While we’ve all been heavily focused on the election, the NY Times dropped an important story about Jan. 6 that many didn’t notice.
Remember when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) grilled an FBI official about FBI or confidential human sources (informants) who may have been involved or had knowledge about Jan. 6?
Turns out that one of the top people in the Oathkeepers — their vice president — was an FBI informant, according to the NY Times.
An F.B.I. informant who was embedded for months in the inner circle of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, is likely to testify as a defense witness at the seditious conspiracy trial of Mr. Rhodes in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The informant, Greg McWhirter, served as the Oath Keepers’ vice president but was secretly reporting to the F.B.I. about the group’s activities in the weeks and months leading up to the Capitol attack, according to two people familiar with the matter.
But that wasn’t all. Let’s read on.
Mr. McWhirter is the second known F.B.I. confidential source who was in a position to provide information to federal agents about the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, raising questions about why investigators did not know more about the attack on the Capitol.
Near the start of Mr. Rhodes’s trial, Abdullah Rasheed, a former Oath Keeper from West Virginia, told the jury that he became alarmed by the violent language Mr. Rhodes used during a video conference with members of his group in November 2020 and provided the F.B.I. with a recording of the call.
“The more I listened to the call,” Mr. Rasheed testified, “it sounded like we were going to war against the United States government.”
Officials at the F.B.I. did not respond to Mr. Rasheed’s initial attempts to contact them and only reached out to him after Jan. 6.
The F.B.I. also had a confidential source in the Kansas City chapter of the Proud Boys in the months leading up to Jan. 6. That person, a low-level member of the far-right group, marched with other Proud Boys into the Capitol on Jan. 6. But in meetings with the government before the Capitol was stormed, he told investigators that the organization had not planned to attack the building and stop the certification of the 2020 election.
That was in addition to the fact that the head of the Proud Boys had also been a government informant in the past and just coincidentally was arrested before Jan. 6 so he wasn’t at the site of the riot.
Even the NY Times snuck in the obvious question here: If the FBI had all these contacts and they’re claiming it was some prior plot, why wasn’t it stopped beforehand, if it was a “seditious conspiracy” and not a spontaneous riot?
When the FBI got a tip from Rasheed, why didn’t they follow up on it? It would seem with something that specific you would want to follow up on it, especially if he was saying there were questions of violence. So why didn’t they?
If McWhirter was a confidential human source, why didn’t the government put him on the stand? Why didn’t they want the jury to hear that they had a confidential human source embedded in the matter? Why is it the defense that wants to call him?
A lot of questions going on here. With all the things that may be on the plate of a new GOP majority, maybe Ted Cruz wants to re-up that grilling and get to the bottom of this.