Executive Summary
Joe Hoft joined me this week to talk about American Martyrs, the documentary he and his brother Jim built around the men and women prosecuted over January 6th — and what he found is not a story about a riot. It is a story about a procedure. Joe is an auditor by training, with ten degrees and designations and years spent reporting to audit committees around the world. He does not argue from feeling. He tests whether the story matches the ledger.
It does not. Judges instructed juries that five police officers were killed on January 6th. None were. Jurors were shown video of events the defendants were not present for. Enrique Tarrio — who was not in Washington that day — spent roughly two to three years in solitary confinement in prisons around the country before a Department of Justice official slid a piece of paper across a table and offered him his freedom the next morning in exchange for a signed statement that he had conspired with President Trump to overthrow the government. He refused. He received 22 years. Stuart Rhodes was handed the same offer by the same official. That official also ran the pipe bomber case and was involved in General Flynn's proceedings.
Then there are the devices themselves. Two pipe bombs, placed the night before outside the RNC and DNC, built around an oven timer set for twenty minutes, tucked under benches — and found the following day. Those devices became the justification for clearing the Capitol, which meant Nancy Pelosi presided rather than Mike Pence, and objections to certification were never heard.
And the whole sequence had a rehearsal. A simulation at the Boston FBI field office, run in the same season Event 201 gamed out a pandemic and the Transition Integrity Project gamed out the 2020 election.
Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
What the Ledger Says About the Pipe Bombs
Start with the evidence that has been sitting in plain view for years.
The devices were, in Joe's word, a joke. An oven timer — the kind you set for twenty minutes to take cookies out. Jimmy-rigged together. Slid under benches outside two party headquarters.
They were discovered the next day.
Think about what that means as a matter of physics before you think about it as politics. A twenty-minute timer cannot generate a next-day emergency. Whatever those devices were built to accomplish, detonation was not on the list.
What they did accomplish was procedural. The Capitol was cleared — we have bombers targeting both locations, this is serious, everybody out. When the chamber came back, Pelosi was in charge. And Pelosi did not allow objections to the certification to be raised.
That last piece is the one almost nobody connects. When challenges later went to court, they were thrown out for lack of standing. There was no standing because no objection had been permitted on the floor. The door was closed in the chamber, and the courts then pointed at the closed door.
Now the suspect. FirstNet was the entity that first flagged the devices, and later reported that the person who sat at both benches carried a number tied to law enforcement. The investigator Steve Baker then reported the figure was a woman — and that her gait matched a Capitol Police officer who is now with the CIA.
Meanwhile, the man sitting in a cell over it is a young Black man with autism. His family says he never could have done it. His daily routine was a walk to the 7-Eleven and back with his little chihuahua. His build does not match the video — short legs, big feet. And at one of the first hearings in his case, paper was taped over the courtroom window so nobody could see in.
Why would you cover a courtroom window?
The Trials Were the Operation
Here is where I have to be blunt, because this part should stop every American cold regardless of what they think about that day.
A federal judge told a jury that five police officers were killed on January 6th. Not one was. That is not interpretation. That is an instruction from the bench, on the record, in a case where a citizen's next two decades were at stake. Jurors were also shown video of events the defendant on trial was not present for.
And then there is Enrique Tarrio, who was not in Washington at all, and was sentenced to 22 years as a terrorist. Rudy Giuliani appears in the film describing what he saw at the Capitol doors — people being let in, in his comparison, like an usher at Radio City. There was no signage. One or two men walked inside a building that had been opened for them.
The offer to Tarrio tells you the whole purpose. They needed somebody — anybody — to say they had committed sedition alongside President Trump. That was the deliverable. Years in solitary, the paper on the table, the promise of home tomorrow.
He told them to go to hell. So did the others. They would not lie about their president to buy their own freedom.
That is who we are. And they did not know they were dealing with real Americans.
The Rehearsal Nobody Was Supposed to Notice
January 6th was gamed out in advance.
In the Boston FBI field office there was a simulation, conducted in roughly the same window as two others: Event 201, which gamed out a pandemic, and the Transition Integrity Project, which gamed out the 2020 election. Three exercises. Three scenarios. All written down by the people who ran them.
And the objective, as Joe reads it, was singular — to ensure that somehow, some way, Trump was charged and found guilty of insurrection. No holds barred.
Zoom out one more click and the shape gets clearer. What has been run against this country since late 2015 is a tradecraft playbook for regime change operations — the same one that has been running all over the world since the 1950s, perfected across decades of interfering in other nations' elections.
None of it is new. It has simply never been aimed inward before.
The Law Schools Built the Lawyers
The durability of all of this comes from one place, and it is not Washington. It is the law schools.
Go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s — Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, revolutionary Marxists led by Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Their cases were botched, essentially all of them. Dohrn went to teach at Northwestern Law School instead of to prison for life. Ayers went to the University of Chicago. Roughly twenty-five thousand people moved through that movement, and a great many walked straight into academia.
They did not use the election system back then. They learned, over decades, to use it — to chip away and to seat candidates who would chip away at the Constitution.
Look at what is taught now. Critical legal theory is a real discipline, the way critical race theory is. Read the catalogs at Georgetown Law, NYU Law, Harvard Law, Berkeley Law, UCLA Law. They are teaching activism using law. That is lawfare, written into a syllabus.
And the practitioners are not in exile. Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Rosa Brooks — all tied to the Transition Integrity Project, all holding positions at elite law schools, all of them back at work on the midterms and 2028 right now. None held accountable at all.
