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Jan. 29, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:04:14
REDEMPTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1010
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Guys, welcome to a special edition of the podcast.
As you might see, if you're watching, as opposed to listening, I've got a friend in the studio.
He's Matthew DeSilva.
He is a January 6th political prisoner, now out thanks to President Trump's pardon of the January 6th hostages, as he calls them.
And as you'll see from today's episode, Matt is no ordinary January 6th defendant.
He's actually someone that has been known to Debbie and me for a while.
And we're going to go through Matt's story and draw out the larger significance of his incarceration and also of January 6th.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or Rumble, please subscribe to my channel.
If you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please help get the word out.
I'd appreciate it.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Matt, it's a real pleasure to have you.
You came to our neck of the woods to do this, and we had the pleasure of having dinner with you and your lovely wife.
And, you know, wow, you have been behind bars to...
Talk about how long and talk about the feeling of freedom.
How did you find out that you were going to get out?
Well, that's a very interesting story because on January 20th, we were all anticipating some kind of news.
And as the day went on, President Trump did speech after speech after speech, and he never quite said it.
Right.
So we were all on the edge of our seats wondering what was going to happen, if it was going to happen, and when it was going to happen.
And in Beaumont Low, specifically the prison where I was at, there was a really big winter storm coming through that night.
And we suspected that the...
People at Beaumont would use that as an excuse not to let us out if he gave the order too late.
So we were just waiting and waiting and waiting.
And then suddenly news started to trickle in that the pardons had been signed.
And we got news from a case manager who was working there at that time.
He started the paperwork.
And then he told us to go back to our unit.
He would get back to us in about an hour.
And four hours later, we finally...
Finally got the nod to leave.
And during that entire time, we were just sort of discussing with ourselves what we would do if they wouldn't let us out, who we would call, and how we would affect our own release.
Now when you say we, do you mean, were there a bunch of January 6th guys in that particular facility?
At the Beaumont area, there were six of us.
Four of us were in the low security prison.
So there were four of us there, two of us.
I was in a unit with one other Jan Sixer.
And then there was another in the unit below me and another in the unit across from me.
And these are basically sealed off.
Buildings where we can't really walk or talk between us.
So if you're in the same unit, you can have communications.
But if you're outside that unit, you don't know what the other guy is doing.
You described at dinner as you were walking out with another guy.
A guy that you said had some kind of a limp.
Talk about that.
Well, Kyle...
I don't know specifically what his issue is, but he clearly had a kind of problem with his walk, and so he sort of walked with a severe limp, and obviously he couldn't run or move fast.
And they called us out very late at night, almost as late as they could have called us out in still effects release before midnight, which they were required to do by law.
And we were walking to the building where they were going to release us, and there were two COs, which is what we call guards in prison, correctional officers.
And as we walked by, the female one yelled out to him, hey, broken legs, ha, like that.
And we just sort of turned and...
Looked at her, excuse me.
And we gave her a kind of one-finger salute at that point.
Mocking, mocking this guy, even on the way out.
On his way out, yeah.
To take it upon herself to mock him on his way out.
And then the other CO, Littles, said, hey, you just flipped off a lieutenant.
And we said we didn't care because we were getting out.
She wasn't our lieutenant anymore.
But it was a really weird experience because she didn't need to say anything.
Regardless of her political views or her views about whether or not we needed to be there, she could share them with her fellow co-worker after we were out of sight.
But she made the point of calling out to us, like a catcall, to try to belittle us on the way out.
Matt, were you in a year and a half?
Thereabouts.
Right, 18 months.
18 months end to end.
I was allowed the privilege to self-surrender after my conviction.
So I was able to go home, drop off my clothes after my trial in D.C., and then I self-surrendered.
And from there, I began the sort of diesel therapy that they talk about, where you go from prison to prison to prison.
And then finally, I ended up in Washington, D.C., where I had to wait.
Supposedly only three months for my sentencing.
That was the original plan.
And then that became nine months before I was finally sentenced.
And then I was moved out of D.C. and I went to Philly and then Oklahoma and then finally to Beaumont, Texas.
What did you say?
You said diesel therapy?
Does that refer to like a truck moving you from place to place?
