Justice Department Admits In Case Filing It Is Withholding Potential Exculpatory Evidence From January 6 Defendants

It has been long suggested that the January 6 defendants who have been put through hell in jail cells for over six months, beaten, hogtied, and humiliated by guards, many of them in solitary confinement, and most for misdemeanor charges, have had their due process and Constitutional rights denied them.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has produced one of the first documented admissions that prosecutors are withholding potentially exculpatory evidence in court cases concerning the January 6 defendants.

On Monday, acting US Attorney Channing Phillips implied that this is the motivation behind not releasing the over 14,000 hours of video footage of the January 6 events to defense attorneys and the public in United States v. Couy Griffin.

Griffin, who is a county commissioner for Otero County, New Mexico, was arrested and charged with Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building, a misdemeanor, and Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building, a misdemeanor, on January 19. The prosecution tried to waive Griffin’s right to a speedy trial.

The defendant was released on his own recognizance on February 5, 2021. He sat for 17 days in jail for a pair of misdemeanors. Put that into perspective by realizing Kamala Harris supported an organization that collected donations to bail out felony looters and rioters during the summer of 2020 nightly riots so that people who set buildings on fire, stole from stores and other businesses didn’t spend a single full night in jail.

According to a court filing, on March 18, 2021, the United States filed a motion for a 60-day continuance of the proceeding.

The government’s reasoning on its motion was that the Capitol Breach investigation was so complex and sweeping that it would “make the immediate legal proceeding impossible, or result in a miscarriage of justice,” the prosecutors argued. A miscarriage of justice walking through the Capitol building taking photos.

The defense called the prosecution’s bluff. The US attorneys did not want to give the defendant a speedy trial because they have other areas of concern.

“The same day, Defendant filed an opposition to the government’s motion, objecting to tolling of his constitutional and statutory rights to a speedy trial. Defendant asserted that there was nothing complex about his case, which ‘actually involves pictures of [him] with a bullhorn on the Capitol steps,’ argued that the government had mischaracterized its own ‘logistical and manpower burdens’ as a complexity created by the case itself, and essentially accused the government of weaponizing the STA ‘to strategically manage which trials and cases it wishes to put forward to the public first’,” the court filing reads.

Due process dictates that the prosecution must provide any exculpatory evidence it finds against a defendant, and yet the politicized and crooked DOJ has refused to comply. The problem here is that the DOJ refuses to hand over potential exculpatory evidence to be discovered in the over 14,000 hours of video documentary footage of the events that took place at the Capitol building on January 6.

“Although we are aware that we possess some information that the defense may view as supportive of arguments that law enforcement authorized defendants (including Defendant) to enter the restricted grounds, e.g., images of officers hugging or fist bumping rioters, posing for photos with rioters, and moving bike racks, we are not in a position to state whether we have identified all such information,” Acting United States Attorney Channing D. Phillips writes.

I have watched video of Capitol Police opening the doors and waiving protesters through and other video of Capitol Police removing barricades out of the way and waiving people through to go enter the building. The police told protesters to proceed so long as they remain peaceful.

The 14,000 hours of video could also provide some insight into undercover police and FBI agents and FBI informants working in the crowd with extremist groups on January 6. At least one undercover agent with the Metro Police was confirmed in a court filing.

“An accused US Capitol protester spoke with an undercover Washington police officer on Jan. 6 who later connected the man to an undercover FBI worker,” the Epoch Times reported.

It appears more and more that what we have here is a massive government cover up. You don’t withhold due process rights, exculpatory evidence, and hold misdemeanor defendants in jail for half a year, and many in solitary confinement, unless the government is exploiting the situation for political purposes, which seems to be the case.

None of the over 500 defendants have been charged with anything like insurrection, treason, or an act to overthrow the government and that’s because that’s not what happened by all accounts we know of watching video that did make it out of the clutches of biased, corrupt prosecutors.

The government has charged many of the defendants with exaggerated felonies which are being knocked down to misdemeanors.

“So far, at least 30 defendants have pleaded guilty,” CBS News reported on Wednesday. “At least 24 have pleaded guilty to misdemeanors only, while six have pleaded guilty to felonies.”

“What is obvious now in hindsight is that the Biden Justice Department prosecutors sought and obtained felony charges in many cases based on almost no meaningful review of actual evidence about what happened; it used fear and hysteria to justify doing so,” Shipwreckedcrew of Human Events observes. “Now they are being pressed to provide the evidence that is supposed to support the felony charges they brought, and are unable to do so in the timeframe required by law. So they are abandoning the cases on the best possible outcome available—the least serious of all federal crimes, ‘petty’ misdemeanors.”

Did you get that? Prosecutors overcharged January 6 defendants in order to keep them in jail and when the time came to put up or shut up with evidence that supports the charges, they had to do the latter, because there is no evidence to support such charges. This is one of the biggest problems with corrupt governments. Agents do things outside the boundaries of law and due process knowing they will never face any kind of reprimand. Meanwhile, people have been sitting in jail cells for a very long time over charges that dictate they never should have spent a single night in jail.

“Now that the DOJ has gone down the path of exchanging guilty pleas to misdemeanors for some defendants charged with felonies, it will become more difficult to not do the same for a much larger number of defendants where the facts are substantially the same,” the Human Events piece added.

Meanwhile, corrupt Democrat members of Congress continue to hype the events of January 6 as the worst thing to happen in the Capitol since the War of 1812 (their words, not mine) proving that not only are they crooked as the DC Beltway, but they have no working knowlege of the history of the very building in which they work.