CNN tried to fact-check Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy over claims related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The network got fact-checked instead.
On Wednesday, Ramaswamy ventured into hostile territory with a CNN town hall moderated by the network’s Abby Phillip.
“Let me ask you about something you said at the debate last week,” Phillip said. “You used the phrase ‘inside job’ to describe what happened on January 6th.”
Phillip went on to ask Ramaswamy whether the presidential candidate was at all concerned about the rhetoric being deployed in courtrooms of Capitol riot defendants.
Ramaswamy responded by sharing his own skepticism of federal involvement in the riot three years ago.
“If you had told me that January 6th was in any way an inside job, the subject of government entrapment, I would have told you that was crazy talk. Fringe, conspiracy nonsense,” Ramaswamy said. “I can tell you now, having gone somewhat deep in this, it’s not.”
“The reality is this,” Ramaswamy explained. “We do have a government, first of all, we have to acknowledge that has lied to us systematically over the last several years.”
Ramaswamy cited government lies over Covid-19 and Hunter Biden’s laptop, the latter of which 51 former intelligence officials sought to discredit as a Russian smear campaign. The infamous letter published by Politico is now under investigation by House Republicans as an operation by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
“The reality is we know that there were federal law enforcement agents in that building; we don’t know how many,” Ramaswamy said.
We don’t know how many because the FBI has refused to disclose how many. In January last year, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz asked the Executive Assistant Director for the FBI’s National Security Branch, Jill Sanborn, point blank, “How many agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of Jan. 6?”
“I can’t go into the specifics of sources and methods,” she said.
A former assistant FBI director told lawmakers that the FBI had so many paid informants in the crowd that the bureau lost count, according to the New York Post in September. Whistleblowers from within the FBI, meanwhile, have faced retribution for the agency’s response to the Capitol riot.
But before Ramaswamy could continue Wednesday night, Phillip cut him off.
“I’m going to go ahead and interrupt you here,” Phillip said, “you’re saying that there were federal agents on January 6th. There is no evidence that there were federal agents in the crowd on January 6th.”
Ramaswamy cited the FBI’s refusal to give lawmakers clear answers over the presence of undercover informants in the crowd. Phillip wouldn’t accept that. But if she won’t take Ramaswamy’s word for it, would she accept it from The New York Times?
Here’s a headline from the paper in September 2021: “Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant.”
What about Newsweek? According to the magazine in January last year, the Justice Department had even deployed special commandos with “shoot to kill authority.”
And in August, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who oversaw campus security the day of the riot under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said in an interview there were “multiple” federal agents in the crowd.
But according to Phillip, “there is no evidence that there were federal agents in the crowd on January 6th?”
Ramaswamy went on to highlight the thousands of hours of Capitol security footage kept under lock and seal by House Democrats that Republicans are finally releasing. The J6 tapes reveal demonstrators being peacefully escorted throughout the building contrary to the carefully selected, dramatized footage used by Democrats’ weaponized Jan. 6 Committee. The first batch of previously concealed footage was aired by former Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson before his abrupt departure from the network.
“Now you see footage coming of actually rolling out the red carpet for Capitol Police allowing people in right through the front door,” Ramaswamy said. “Why did they suppress footage?”
Phillip responded by talking over the Republican entrepreneur to complain the candidate was trying to “cherry-pick” examples from the Jan. 6 riot.
“You cannot cherry-pick examples,” she said, “and say that is what happened on January 6th.”
Except that’s precisely what CNN and the Democrats’ Select Committee on Jan. 6 did for two years following the riot. When newly-elected Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana took over as head of the lower chamber, he committed to publically releasing the rest of the Capitol security footage. Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who was overwhelmingly voted out of office after leading the Jan. 6 Committee as vice chair, responded by re-publishing a compilation of the riot with cherry-picked clips aired by allied networks such as CNN on repeat.
“Here’s some January 6th video for you,” Cheney wrote on X.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, whom Cheney’s Soviet-style committee sought to frame as a collaborator in an apparent “insurrection,” wrote back.
“Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times. You made sure we saw that — and nothing else,” Lee wrote. “It’s the other stuff — what you deliberately hid from us — that we find so upsetting.”
“I don’t want to have to interrupt you,” Phillip said, “I really don’t. But I don’t want you to mislead the audience here at all.”
Ironically, Phillip’s interruption only prevented CNN’s audience from hearing the truth about Jan. 6 and being further misled.