What's that phrase mean?
Well, diesel therapy is a form of...
Well, it's part of how the Bureau of Prisons will...
Transport a prisoner to their final destination.
They obviously can't do direct flights and they don't do flights every day.
So they'll put you in a place where you're just sort of held for a while and you don't know how long you're going to be there and they don't tell you when you're going to leave.
So you're basically abducted.
They might come in at 1 o'clock in the morning and tell you you're leaving and then you leave.
And then they take you to the next part on the next leg of your journey.
The next part.
Sometimes the BOP uses it as a form of punishment if someone proves that they're not capable of working well with certain COs or certain populations.
They'll just keep them rotating around indefinitely from place to place to place.
One of the things that comes clear out of even the little we've talked about so far is how You become kind of a non-person.
And not only that, you are completely at their mercy.
Now, I wasn't in prison myself.
I was just in a confinement center, kind of a halfway house.
But even there, you realize that, you know...
I have a locker, but it means nothing because they have access to your locker.
They can actually put drugs in your locker without your knowledge.
Absolutely.
So you are a pawn and they know it and you know it.
So it's not like, I think even my attorney had said to me before my confinement, he says, don't think that like they have 70% of the power and you have 30. No, they have 100% and you have zero.
Yes, yes.
So as sometimes unpleasant it might be to work.
With your fellow inmate because they come from all different walks of life and obviously we don't have the same experiences or the same points of references.
Ultimately, you don't want to get too chummy with the guards there because, and this is a hard lesson you sometimes have to learn, they don't always have your best intentions in mind.
So they can do a lot of things to you and there's nothing you can do.
Once you incur the wrath of a particular guard, they can do things like they can plant drugs, they can execute a shot, which is a sort of written reprimand.
That's what they call them.
Can they put you into solitary?
Yes.
One of the interesting things about being in prison...
They like to put people in solitary for just about anything.
If they find something wrong, they can find a reason for putting you in solitary.
So it's difficult if you feel like, if you're a J6-er like we were, you have kind of a target on your back because some of the COs were very politically motivated.
And so you have to walk the line.
Very carefully.
Even more than another normal prisoner.
I felt that way.
I felt that way.
I did not want to go into solitary because I didn't feel like I would weather that experience very well.
I was subjected to a week of solitary in Washington, D.C. as part of their COVID protocol.
It was a quarantine.
And I was in a cell for a week with...
No paper, no pen, no reading material, no radio, no phone access, no commissary access.
Basically, I would wake up in the morning and in my 8x11 cell pace until I thought it was night because I had no window.
I mean, Matt, that is to me almost a terrifying concept because I know you.
We'll get into all that.
And you're a reader.
You're a contemplative guy.
And a life without any activity for the body or the mind is a kind of torture, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
It's something that gets to you and works at you.
And the only way I learned how to deal with that is just to have a routine.
So I would get up.
I would pace constantly.
I would pray constantly.
I would try to remember songs and try to sing songs.
Really ashamed that my memory was so bad.
Physical exercise, like push-ups?
Physical exercise, like push-ups, sit-ups, and things like that.
Just doing whatever you can in the cell to keep your body and your mind active.
And not letting yourself...
It's very tempting in the middle of the day to look at that bed, which is the only other piece of furniture in your cell, and say, I'm just going to lie down for a second.
But if you do that, you're going to upset your sleep schedule, and then you're going to end up waking up in the middle of the night.
It doesn't solve any problems, ultimately.
Very...
Wow.
Now, I mean, Debbie, and I noticed when we saw you that you've lost some weight.
In fact, you are very trim, let's say.
I don't know.
I suppose there's a benefit to that.
But how many pounds did you lose over these 18 months?
And what was your immediate feeling as you stepped out of it, in a sense, into freedom?
Well, yeah, the pounds really started coming off when I got to Beaumont in July.
That was when I started to notice the sort of rapid weight loss.
Is it horrible food?
Interestingly, the food in DC was much worse.
You could barely recognize it as food per se.
Beaumont, when I started out in July, the food quality was much higher, but it was...
The portions were small, and it was hard to get commissary because you'd order commissary, and the people who run commissary wouldn't give it to you because they were either out or they didn't like your face.
