cluster much more in one or two hot spots. The reasonable conclusion would be that the January 6 event was much more likely the riotous behavior of aggressive individuals than the coordinated actions of an insurrectionist cadre.
In fact there is no solid evidence that January 6th gave birth to — or even aborted — an insurrection. To put it more directly, tens of thousands of Trump supporters gathered that day but so far not a one of them has been convicted of helping overthrow the government. Until that happens it is dishonest to refer to what happened on January 6 as an insurrection.