Free Republic

The Capitol riot of January 2021 set off the largest criminal investigation in the Justice Department’s history. For federal prosecutor Ashley Akers, it was a defining moment in a seven-year career spent untangling complex cases, from wire fraud to domestic terrorism. She helped put away dozens of rioters – including some who swung bats and beat police officers. Then the tables turned. On his first day back in office, U.S. President Donald Trump granted clemency to every criminally charged January 6 rioter. Akers resigned. Now, Akers and other prosecutors who handled Capitol riot cases face a new threat. Reuters has...

Cold Case Heats Up"[The current FBI] was competent at cracking the case; [Christopher Wray's] was competent at corruption and obstructing it."- Mike BenzDo you have any idea what tapestry of corruption and crime is attached to the little thread of the J6 / DNC / RNC pipe bomber suspect arrested yesterday by the FBI? Consider this: suspect Brian Cole, Jr., is alive and probably talking, unlike, say, Jeffrey Epstein and Thomas Matthew Crooks in other matters of public interest. Let’s hope he is under FBI protection in custody, lest something. . . say. . . happen to him.Dressed for government...

Ms. Bondi has just stated that the current Administration would like to restore faith in the FBI. She also said the pipe bomber evidence had been gathering dust. Kudos to Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, and the fine forensic work of the FBI! Since it has taken 5 years to solve this case, please post the questions you would like to see answered in your lifetime, here, regarding this case.

A suspect who allegedly planted pipe bombs blocks from the U.S. Capitol on January 5, 2021, is now in federal custody after a nearly five-year investigation, law enforcement sources told Fox News Digital on Thursday. The FBI arrested the suspect, a male living in Virginia, early Thursday morning, the sources said. The man in custody is 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. of Woodbridge, two sources said. Authorities discovered the two pipe bombs near the Republican and Democratic National Committees' headquarters around the same time that thousands of protesters a few blocks away began to descend on the Capitol over the 2020...

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Wednesday ordered two Jan. 6 defendants pardoned by President Donald Trump to be refunded in full for restitution payments made and fines incurred as part of their earlier criminal cases. It was a reversal from just months earlier, when the same judge rejected their bid for repayment. Boasberg used a memo order Wednesday to outline the fairly complex case history for Cynthia Ballenger and her husband, Christopher Price, both of whom had been tried and convicted on misdemeanor charges in connection with events of Jan. 6, 2021, and ordered to pay hundreds of dollars...

A federal security officer linked to a thwarted Jan. 6 pipe bomb attack cleared her name by providing an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed, sources told CBS News. The FBI has now ruled her out as a suspect in the 2021 plot, according to three sources — but only after her name circulated on social platforms and a conservative news site. How an innocent woman's name came to be publicly linked to the unexploded pipe bombs is a question that has raised concerns among some senior officials in the Trump...

New York Assemblyman Chuck Lavine, a Democrat first elected to state office in 2005, has become one of a handful of unlikely leaders of state efforts to preserve the history of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection. Sitting in front of a bookshelf in his home office in Glen Cove, New York, a historic community just south of the Long Island Sound, Lavine, 78, has a pile of work on his desk — a proposal to establish a deer management program in his county, and material on organizing a youth reading program and promoting a food drive. And while...

Jorge Bonilla wrote a story here on Sunday about the BBC bosses, Director General Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness, being forced to resign due to their organization doctoring a clip of President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.So how did Politico cover this scandal? By treading lightly on the details while emphasizing that "the latest crisis marks a significant escalation in attacks on the BBC from the right."In addition, strongly implied that the Trump administration's reaction to the BBC scandal displayed unseemly hubris as you can see in the title of their Sunday story by Matt Honeycombe-Foster, "Trump...

The BBC misled viewers by doctoring a video of President Donald Trump to make it appear he was encouraging the Capitol protest on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a whistleblower memo viewed by the Telegraph. The corporation aired the video during a Panorama program titled "Trump: A Second Chance," which was broadcast a week before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The spliced-together version made it seem as though Trump said: "We're gonna walk down to the Capitol and I'll be with you, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not gonna have...

The FBI is reupping its call for information about an unsolved case that has vexed the agency for years: the planting of bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters the night before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. The agency released several new security camera videos of the still-unidentified suspect on Wednesday, offering up a more complete visual timeline of the person's movements on foot in Washington, D.C., both before and after the pipe bombs were placed. The previously unreleased tape includes several videos of the person walking toward the DNC headquarters, where a bomb...

