Amanda Carpenter: Need to Know

Welcome to the Need to Know podcast. I’m Amanda Carpenter filling in for trolley site. And thank you so much for hanging with me today. We tried this concept a few weeks ago and this time I’m gonna do it just a little bit different where we’re gonna go deep on just one topic. And today, we’re gonna talk about what I think is shaping up to be Donald Trump’s first twenty twenty four campaign promise.

And what is that? Partans for the January sixth writers.

In

a sort of under the radar podcast interview last Thursday, Donald Trump said he would issue full pardons and, quote, official government apologies to the writers who storm the capital. And he told us to a maga personality. She’s out of Pittsburgh. Her name is Wendy Bell. And, you know, oddly enough, she was taken off the air in twenty twenty when she called on park Rangers.

To shoot anyone on-site who defaced Confederate monuments. And so I I tell you that just to give you a flavor for what kind of broadcaster she is. And what kind of broadcaster Trump is speaking with. And let’s listen to a clip of her back then.

My easy solution FOR THE PARK RANGERS AND HOPEFULLY SNIPERS WHO ARE GOING TO BE WATCHING FOR THIS IS TO SHOOT ON COP, SHOOT ON-site. Shoot done. No more messing with monuments. You wanna mess with the monument? Done.

Get out. And

now here she is on rumble talking with Donald Trump about pardoning the writers. I wanna ask you, I’m certainly concerned about these January sixth defendants, sir. There are hundreds

of people who have been dragged through hell and some are still locked up in the DC gitmo I am sickens, sir. How do we write this wrong? What can you do?

So I met with a number of times that I met with and I’m financially supporting people that are incredible. And they were in my office actually two days ago. It’s very much of my mind. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them. What they’ve done to these people, it’s disgraceful.

And and mostly, I mean, you know, it’s it’s they’re firing, they’re policemen, they’re they’re people in the military, the people that were you know, you look at what took place with the police with their us hearing a man and so many different things. And we’re working on it very hard. We’re working with legals. And I’m looking at it very carefully. I’ve I’ve studied it.

I studied cases and contributions should be made. We have to do that because, you know, they have some good lawyers. But even the good lawyers,

studies fraudulent judges. You get before Amen.

You get some of these judges that that are so so nasty and so angry mean the sentences. And I will tell you, I will look very, very favorably about about full pardons. If I decide to run and if I win, I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons. In full pardons.

That well deserved. I

think that’s probably gonna be the best because even if they go for for two months or six months and, you know, they have sentences that could take a lot longer

than that. But we’ll

be looking very very seriously at both parties because we can’t let that happen. What’s happened here at And I mean, full pardons with an apology just to many an apology.

Amen.

They’ve been so badly so badly treated. And I know that’s just in my little list. I know that’s a big subject for you, and it’s a big subject for me too. Hey, man.

Hey, man. Full pardons. I mean, how many times did he say it? Full pardons? Full pardons?

Very serious about this. I think he means it. Right? This is the most definitively he’s spoken about this, but make no mistake. This is not some one off idea because he’s been floating it publicly for the last year.

Take a listen to what he had to say at this Texas rally back in January twenty twenty two.

If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January six fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.

And here he is, in June, talking at a faith in freedom conference, where he is telling the audience again, how unfairly they’re being treated and why,

you know,

if he decides to be present again, he might do something about it.

January sixth defendants are having their lives totally destroyed and being treated worse than terrorists and murderers despite Most being charged with parading through the

capital, most people should not be treated the way they’re being treated. And if I become president someday, if I decide to do it, I will be looking at them very very seriously for pardons, very very seriously. Should’ve been treated for anything.

So where is this coming from other than Trump? Who actually wants this? Who are the people advocating on behalf of the writers? And how did this become a thing? That’s what I needed to know.

So I think the first thing to understand is that from the very beginning, we’re talking January sixth itself. Donald Trump has promoted the idea that the January six protesters were all good people who were right to act on their feelings about the election and were being subjected to some kind of double standard. This was

his message to them that day. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens.

You see the way others are treated that are so bad and

so evil. I know how you feel.

So that’s the message that came from the top. On day one. And that is a message he is stuck to, firmly. Even as, you know, everyone else in official Washington was rattled rightly by the events of January sixth, and we’re putting out statements again rightly condemning the rioters. And Donald Trump has never wavered from this idea that they did nothing wrong.

He started talking about this a few weeks later, he rammed on to his beach club in Mar a Lago And of course, the reporters went down there to interview him and his thoughts about the election, everything else. And this is how he described the crowd to a pair of Washington Post reporters.