So commissary, just to get people, I mean, I think most people know, but it's sort of like you pay for candy bars, right?
Or you pay for...
Snacks.
Little things that you have to...
That you could buy to sort of tide yourself over.
Not just snacks.
You could also get multivitamins.
In Beaumont we could get medicine like ibuprofen.
Things like that.
We didn't have access to a lot of medicine in D.C. So that was pleasant.
But again, you could only order every other week.
And they didn't always give you what you ordered.
And they never were upfront as to why you didn't get what you get.
Are they out?
Or are you supposed to buy it through back channels?
And that's another thing that happens in prison.
Is that like the black market?
Right.
So every job that you can have in prison, you can exploit for personal gain.
So if you work in the kitchen, you can sell food to your fellow inmate.
If you work in the commissary...
You can sell clothes or other high-end items to your fellow inmate.
And of course, for commissary, it's especially egregious because you're already paying a pretty high price for these things.
But then they add this extra black market tax on top of that to make sure you get what you want.
I never took part in that.
There are a lot of inmates who said that that was beyond the pale.
But yeah, there are people who say, well, if you want to get something, You've got to talk to someone who works in commissary.
And I didn't think that that was the way to go.
So I ended up losing a lot of weight because the food portions were small.
Sometimes the meals were very bad.
And on top of that, I was starving for commissary.
Oh, yeah.
You get out.
Was your wife able to come get you?
And so you walk out.
What do you see when you step out?
So when I step out, one of the fellow inmates I was with was Mark Middleton.
And he was working with, I forget the name of it.
It was like the American Patriot Relief, I believe is the organization.
He and his wife were both J6ers, a husband-wife team who had been tried.
Arrested, tried and incarcerated.
She was incarcerated in Fort Worth, and Mark was incarcerated with us.
And he had organized around the country a group of volunteers who would help drive J6ers to their homes.
And that was really nice.
And they were waiting for us there, along with some of the people from the other security levels in Beaumont.
Your wife said something very striking and cool, and that was that there was a group of women and men in North Texas, and they had apparently done a screening of the film Vindicating Trump, and they all got really fired up at the end of it, and they sort of adopted your wife as someone just to be in touch with and just to kind of look out for, and she said that it meant a lot to her.
Yes.
So it's very interesting because I never told anyone about our relationship.
And they just sort of look at your movies and they say, oh, well, these are really interesting.
And they held a screening and they knew us.
And from that...
Point on, they started supporting us, helping to support us financially.
So that was nice and doing a lot of nice things for her.
And I really have to tell you that there were a lot of people, many of whom whose names I don't know.
Some of them I do.
Dwight and Lily Yen, in particular.
There was a person named Dunn and another person whose last name was Chi, QI, who kept on putting money into my commissary.
I don't know them at all.
From their end, they were making sure that I could get fed.
So many people coming together out of nowhere, and I don't know them.
It was such a beautiful...
Idea to have these people writing letters all the time.
We got so many letters.
We got so many letters from so many different people.
And that needs to be cataloged someday because they were all volunteers and they did just marvelous work.
So, Matt, now that you're out, we have some presents for you.
What?
They're mostly goofy presents, and there's kind of an element of humor to them, but I'm going to...
Do I get a shiv?
I'm going to present them to you one by one, because I think you'll...
So, the first one is we have a bottle of wine, but it's no ordinary wine.
This wine is, you'll see, it's Devin Nunes' wine.
So Devin Nunes, who is the head of Truth Social, as you know, has his own vineyard.
He was a congressman in California in the wine country.
So this is Devin Nunes' wine.
Patriot.
It's called Patriot Wine and very appropriate.
Oh wow, thank you so much.
We'll give that to you to put to the side.
And the rest of it we're going to take a look at here.
So we're going to start off with some Republican socks.
Which I think you'll enjoy.
Finally.
I've been wearing non-partisan socks my whole life.
We have two books for you.
Vindicating Trump.
Oh, that's awesome.
And then the other one, well, this is a book that deals with God and suffering.
So I don't know if it's appropriate, but What's So Great About God?
Written by one Dinesh D'Souza.
And then we have four...
Four films for you.