A bronze statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike, which was toppled by demonstrators in 2020 following George Floyd’s death, was reinstalled this past weekend in Washington, D.C. The statue, which stands 11 feet tall atop a 16-foot granite pedestal, was pulled down with ropes, spray-painted with graffiti and set on fire by demonstrators who viewed it as a symbol of systemic racism and the Confederacy. Pike was a Confederate general in the Civil War and also served as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He was one of the most influential figures in the history of American Freemasonry...

This week, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) told LindellTV reporter Alison Steinberg to "shut up." The incident occurred as she was being assisted in her efforts to navigate the stairs to the Capitol building in DC. "I could've been seriously injured or killed!" Pelosi contended. "I have a right to walk without being accosted by unwanted questions." "I was only trying to get Speaker Pelosi's response to Republican assertions that she was at least partially to blame for the disorder at the Capitol on January 6, 2021," Steinberg said. "Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund...

Now that the curtain’s getting pulled back more and more on the January 6th setup… and yes, the infamous “Pipe Bomb” hoax that aged about as well as gas-station sushi, the bombshells are coming in fast and furious style. Most of us already knew J6 was less “insurrection” and much more “fedsurrection,” and that the pipe bomb story was a political fairytale. So, while a lot of people are done with bombshells and ready for indictments, it’s still worth connecting the dots. Because, let’s face it, if there’s one person who wants justice more than anyone, it’s President Trump… the...

After targeting one former FBI director he forced out, Trump raised the prospect of an investigation into a different former FBI director he forced out.For more than four years, a wide variety of Republican conspiracy theorists clung to a ridiculous idea about the Jan. 6 attack: It was federal law enforcement, they’ve claimed, that secretly instigated the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol. The absurd claims grew so common that they were given a name: the “fedsurrection” narrative.Indeed, at the heart of the theory is the idea that insurrectionist rioters were actually the victims on Jan. 6: These poor, unsuspecting partisans...

The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to "wokeness" and allowed its employees to become “pawns in a political war,” according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years. Scores of FBI agents and personnel – many from the bureau’s premier Washington field office (WFO) – sent anonymous complaints to the after-action team detailing how agents were sent into an unsafe...

The FBI has acknowledged it had 275 plainclothes agents in the massive crowds on Jan. 6, 2021, more than four and a half years after questions were first raised about the level of FBI involvement that day, Blaze News has learned. A senior congressional source said the number is not necessarily a surprise, since the FBI often embeds countersurveillance personnel at large events. But given the FBI’s until-now steadfast refusal to disclose the level of its presence at the Capitol, the figure might still be viewed with skepticism in some quarters. The news comes in the wake of claims by...

Laura Loomer @LauraLoomer Ashli Babbitt has been offered a full military funeral with honors by the Trump administration. She was shot and killed by a black police officer inside the US Capitol on J6. 10:30 PM · Aug 28, 2025

Nancy Pelosi is probably kicking herself over her most recent X post, because it opened a can of worms she never wanted spilled. But TDS got in the way, and she couldn’t help herself. In a desperate effort to smear President Trump’s plan to clean up DC’s deadly streets, Pelosi took to X and claimed that Trump “delayed” deploying the National Guard on January 6… a claim that instantly blew back on her, in a big way, dredging up an old debate about her role that day. ... But even worse for Pelosi was the blistering response from former Capitol...

JPMorgan and Bank of America “debanked” President Trump for his role in the January 6 Capitol Hill melee following pressure from the Biden administration’s banking regulators and the Federal Reserve, people with direct knowledge of the matter tell The Post. The exact reason for Trump and his tens of millions of dollars in holdings being kicked off the JPMorgan banking platform, and then denied access to Bank of America’s services has yet to be reported. But sources at the banks — the No. 1 and No. 2 largest in the US in terms of assets — confirmed the cause stemmed...

The Federal District Court for the District of Columbia has been a safe haven for Democrats, with the justices there willing repeatedly to favor plaintiffs who have filed suits against the Trump administration. Margot Cleveland obtained a memo from a federal judicial conference held this past March showing that the DC judges are actively hostile to Donald Trump and want to ensure the Supreme Court shares that hostility. This behavior crashes into the federal canons governing judges, as well as into the reality of Trump’s conduct. Before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, the DC District Court had...