A loving crowd too, by the way. There was a lot of love. I’ve heard that from everybody. Many many people told me that was a loving crowd.

Happy happy happy happy. So where does this go? Just think this through a little bit. If you believe as Donald Trump does that this was a loving crowd, who acted on behalf of a good cause. These people are being unfairly treated.

What do you do about it? There’s there’s has to be a remedy for this. And as all these writers started being arrested, started being processed through criminal justice system, people started to ask. And among those people were a group of Republican members of congress who you’re gonna love this group, they began taking a special interest in the writers held in pre trial detention in Washington DC. And that was Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gates, Louis Gomer, Paul Gossar, Andy Biggs, and Bob Good.

They well, they attempted to hold a press conference outside the Department of Justice to draw attention to the plate of these rioters. And it didn’t go so well. They went there to talk about who they call the political prisoners. That’s what they call the jail rioters. But they were shouted down and madely drowned out by this guy who just brought a whistle to the press conference and just began whistling at them.

Blowing the whistles they tried to talk. And so they had to abandon their press conference. It was mocked at the time everybody made fun of it. But they didn’t give up on this cause, not by any means. And I think, let’s just take a minute to talk about the people being held in this jail according to the Department of Justice.

More than eight hundred and sixty defendants have been arrested in all fifty states in connection with the breach. But there’s only about forty being held here. They can’t be let on bail because they’re considered too dangerous to their community, and they’re waiting to go through trial. One of these folks was just sentenced to seven years. His name is Guy Raffett.

And just to give you kind of a flavor for, you know, the very fine people being held in this facility, who didn’t engage in violence. He was a member of the Texas three percenters. What he did that day, he recruited other people to come to Washington because he, quote, wanted to strike the match in DCM the six, packed along with them, he had a bunch of handguns, air style rifles, On his person that day, he wore body armor, he carried flex cuffs, and he had a radio for communication with his fellow militia members, I guess. And at the time, he said that he carried the gun and the zip ties. This is according to evidence because he would rather be tried by a jury of twelve than carried by six.

So, you know, he got his wish there. Also, according to evidence, he was on a mission to stop Congress from acting. I mean, obviously, that’s what they wanted to do. And he was specifically targeting House Speaker Pelosi and then Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. And he said he planned to drag closely out of the capitol by her ankles, and he wanted to see her head hit every effing stare on the way out.

So, you know, loving crowd. And he didn’t go into the capital that day. He didn’t engage in physical violence. And so, I guess that makes him a peace loving catriate. You can decide for yourself because Raffat is the kind of person that Donald Trump would probably be interested in partnering.

So back to the DC jail, there’s still defendants there waiting for trial. They call themselves the sixers, and they have their own wing. And let’s be honest, the conditions there are notoriously bad. Prisoners are treated badly there. That’s not something exclusive to the sixers.

It’s been happening for a long time. It’s not defensible. Judge recently held top jail officials in contempt because they delayed medical care for one of the defendants in their custody. And this is sadly the reality for the more than fourteen hundred people who are held there is not exclusive to the January six defenders. And there is an entirely different story about why anyone cares about the conditions in this prison and and it’s only being written about because there’s magna and suction as being held there, but that is a different story.

But I want to be focused on is this new political movement that is focused on the idea that these writers did nothing wrong and they’re being treated unfairly. Which is where I’m gonna be focused today. And to that end, there was a follow-up to the literally Whistle Blower Press Conference. That was called the justice for January sixth rally. That was held in September.

And although security for the event was like super sky high. Everyone is worried that there would be more violence. They put the fences back up around the capital. It did fizzle out. So let’s listen to this report.

FROM CBCS’ CATHERINE HERAGE.

I THINK IF THERE’S ONE BEAT THAT WE’VE HEARD PRETTY CONSISTENTLY SO FAR HAS BEEN ABOUT ASHLEY BAVEN. ASHIE VABBIT WAS THE AIR Force FEBREN WHO WE KNOW THE VIDEO WAS CLIMBING THROUGH THAT WINDOW INSIDE OF CAPITAL AND THEN WAS SHOT THAT OFFICER AS review was found to have acted appropriately, but she certainly is maybe perhaps for lack of a better word becomes sort of a murder a symbol for some of the people who are here today. But again, it’s a very small, very small group. It in no way reflects the seven hundred people that they thought would come based on the security permit that they asked for, Lana.

