“They forced us to lie about everything,” said Tucker Carlson in his speech at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night. The primary reason he supports Donald Trump, Carlson continued, is because Trump “liberated” the American people, liberated us “from the obligation to tell lies.”
I can relate to that. I owe my career as an author -- 15 nonfiction books and several documentaries -- to the legacy media’s unwillingness to tell the truth. To my good fortune, they leave the big stories on the table. Citizen journalists take up the slack -- in my case, TWA Flight 800, the death of Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, the authorship of Dreams from My Father, and the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt among others.
No event in recent memory has spawned as many lies and as much mendacious reporting as the Capitol brouhaha on January 6, 2021. Indeed, citizen journalists and the alternative media are responsible for all honest reporting on this epic subject. Yes, all.
No journalist has experienced January 6 quite as intimately as Steve Baker. He spent nearly two hours live streaming inside the Capitol on that fateful day and is now affiliated with Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze.” In the three years following January 6, Baker has reported fearlessly on the injustice being dished out in the D.C. courts. The DoJ noticed. On March 1, 2024, the FBI disregarded Baker’s status as a journalist and arrested him on four misdemeanor charges.
While ignoring Baker’s arrest, if not applauding it, the legacy media have made a hero out of a man who personifies the era’s mendacity, former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn. If there is any one individual who has ascended into the media stratosphere solely on the basis of a lie it is the shameless Officer Dunn. Unfortunately for Dunn, Baker’s just released two-part documentary, “A Day in the Life of Harry Dunn,” brings him crashing back to earth.
Dunn’s lies matter. They have made him the most celebrated hero of the Left’s most celebrated event. To sell their version of the event, the Left has pitted Dunn against the day’s most reviled villains, the Oath Keepers. To prove that the largely peaceful protest on January 6 was an insurrection or something like it, the Department of Justice needed to convict people who looked like they could actually overthrow the government. Enter the Alpha males of the Oath Keepers and their eyepatch-wearing leader, Stewart Rhodes, stage right.
This loosely affiliated group of 35,000 patriots, two-thirds of whom were veterans of the military or law enforcement, had an unblemished record until they walked into the DoJ’s trap on January 6. In November 2022, the DoJ convicted four members on charges ranging from obstruction of an official proceeding to seditious conspiracy. Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Kelly Meggs 12 years, Jessica Watkins, 8 1/2 years, and Kenneth Harrelson 4 years.
Most conspicuous of those protecting the Capitol from the Oath Keepers on January 6 was Dunn. The 6’ 7” 300-pound African American showboat never could quite keep his story straight, and he talked a lot -- to the FBI, to the House J6 Committee, to his ghostwriter, to every talk show host that would host him, to the jury that convicted the four Oath Keepers, and lately to Harris-Walz supporters on the campaign trail.
In part I of a “Day in the Life,” Baker and his team tracked every minute of Officer Dunn’s movements on January 6. As Baker shows, Dunn stole more valor that day than Tim Walz has in a lifetime. He lied promiscuously about everything, big and small: when he arrived at the Capitol, where he stood post, and, how he responded, in the words of President Joe Biden, to “the vilest racist names” names he was called that day.
Even before the day was through on January 6, Dunn was reciting lines from the Democrats’ well-worn race-baiting playbook. “I got called a nigger 15 times today!” Buzzfeed News reported him shouting to no one in particular in the still occupied Capitol Rotunda.
That number 15 caught my attention. On the afternoon of March 20, 2010, the day of a major Obamacare protest on Capitol Hill, Rep. Andre Carson, a Muslim from Indiana, avoided the tunnel and walked provocatively from the Cannon Office Building through the crowd across Independence Avenue to the Capitol.
At the Capitol, Carson told reporters what happened en route. As Carson explained, he “heard ‘n-word, n-word,’ at least 15 times, hundreds of people, and Capitol Police finally became aware and started protecting us.” A number as specific as “15,” the playbook likely noted, makes an accusation sound more credible.
Unfortunately for Carson, by 2010 scores of protestors had smart phones or video cameras. Jesse Jackson Jr., who accompanied Carson, carried two cameras himself. The late Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for any video showing any congressman being called the n-word. No one came forward, not even Jackson.
Almost everyone was shooting video on January 6, Baker included, and the FBI confiscated much of it. To help identify protestors, the DoJ gave a leftist collective known as the “Sedition Hunters” unprecedented access to the footage. These Junior G-Men and the DoJ would have loved to find someone, anyone, using the n-word against Dunn or any other officer that day. As at the Capitol Hill protest of 2010, they have produced nothing.
Had Dunn confined his lying to the Left’s traditional art of race baiting, he would not have doomed the Oath Keepers and endangered himself. But to sustain his heroic media image, he chose to lie to the FBI and at the Oath Keepers’ trial. Baker documents Dunn’s dissembling beyond argument in Part II of his video series.
Minutes after the shooting of protestor Ashli Babbitt, a frightened Dunn, armed with an M-4 rifle, stood at the top of a staircase telling a group of Oath Keepers that officers were down and they were being taken out on stretchers. “Y’all are f***ing us up,” he shouted.
The Capitol Police lieutenant who killed Ashli Babbitt, Michael Byrd, triggered the panic when he sent out over his radio, “Shots are being fired at us and we’re sh, uhh, prepared to fire back at them. We have guns drawn.” Only one shot was fired that say, and Byrd fired it. Lying was epidemic among the Capitol Police.
According to the initial FBI 302 from May 21, 2021, “Dunn advised he allowed [the Oath Keepers] to stand in front of him to help keep the protestors from getting down the stairs.” The video supports Dunn’s initial testimony about Oath Keepers. These imposing gents kept the raucous crowd at bay.
Once the DoJ decided to set up the Oath Keepers for a fall, it became clear that Dunn’s original testimony presented a problem. So the DoJ sent the FBI back for a second interview on August 16, 2021. The “second” interview seems to be an established FBI practice. In the case of TWA 800, for instance, the FBI and/or the CIA fully manufactured second interviews for the three most pivotal eyewitnesses to a missile strike and fudged the original testimony of several others.
Dunn’s second interview fit the mold. “That testimony was not only changed to a contentious encounter with the Oath Keepers,” says Baker, “but [the FBI agents] also created another event in another part of the building to say that [Dunn] misremembered and was confusing the two.” At the trial, Dunn continued to lie. When attorneys for the defendants asked Dunn if any of the Oath Keepers assisted him, he replied, “Absolutely not.”
For Baker, the real question was not whether Dunn committed perjury. With the surfacing of the video and the 302s, that much is a given. The real question, one that only Congress can address, is who suborned that perjury.
To get at the larger truth, Congress needs to establish a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commission. TWA Flight 800 was shot down in 1996. For the last 28 years at least, the legacy media have conspired with the intelligence community to shape the news to advance the Democrat’s best interests. This will be a busy commission.
When I first got involved with TWA 800 20-some years ago, I considered the media-deep state coverup of the crash the most successful in American peacetime history. Now TWA 800 would scarcely make the top 10. God willing, liberation begins on November 5. That day cannot come soon enough.
Jack Cashill’s Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 is now available in all formats.
Image: Tyler Merbler
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