Let's see.
Which are they?
Well, here's Vindicating Trump.
You have to sign these.
We'll sign them afterward.
Here's Death of a Nation.
Awesome.
Here's one that I think you'll identify with, Police State.
Oh, yeah.
Uh-oh.
And this one is one of our favorite films.
I've actually talked about it in the podcast.
It's called Sabina.
Sabina.
And it's just a gorgeous and very uplifting film with a very powerful message.
And you're physical media mavens, too.
That's what I like about this, because I'm very much into physical media.
I don't do the digital copy thing.
So this is awesome.
Yeah, yeah, good stuff.
No, absolutely.
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Alright, so Matt, let's back up here.
We met in kind of an interesting way.
You send an email, and we get a few of these to the website.
Boom.
And Debbie, I will say, was very taken by your email.
It was not a normal email.
It stood out.
And Debbie was like, this guy is being targeted for January 6th.
And so we talked on the phone.
When was this?
This was actually many, many months before.
Right.
Was it about a year before?
It was probably about...
A little under two years ago.
So what happened is I was arrested.
Before I was arrested, I knew they were coming for me.
And I looked around for an attorney.
And I wanted an attorney who had...
Who could talk back to the narrative?
A fighter.
A fighter.
I didn't want someone who would just sort of say, oh, you need to plead guilty and you'll be fine if you just do your time and get out because everyone knows you were crazy and wrong and stupid and this is all your fault.
I didn't want someone who's like that.
I'm willing to take responsibility for everything wrong that I've done, but I wanted someone who was a fighter.
And I came across a news article about Attorney Marina Medvin.
I looked her up.
She used to be the general counsel for the NRA, and she had already been representing another J6er at the time.
And she was very vocal and forceful in approaching the media as well.
And her family is refugees from communism.
Yeah, yeah.
She understands the police state.
Absolutely, absolutely.
That was important to me as well, because my background was I was a Chinese linguist for the Navy.
And I mentioned that in my email to you.
I understand how communism sort of infiltrates a country's systems.
And then one day an iron curtain comes down and they just have control of everything.
And that's what I felt like was happening with January 6th.
And so I contacted her, and we struck up a deal, and she started representing me.
And then she just sort of says offhand, you know, Dinesh D'Souza is asking about if he can help any Jan Sixers.
And I said, oh, okay.
I took that to mean that you were open to helping me with employment or something.
Why did I think that this would work?
Looking back, I had no reason to expect any kind of answer.
Of course, at that point in your life, you're very desperate.
I reached out to you.
Sure, I'm just going to talk to Dinesh D'Souza, and he's going to give me a jump.
And yeah, that's exactly what happened.
That's exactly what happened.
And, you know, you have an unusual background, right?
You lived in Japan.
Talk a little bit about your background.
My resume was written by a child.
It's crazy.
I lived in Japan.
I taught English as a second language for a while.
My degree was in Japanese.
I speak and read and write Japanese.
And then I came back to the United States.
9-11 happened.
And in a sort of peak of patriotism, I joined the military.
I had a college degree.
I could have been an officer, but I stayed enlisted because I came in as a linguist and I liked the linguist job better than the officer job.
So they trained me up at Defense Language Institute in California, Monterey, California.
I learned Mandarin Chinese.
My knowledge of Japanese characters really helped with that.
And then I did signals intelligence missions for the government.
As a Chinese linguist for a few years out of Hawaii, working at above top secret levels to talk about it in a kind of roundabout way, basically at the highest levels of trust for the government.
And then after a while, I decided I didn't really like the scene too much because the Edward Snowden revelations came out.
And I was like, Edward Snowden?
Didn't I see that guy in the hallway that one time?
And I decided that I needed to take a break from that kind of lifestyle.
And I went civilian, working competitive intelligence for a corporate law firm in Dallas.
Then I was sort of pushed out of that position because of my politics.
And I ended up with a much more conservative company, which was doing competitive intelligence analysis.
With federal contractors, it was much more interesting work.
My coworkers were just awesome people to work with.
And they also were the ones who called the FBI. So you were ratted out by your coworkers, basically.
Yes.
At least one of them had to have called the FBI. But that's an interesting story, too, because I was working from home.