The judges come through the same door. Joe's observation is devastating in its simplicity: at confirmation hearings for many of these judges, one or two senators showed up, and the nominations went straight through. When a sitting president tries to seat judges, the blue slip lets a single senator say no.
Fifty-one intelligence officials, including five former CIA directors, signed a coordinated letter they knew was false and released it to the American people days before an election. The emails exist. Every one of them should have faced conspiracy to defraud the United States before a federal election. Instead, every one of them was placed at an NGO or a think tank.
If nobody ever pays the price, the price stays worth paying.
Follow the Money and the Meetings
Two more entries in the ledger, because they explain who benefits.
The FBI, the NSA, Nakasone, and an official named Flores knew that 200 million American citizens' names, addresses, and voting records had been transferred to the Chinese Communist Party. No indictments.
And John Podesta, while running Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, went roughly three weeks before that election with the Center for American Progress to meet the CCP's top cyber officials — a meeting documented on that organization's own website. He conceded on the candidate's behalf on election night because they did not expect to lose. Two weeks later he was back in Beijing. Podesta was also tapped by Ban Ki-moon as one of the writers of Agenda 2030 — seventeen Sustainable Development Goals and a global digital public infrastructure with full track-and-trace surveillance already running in China — and he implemented it inside every administration he served.
None of this was hidden. The Church Committee investigated the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Institute, and MacArthur decades ago, and the investigators concluded those entities were created to subvert the voice, the vote, and the will of the people by putting themselves between the citizen and the election system.
We documented the mechanism. Then we looked away while it scaled.
This Is Where We Get Our Sobriety Back
Here is the pivot, and I mean it.
Every fact above is public. The filings, the catalogs, the Beijing meeting posted by the people who attended it. The information is not hidden. Our attention is — and that is what an addiction to conflict and chaos does. It keeps us fighting each other over the outrage of the hour while the architecture gets poured.
Recovery in civic life is unglamorous. You stop reacting and you start reading. You trade the rush of the fight for the receipt.
And the numbers are on our side. Joe puts this country at roughly 70/30 awake, based on polling rather than election results. Seventy percent. We are not a remnant; we have simply been talked into behaving like one. Look at Spain — ordinary people filled the streets and said we are finished with this. No court ordered it. Consent was withdrawn in public, at scale.
When one of the January 6th men walked out of jail on a presidential pardon, the entire prison started banging on the bars, cheering him out, calling don't forget us. Men with every reason to be bitter chose to celebrate somebody else's freedom.
That instinct is still in us. We the People are the answer, and the men in those cells already proved what we are made of. The far cheaper version is asked of the rest of us: read the document, call the office, show up to the hearing, and bring somebody who does not already agree.
Who rules? In the republic our Founders built, the answer has never been a bench, a board, or a foundation.
Key Takeaways
- Judges instructed juries that five police officers were killed on January 6th when none were, and jurors were shown video of events the defendants were not present for.
- Enrique Tarrio was not in Washington that day. After two to three years in solitary, he was offered freedom for a signed confession of conspiracy with President Trump, refused, and received 22 years. Stuart Rhodes got the same offer from the same DOJ official.
- The J6 pipe bombs used an oven timer set for twenty minutes and were found the next day — after serving as the justification to clear the Capitol so Pelosi, not Pence, would preside.
- Because Pelosi barred objections to certification, later court challenges were dismissed for lack of standing.
- January 6th was gamed out at the Boston FBI field office, alongside Event 201 for the pandemic and the Transition Integrity Project for the 2020 election.
- Fifty-one intelligence officials, including five CIA directors, signed a coordinated letter they knew was false before a federal election. None was indicted; all landed at NGOs or think tanks.
- Church Committee investigators concluded the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and MacArthur foundations were created to subvert the voice, the vote, and the will of the people.
- Joe Hoft estimates the country is roughly 70/30 awake based on polling — a supermajority that has been convinced it is a minority.
Frequently Asked Questions
If the pipe bomb suspect's gait didn't match, why is an autistic man still charged with it?
Because the same Department of Justice official who ran the pipe bomber case also ran the January 6th prosecutions. The man charged is a young Black man with autism whose family says his daily routine was a walk to 7-Eleven with his chihuahua and whose build — short legs, big feet — does not match the footage. At one of the first hearings, paper was taped over the courtroom window.
Why has nobody been prosecuted for any of this?
Joe's answer was direct: nothing has been done that we are aware of, and it is being blocked. Obstacles are being put up. An executive order went after the law firms and the specific individuals involved — Eisen, Elias, Zeitz — and nothing followed. His harder question is the one to carry into the next news cycle: if the entire objective of these organizations is to destroy a president and a movement, why do they hold nonprofit status?
Is it fair to call January 6th an "operation" rather than a riot?
Test it the way an auditor would. Was there a rehearsal? Yes, at the Boston field office. Was there a pretext? Two devices with oven timers, found the next day. Did the pretext produce a specific outcome? The chamber was cleared, the presiding officer changed, and objections were blocked — which is exactly why later challenges failed for lack of standing. Each of those is a documented event.
What does China have to do with January 6th?
Directly, nothing. Structurally, a great deal. The same network ran the legal war and the foreign relationships: 200 million Americans' voting records in CCP hands with no indictments, a campaign chairman meeting Beijing's cyber leadership weeks before an election, and an Agenda 2030 surveillance architecture already operating in China. Joe said he once wondered whether the devil was behind something this coordinated, and concluded it was not the devil — it was an operation with subsets of operations.
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