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson gave the Justice for January six movement a gigantic boost last fall. And that’s when he began promoting this three part they build it as a documentary. It’s not really a documentary. It’s a series called the Patriot purge. And in it, he presented really a jarring new theory that essentially implies that the prosecution of January six writers and others, which he describes as quote, legacy Americans, Wink, wink, presents a new war on terror against American citizens.

Just listen to this. The

helicopters have left Afghanistan

and

now they’ve landed here at home They began to fight a new enemy in a new war on terror, not you should understand a metaphorical war, but an actual. Soldiers in paramilitary law enforce and guided by the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies, hunting down American citizens, purging them from society Eddie throwing some of them into solitary confinement.

Now, if there is a lot more to this, and he goes on to talk about how there’s government agents that entice and entrap patriotic Americans and sort of bait them into violence on January sixth, and that this was all maybe maybe could be a false flag operation.

Then

he also has this tangent where he talks about how there’s this domestic form of quote, debatification a foot where the government is purging Trump sympathizing military members from the ranks and doing, you know, maybe even worse to them. There’s this all these open ended questions that lead you to assume the absolute worst. And this is the patriot purge. This is the title of the series because these good Americans are being baited, trapped, enticed by the government with these tools developed in the old war on terror. And that brings us back to Ashley Babbit.

You know the name? She was the Army veteran who shot in the neck by law enforcement in January six, and she is really the prime example of this page rate purge. And to draw this connection between the old Warren Terre and the new Warren Terre Tucker Carlson, he just absolutely bombards the viewer. With the most abysmal images from Guantanamo Bay. We’re talking about, you know, the guys with hoods, braided, and orange jumpsuits.

Being let around naked and abused the stock video images of waterboarding dogs barking with their teeth bearing, and you see the planes flying into the twin towers over and over. You keep hearing George Bush’s famous line. You are either with us or you’re with the terrorists. And this is all sort of just like mushed together To give the viewer the idea that between George Bush and Joe Biden, there is this permanent official dumb in Washington that is out to get you the American citizen using the same surveillance, same torture methods that were used to hunt down the terrorists behind nine eleven. It is a lot to take in.

I do not recommend watching it. But all this adds up to, according to Tucker, These magna people who showed up on the capital on January sixth are the new targets. Of the new warrant error, and it’s all because they oppose Joe Biden.

Because of January sixth, we must now use launch forcemen and military force to arrest, imprison, and otherwise crush anyone who leads opposition to Joe Biden’s cover. We are living through the transformation of a formerly Democratic republic into something else.

And here, Tucker brings it directly to the January six writers.

In two thousand one, Cofer Black, then the head of counter terrorism, the CIA, said this. After nine eleven, the gloves come off. Now twenty years later, those same ungloved hands that tortured and killed suspected foreign terrorists have been unshackled on behalf of a political party here at home. Suddenly, the United States of America has political prisoners. American citizens, some of whom committed no violence whatsoever on January sixth, remain rotting in pretrial detention in one of the worst jails in the country.

And Tucker goes on to say if the government keeps this up, there are likely to be unintended consequences. What does he mean by that? Well, the logic goes that the government keeps abating the Trump supporters. There will be more violence. There will be more terrorism.

They will be forced to take action as a kind of retribution for the prosecution of the January six rioters and for the killing of Ashley Abbott And if you watch this film, which again, I don’t recommend doing, you’re gonna see Ashley Babbit die many times. You’re going to see her die over and over. There’s very high quality, close range images of her death where you see the law enforcement officer his gun behind the glass doors because she’s attempting to enter the house chambers. She’s held up. The gun fires.

She’s shot into the neck. She falls down immediately. She bleeds out. You see her dead body carried down the stairs? I mean, it’s it’s not once.

It’s again and again and again. And here is Tucker’s message why this happened.

The terrorists who brought down the world trade centers in two thousand one explained why they didn’t. They describe the attacks of nine eleven as acts of vengeance blow back from our foreign policy decisions. Decisions are government made in order to fight global tariff. In other words, in the end, our war on terrorism caused more of it. That’s clearly true, and we shouldn’t be surprised to hear it.

Unintended consequences are the first rule of life. She have got to wonder about the unintended effects of this second newly declared war on terror, the one being waged in our country right now. They’re telling you that crushing the civil rights of American citizens is necessary. We have no choice if we wanna live in a safer country. We must spy on our political opponents.

We must silence them. Defame name them, prevent them from having jobs, take away their bank accounts, throw them in solitary confinement, shoot them in the neck if necessary sir. They’re pushing you toward violence and they’re doing it on purpose.

I mean, this all sounds scary. I mean, listen to that music. The music is super hyped up. It’s meant to provoke an emotional reaction. And I could go through and fact check all this.

But the point is, Tucker Carlson is creating pure propaganda to bolster the cause of the riders. That’s the purpose of this. It’s not to be based in facts. It is to bolster the cause of the riders. Now long after this series was released, again, Marjade Taylor Green are gonna hear more of her Matt Gates and their fellow sixer sympathizing members of Congress went on a tour of the so called Patriot Wing of the DCJL.

This is different than the press conference that they attempted to hold. This time, they they were going in. Right? They’re gonna go in, see the riders, and that’s what they did. And around that time, Tucker was also doing an interview promoting his series that was asking why Trump wasn’t doing more to help the writers with their legal bills.

People

are gonna be offended that I asked this, but I can’t control myself. So, like, what about the president on whose behalf they were gathered that day? Like, has anybody sent them money? I mean, is anybody really braised the people around to brand parscale. Otherwise, people were getting rich.

Right? Right. Complaining that the last election was rigged, which it clearly was — Right. — obviously. Yes.

And they’re making all this money and all these people are sending all this money down to Florida. But is any of that money going to defend these people who went to this rally on behalf of that candidate?

I

just find that appalling. That’s

what I’m gonna do. So Tucker was doing most of this in November of last year. But Marjorie Taylor Green kept it up. She didn’t just go visit the writers in prison. She issued a report about it.

And she held another press conference this time in the United States capital where she couldn’t be whittled down to talk about it. And so I’m just gonna read a little bit from this which was titled unusually cool. It’s available online if you care to read more. But this is what our staff said. Moments after representatives, Greene and Gomer entered the room that inmates broken to excited, yelling, and triumphant shouting, astounded by a visit from two city members of Congress.

The inmates were overwhelmed with emotions. Some crying almost all emotionally shaken. One inmate asked to hug congressman Green. And it goes on to talk about how they all gathered together for their nightly singing of the star spangled banner. This is a thing that they do inside the prison.

They sing it every night at nine PM. Greene brought them all together for a huddle where she prayed and told them how much they were loved. And another note from the report says quote, as staff slowly escorted the congressional delegation out of the room, the January six detainees began a USA chant followed by a let’s go branded chant. Now let’s fast forward just a little bit more to the one year anniversary of the capital attack because Not everyone is where Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green and Donald Trump were, but they did begin toying the line. You would think it’d be the opposite it.

Right? And the one year anniversary, we’ll talk about what an awful event this was, how we should take all action we can to prevent it from happening ever again. But that’s not really what happened. And you can see that from a very weird incident that happened with my former boss, Ted Cruz. There was this senate oversight hearing on January fifth where he made the mistake of describing the people who entered the capital as domestic terrorists.

This was not good. Tucker Carlson did not like it one bet. They’re busy repeating the talking points that Marek Garland has written for them. Here’s one example.

We are approaching a solemn anniversary this week, and it is an anniversary of a violent a terrorist attack on the capital where we saw the men and women of law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage, incredible bravery, risk their lives to defend the men and women who serve in this capital.

In Tucker Land and Magaland, that was a big no no. He did not watch the patriot purge. Otherwise, he would have known that Tucker is saying the writers are being unjustly treated as terrorists, and that’s exactly the problem. And so cruise had to make it right with Tucker. He booked himself on the show the next night to grovel and apologize and here that is.

The way I phrased things yesterday, it it was sloppy and and it was frankly dumb. And I

don’t buy that all day.

Whoa. Whoa.

Whoa. I don’t buy that for look, I’ve known you

a long time since before you went to the senate.

And

so the anniversary of January sixth, January twenty twenty one, that time period is important. Because that’s when you began to see the activists, the MagA Media, Members of Congress, Trump and even Trump endorsed candidates really get behind this idea that the writers were entitled to mercy and you couldn’t talk about them in these harsh terms. J. D. Vance got the message, he watched the page rate purge, he’s listening to Donald Trump because he tweeted around that time that, quote, many of these prisoners are veterans who serve their country honorably and are accused of nothing.

There are people help them if you can. And so that was all happening in January of this year. And maybe I don’t know if you’re a Twitter addict like me. I hope you’re not. There was this image of a strange banner that turned up at CPAC, you know, these big digital images on the main stage where they can put, you know, essentially whatever Kyron they want.

It’s like a giant Fox News Kyron. And what it said is that we are domestic terrorists. And I think a lot of people looked at that and said, why why would they do that? Well, if you were following the story, you get what the dig is. You get what the inside joke is.

And it’s because they feel as if they are being treated like domestic terrorists. They’re being unfairly targeted. Like their domestic terrorists, just like Tucker Set. And also at CPAC, again, if you’re a Twitter addict, this might be burned into your mind sadly, I apologize if it is because I probably put it into your feed, but it was the image of they constructed this, like, fake prison cell and they had this actor in orange jumpsuit. You know, he’s he’s he’s a sixer.

Clearly a fixer. There’s like Trump propaganda all over the inside of the fake prison cell. He’s crying. If you were attending the conference, you could wear headphones and listen to these tearful pleased from the writers about how they did nothing wrong. And then there was Margie Taylor Green, who, of course, she walked in there, got down on her knees, and prayed with the actor who was fate crying.

It was pretty looney. And again, a lot of people laughed at it, but you can kind of see how this idea, this radical idea that Trump planted on January sixth, the day of the attack, that These people did nothing wrong. We’re being treated unfairly and we’re just loving patriots. Has now become full circle to mainstream, main stage conservative politics. And I believe there were probably other people at CPAC who walked by that and thought it was looney.

But nobody said anything about it. Nobody blinked. Right? Like, this is not a problem. There’s nothing to see here, just some more weird stuff.

Because the underlying idea is fairly important, which brings me to a Trump rally that happened in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Trump was a headliner there. He was going there to, you know, promo, doctor Oz, and Doug Mastriano, which in itself should be weird enough. Okay. Put that aside.

I did watch the rally. I also watched the warm up speakers and lo and behold, among them, front and center, was a woman who’s leading the efforts to fundraise for the January sixers. And here she is. My name is Cynthia Hughes, And I’m the founder of the Patriot Freedom Project. A foundation started after the arrest of my nephew who has been languishing behind the walls of a DC jail almost two years for his participation In the January sixth rally, she didn’t come out of nowhere.

Steve Bannon has been giving her a platform airtime for a while. Dinesh DeSousa gave her a hundred thousand dollars. He’s got all that, you know, sweet two thousand mule money to hand out, so that’s super nice of them. And now She’s being platformed at major rallies covered by all of the media by Donald Trump himself. And that one DM person blinks.

As I close this out, listen, I know what the typical Trump defenders or at least the semi respectable ones are going to say about all this. They’re gonna say that, blah blah blah, this is just talk. Donald Trump hasn’t seriously thought about pardoning the writers. He’s too stupid to understand all the crimes, let alone the pardoning, and that is just not true. It is not true.

He’s already when he was president, he did exercise his pardon power in staggering ways. He gave out pardons for Steve Bannon Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Nadal is just like a blip in his presidential history. There was also the reports from political in the final days of his presidency that he was considering blanket pardons for all the writers. So, yeah, again, another little data point that is very much on the brain. There’s also the revelations from the January sixth committee that several members of Congress, including, you know, our girl, Marjorie Taylor Green, was inquiring about the possibility of pardons Rudy Giuliani, one of his aides, was appealing to the Trump administration trying to get a message to Trump about a possible pardon.

And so This isn’t this isn’t a one off. This is something that was bandied about in the Trump administration in the final days that the former president continues to push that his activist push, major Republican, you know, senatorial candidates have grabbed a hold on and Tucker Charles and his champion. So it’s happening. It’s basically a campaign promise. There’s not Donald Trump really doesn’t talk about policy that much.

This is one of

them. So

before I go, I do want to make a request. Let’s get all the candidates on the record about this.

You

know, maybe that fancy, Nancy, ivy league lawyer, Rhonda Santos, might have some ideas about this. Maybe somebody could ask him. Because I would like to know, this is not an issue about what Trump might do in twenty twenty four. It is a live issue right now about law in order and democracy in our country. And so that’s what you need to know about the movement to pardon the January six writers.

I thank you for listening. I so appreciated your feedback from the last time we tried this, and so I invite you to come back. Tell me what you thought about this again. And, Charlie, he will be making his triumphant return to the microphone tomorrow and I cannot wait to hear from him. I know he has lots to talk about with you.

You’re worried about the economy. Inflation is high. Your

paycheck doesn’t cover as much as it used to. And we live under the threat of a looming recession. And sure, you’re

doing okay, but you could be doing better. The

afford anything podcast explains the economy and the market detailing how to make wise choices on the way you spend and invest.

Afford anything talks about how to avoid common pitfalls, how to refine your mental models, and how to think about how to think. Make smarter choices and build a better life.

Afford anything wherever you listen.