By Jack Cashill
For a criminal defense attorney, the scariest moment in any trial is when his client unwittingly opens the door to otherwise inadmissible evidence.
On Thursday, during her acceptance speech, Vice-President Kamala Harris opened that door. The Trump people would have preferred that no one at the DNC talk about January 6, but Rep. Jamie Raskin shattered that hope on the convention’s opening night in a speech so laden with lies Satan was envious.
Harris was much more careful, too careful. So crafted were her words that they revealed a signature speech pattern. As shall be seen, this pattern was evident in her first — and last — interview about her role on January 6, which she gave in January 2021. The silence then and since screams out for an explanation.
Here, for instance, is an example of Harris’s duplicitousness excerpted from her convention speech. “[Trump] sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.” For starters, the mob was conspicuously unarmed. Of course, too, Trump encouraged the crowd at his speech to march “over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” And finally, the crowd at the Ellipse where Trump spoke did not reach the Capitol until at least an hour after the Capitol was breached.
In her defense, Harris might say Trump did tell his crowd to go to the Capitol. If not with guns, some were armed with flag poles and the like, and a few probably did mix it up with the police. Together, however, these half-truths amount to a conscious misrepresentation of Trump’s role on January 6.
In a similar pattern, the half-truths Harris shared with Jane Pauley, on the January 17, 2021, edition of CBS Sunday Morning, amount to a conscious deception about her whereabouts on January 6.
After showing a series of riot images, Pauley asked Harris, “January 6 was something seismic. Something seismic happened that day. May I ask, was the TV on? Did someone say, ‘Madam Vice President-Elect, you gotta see this, come.’ How did that unfold?”
Responded Harris cautiously, “I was at the Capitol that morning, and then I was in a meeting, and I was told that I should leave. And then I was taken to a secure location, with my husband.” Yes, Harris was at the Capitol that morning. Yes, she was in a meeting. Yes, she was taken to a secure location.
Together, however, these carefully crafted half-truths amount to a lie. Here, Harris left the impression that she had to leave the Capitol because of the riot. In fact, she was at the DNC and had to leave that location at about 1:15 p.m. because of the pipe bomb found outside the building ten minutes earlier. The Capitol would not be evacuated for another hour.
This deception had consequences. As I detailed in an earlier piece in American Thinker, for nearly a year prosecutors were telling J6 judges and juries that Harris “remained within the Capitol building” throughout the riot. As a Secret Service protectee, any site Harris visited was considered “restricted.” The scores of defendants who violated this restricted space had their charges amplified.
The question remains: why did Harris deceive not only the public but also the courts about her presence at the DNC? For those who prefer video to print as an explanatory medium, Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert and I compressed the whole of “Kamalagate” into a three-minute video.
Whatever Harris’s role, the evidence continues to mount that there was a plot underway on January 6 to incite enough chaos to shut down the certification process. The launch hour seems to have been 1 p.m, the time when the certification process began at the Capitol.
In brief, Ray Epps and his crew breached the Capitol perimeter just before 1 p.m. A still unidentified man put the noose on a pre-constructed gallows at 1 p.m. The still unidentified “scaffold commander” mounted the media scaffolding and began barking orders to the protestors shortly after 1 p.m. And, most relevant for Harris, pipe bombs planted by an unidentified bomber were found near the DNC shortly before and shortly after 1 p.m. respectively.
There has been an obviousness to the plot most evident in the failure of the FBI to identify key January 6 provocateurs and in their kid gloves handling of Ray Epps. Not only did Epps encourage the initial breach and a secondary breach, but he also provided hands-on help to those pushing a large metal Trump sign into a line of police officers. At 2:12, Epps texted his nephew boasting that he had “orchestrated” events at the Capitol. He wasn’t kidding.
Perversely, the more evidence that surfaced against Epps, the more the media embraced him. Not until September 23, 2023, did Epps plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge with no jail time and only then because his preferential treatment embarrassed the keepers of the narrative. As to the scaffold commander, the faux hangman, and a few other window breakers, they somehow baffled the facial recognition tools of the FBI.
What has not been pursued and prosecuted is as important as what has been. The ONLY person seen and recorded exhorting protesters to revert to violence is Ray Epps, yet he is a leftist darling and gets barely a wrist slap. Crimes that are impossible to solve: who planted the pipe bombs, who erected the Pence effigy, who instigated the violence, who bombs pregnancy crisis centers, who left Trump vulnerable on July 13, why did Crooks try to assassinate Trump. The difficulty arises from a total lack of interest by he left in anyone knowing the answers.