President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has come down hard on supporters of former President Donald Trump alleged to have been involved in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, with some reports alleging that a handful of individuals have even been detained without bail and in solitary confinement on various conspiracy charges.
The government’s own charging documents in those cases also reveal a number of “unindicted co-conspirators” who appear to have been heavily involved in what Democrats have called an insurrection, but those unnamed individuals haven’t been charged. Now, Fox News host Tucker Carlson is asking big questions about their identities — including whether some of them may have ties to the FBI.
Speaking during Tuesday’s episode of his self-titled Fox show, Carlson accused the federal government of “hiding the identit[ies] of many law enforcement officers who were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” while throwing “the book” at alleged rioters. “There was a nationwide dragnet to find them. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight,” Carlson said, according to Fox.
“But, strangely, some people who participated in the riot haven’t been charged. Look at the documents. The government calls these people ‘unindicted co-conspirators.’ What does that mean? It means that in potentially every case, they’re FBI operatives,” the Fox host alleged.
“Unindicted co-conspirators”
For his Tuesday monologue, Carlson cited a report from Revolver News, which took a deep dive into the charging documents against the alleged insurrectionists being prosecuted over the Capitol breach.
In all, the report identified at least 20 “unindicted co-conspirators” who were said to have helped plot the riot. Among them, Carlson said, were individuals identified only as “Person Two” and “Person Three.”
“The government knows who they are, but the government has not charged them. Why is that? You know why,” Carlson said Tuesday, according to Fox. “They were almost certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to government documents. And those two are not alone.”
What’s the truth?
Notably, fact-checkers at Newsweek and elsewhere have reported that, according to some legal experts, “an undercover agent cannot be listed as a co-conspirator in court filings.”
Lisa Kern Griffin reportedly told The Washington Post that “undercover officers and informants can’t be ‘co-conspirators’ for the purposes of establishing an agreement to violate the law, because they are only pretending to agree to do so.”
The Duke University Law School professor explained that “an unindicted co-conspirator has committed the crime of conspiracy, and investigative agents doing their jobs undercover are not committing crimes.”
Citing the Post, Newsweek reported Thursday that individuals might be listed under such a label because “prosecutors don’t know their name or don’t have enough evidence to charge them yet, so would run the risk of compromising the investigation if they identified them.”
But until the full truth is revealed, it’s likely Carlson won’t hold back from continuing to ask the hard questions.
The post Tucker Carlson raises questions about potential role of FBI in Capitol riot first appeared on Conservative Institute.
No comments: