“Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan have repeatedly, and for months, indicated that they support the January 6 defendants and that they want to see justice done. So this is their opportunity.”
So says attorney John Pierce, legal counsel to 36 different J6 defendants, in explaining to WND why he has issued subpoenas to the House speaker and three other Republican members of Congress, demanding they testify in federal court on Sept. 5 in hopes it will help the many Americans languishing in D.C. jails for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
According to the subpoenas, the four GOP lawmakers are “COMMANDED to appear in the United States district court” before Judge James Boasberg at 9:30 a.m. and “must remain at the court until the judge or a court officer allows them to leave.”
In the subpoenas, Pierce demands that McCarthy, Greene, Gaetz, and Jordan showcase all their correspondence with law enforcement officials throughout the Capitol Riot, including “Any and all communications to or from the U.S. Capitol Police, Sergeant at Arms, Congressional leadership, Federal Bureau of Investigations, and/or Secret Service created 1/5 to 1/19/2021, relating or concerning (1) plans to resume the Joint Session of Congress on 1/6/2021 after disrupted, (2) why, when, and by who a recess of the Joint Session of Congress was decided or recommended in the early afternoon of 1/6/2021, (3) any effect from the discovery of pipe bombs near Capitol Hill on 1/6/2021 upon the Join Sessions, (4) when the decision to recess Congress started, that is when the cause for recess first existed, (5) how demonstrators arriving after the recess caused a recess.”
Pierce, who founded the National Constitutional Law Union in 2021, argues the subpoenas to testify will finally force Congress to do its job amid a stalemate of broken promises to the political prisoners and the American people.
“These key GOP House leaders have said repeatedly that they support the cause of the January 6 defendants and so, we’d like to have their testimony,” Pierce told WND in an exclusive interview. “They were all on Capitol Hill that day on Jan. 6. There has been some confusion as to why Congress recessed. There’s been some serious confusion about how much videotape exists from that day.
“We’ve heard sentiments of support and promises to release the tapes and various promises to investigate January 6. We haven’t seen a lot of action. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. These subpoenas should simply be seen as an invitation to come to trial, to come to the district courthouse.
“This subpoena requires them to come and testify. They could choose to get their fancy lawyers on Capitol Hill that the government pays for and try to fight it, but that would be very disappointing because that would indicate that they actually are not interested in helping these folks.”
If the GOP lawmakers fail to comply with the subpoenas, Pierce boldly contends, they will expose themselves as corrupt.”
“They can challenge it and they can try to quash it. I suppose the government could make some effort to get the judge to not enforce it,” he said. “That would be certainly strange in this situation for the government to try and prevent GOP House leaders from testifying as to what happened that day. But I guess we’ll have to see how they react to it.”
Both Greene and Gaetz have visited the District of Columbia jail to meet with and check on conditions for the Jan. 6 defendants, but have yet to spearhead any legislative action to remedy the litany of constitutional abuses to which J6 defendants are subjected, including pretrial detention and the Justice Department’s unhinged over-prosecution.
McCarthy pledged to release the 43,000 hours of Capitol security footage from Jan. 6 in its entirety to exonerate both lawmakers and civilians accused of wrongdoing in connection to the riot, among many other promises he made to become speaker of the House that he has yet to fulfill.
The “public should see what happened” that day, rather than rely on the report from the House Select J6 Committee, McCarthy insisted in January.
In an effort to portray Jan. 6 as an “insurrection” akin to Pearl Harbor and the terror attacks of 9/11, the partisan House Select Jan. 6 committee was caught manipulating evidence during its live, primetime broadcasts of the J6 hearing, going so far as to even flagrantly doctor text exchanges between Republican members of Congress.
GOP members of Congress vowed to conduct a “real January 6 investigation” following the sham hearings. But no such investigation has been conducted by GOP lawmakers to date.
In March, McCarthy, the House speaker, met with the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot dead by police as she tried to climb through a broken window during the Capitol Riot. McCarthy claimed he had not even seen the video of Babbitt’s death that had aired ad-infinitum across mainstream media.
Instead of publicly releasing the trove of Jan. 6 surveillance footage, in February McCarthy gave only Tucker Carlson, then with Fox News, exclusive access to the tapes. Then in June, Greene announced McCarthy would give just three news outlets “unfettered access to the J6 tapes,” Just the News founder John Solomon, Julie Kelly, senior writer at American Greatness, and a third still-undisclosed outlet.
Greene claims that publicly disclosing all the footage could “put the security of the Capitol at risk” and encourage “Sedition Hunters” to help the FBI and Capitol Police identify still more people who allegedly committed crimes during what they call an “insurrection.”
Yet Sedition Hunters, allegedly government contractors, already have obtained thousands of hours of Jan. 6 footage and have developed a massive database of Americans who protested in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, by a team filled with data scientists and software engineers.
Defense attorneys issued a subpoena for former President Donald Trump to testify in the Proud Boys trial before the defendants were found guilty of the Civil War-era offense of “seditious conspiracy.” But government prosecutors managed to annul the subpoena.
Pierce’s client, J6 defendant Ryan Zinke, is the first case in which members of Congress have been subpoenaed to testify.
Zink’s father was a Republican congressional candidate in Arizona, and Zink accompanied his father to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 on the campaign trail. Yet now, Zink is facing years in prison for “Obstruction of an Official Proceeding; Knowingly Entering or Remaining in any Restricted Building or Grounds Without Lawful Authority and engaging in any act of physical violence against any person or property in any restricted building or grounds,” according to the Biden Department of Justice.
Congress has plenary power over the District of Columbia and the authority to relocate the J6 trials to a jurisdiction that does not have a 92% voting rate for Joe Biden and where the potential jury pool doesn’t overwhelmingly support Antifa and Black Lives Matter radicalism.
But not a single member of Congress, including those who purport to stand with inmates being held indefinitely by the Biden administration, has attended their trial underway daily at the Barry Prettyman Courthouse, which is blocks away from the Capitol building.
“I wish all of them would have taken the time to see at least some portion of some trials,” commented Pierce, “and to send to watch some portion of some trials. Honestly, I’d like to see all these figures use their fundraising apparatus to help these folks to pay for the cost of defense. We haven’t seen that so far.”
Pierce added, “I’ve obviously been critical of them and as far as I’m concerned, they deserve it. But again, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and see if they want to comply with the subpoena and show up and testify about what happened on Jan. 6.
“President Trump said the other day one of the reasons this is happening is that Kevin McCarthy and his folks have not done enough, or anything, to actually investigate January 6. The GOP has not taken the offense – they have not defunded the FBI or the prosecution. They have not released the 40,000-plus hours of tapes that they promised they would. We were promised we’re gonna have real January 6 hearings. It hasn’t happened at all. And so here we are. We will ask some questions under oath at these trials to understand what’s going on.”
Meanwhile, Jonathon Mosley, a defense attorney and paralegal with Pierce’s NCLU and a WND columnist, warns the NCLU will continue to subpoena testimony from members of Congress until all the exculpatory evidence is exposed.
“Ryan Zinke is just the first case that they’ve been subpoenaed in, and his father ran as a Republican for Congress in Arizona. There will be more,” Mosely told WND in an exclusive interview.
“If you walk out of the courtroom, you can look at the Capitol Building unobstructed from the front steps of the courthouse,” he said. “These members of Congress should be delighted to take a three-minute Uber ride over to the court and come and help and support these Jan. 6 defendants by explaining what they know and what they saw on the other side of the Capitol.
“I would hope that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan would just be pleased as punch to come down there and not just talk about how they support January 6 defendants, but actually do something. It’s hard for Marjorie Taylor Greene to get into the jail, but she’s never even sent a staffer to go over to sit in the courtroom and listen to what’s going on.”
Congress has given obfuscated answers to even the most basic questions about Jan. 6, warns defense attorney Roger Roots, another lawyer with Pierce’s firm.
“Every member of Congress in the Capitol that day is a witness and we want to know their observations,” Roots told WND. “Did they need to close out? Did they need to go to recess – there’s are the questions I have! Remember the House chamber was never breached. Did it need to go into recess at all?”
Roots, who represents Dominic Pezzola, the only member of the Proud Boys who was acquitted of seditious conspiracy, warns that Congress’s failure to act is facilitating the government’s railroading of defendants who are facing decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.
“We’ve never had any congressional testimony in any of these trials,” he said. “What did they see? What did they hear? Did they really need to go on recess at all?”
The NCLU, concluded Pierce, is doing what the ACLU used to say it would do, “which is to fight every day to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans, no matter what political party they are.”
“Right now, it may seem that conservatives are the ones targeted by the federal government, but these things change. The pendulum of power will swing someday, it won’t be left in charge, and they will be wishing that they had these constitutional rights that seem to be shredded on a daily basis,” he said. “You can’t count on politicians these days, that much has been made clear. It doesn’t matter whether they have an R or D behind their name. We cannot trust politicians.”
He added: “The only way that this nation stays free is through two things, God and the United States Constitution. The Constitution is not a piece of paper that can sit there and protect our rights and our freedoms. It requires brave citizens and lawyers, all kinds of folks who are fighting in the trenches every day anytime those constitutional rights are violated. If that doesn’t happen, then our rights just die on the vine, and we’re nothing more special than any other nation on earth and we’re going to be in a tyrannical society.”
via wnd