And I got a call one day from the lady in HR, and she asked me in April, we were just wondering how your interview with the FBI went.
And I said, what?
And apparently she told me, well, yeah, we saw your picture on the website.
And if you remember the time, they had a website of most wanted.
So I was on the FBI's most wanted website, long hair and a beard.
Like that.
And my initial reaction was, why would you do that?
But she said that they had talked to the FBI a couple months ago.
And at this point, I'm thinking, uh-oh.
I mean, because it was me in the photo.
And I felt like the FBI was going to come for me.
And so a couple months later, I think it was July, from that period in April to July when they finally did come for me, I was basically living as a fugitive in my own house, constantly looking outside my window, my front I was basically living as a fugitive in my own house, at the empty car parked across the street, which obviously had cameras, just waiting for that inevitable knock on the door.
Yeah, and it did come one day.
In July, and it just, I can't describe the feeling that I had when it happened.
It was like, oh, it's finally happening.
Was it like a combination of, was it sort of a weird relief, but combined with terror, combined with...
Uncertainty?
Or what was it?
It was mostly terror at the uncertainty of the situation.
What I wanted most of all...
And did they come with guns and things?
Yeah, they pointed long guns at my middle school English teacher wife and told her to walk slowly backwards out of the house with her hands on her head.
They had me do the same thing.
They cuffed me, leaned me up against the local police car.
A gentleman came over and identified himself as an agent from an Illinois field office for counterterrorism.
And I just looked at him and I thought, he must be enjoying his vacation because why would he be here?
It's not for me.
I just kind of rolled my eyes when he said he was with counterterrorism because it's like, what did I do?
What kind of, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Let's back up to, well, January 6th.
And why did you go to D.C.? And what was the, what happened there that put you on this FBI list?
Right.
So I went to D.C. to protest.
I'm an American.
I have a right to do that.
Nowadays, after the 2024 election, it's obvious to most people that 2020 was a huge outlier.
People are looking at those 80 million votes that Joe Biden got and putting their face...
I want to see the milk carton that has the missing 80 million Biden voters because they didn't show up for Kamala Harris' election.
They were vaporized somehow.
They weren't there for Obama.
Yes.
Millions of votes materialized for Biden, of all people, and then promptly disappeared.
And they disappeared.
And so everyone can see that, and everyone knows that 2020 was not on the up and up.
So people, I don't have to explain that so much anymore.
People know that 2020 was a huge debacle.
So intuitively you felt that, and you went to protest in D.C. Yes, yeah.
What happened there that got you into the Capitol?
What happened there that got you arrested?
What were you charged with?
We walked from the area where Trump gave his speech down to the Capitol.
When I got there, there were no barriers up.
That was one of the things the prosecution tried to say.
He had to have crossed a barrier.
There's no barriers there.
And I walked up to the Capitol.
First of all, I have to say that there was no visible presence of someone saying, go here, do this.
Let's do this.
This is where the route is.
This is how long we're staying here.
I've done a lot of pro-life protests before, and that kind of thing is always...
Out in the open and we know exactly how the protest is going to go.
In this particular case, it was a completely unknown situation.
I didn't know what was going to happen in the afternoon.
I didn't know how this was going to go down.
I didn't know where I was supposed to be.
But I saw a bunch of people walking up to the Capitol.
So I walked up to the Capitol and there were some people holding a door.
And I held the door too.
Why were we holding the door?
Because the cops are coming out.
And it's like, okay.
And then it turns out it was a protester who was banging on the door from the other side.
The protester was trying to let us into a staircase, which was actually external.
At the time, we felt like it would go into the Capitol building, but it was external.
And so there was only one other protester who had been in that area.
And as soon as the door opened and I started to ascend the steps, Right next to the stairs on the cleanly swept marble, for no reason at all, was a pitchfork.
And I saw it and I thought, that was planted.
That was my initial reaction.
It's just instinctual.
And then I said to myself, if you pick that up, because there are cameras everywhere...
People are going to record you with a pitchfork on the West Terrace, and you're going to become a kind of icon of this.
You thought that even then?
I thought it even then, because I knew that the media was going to be up to their own dirty tricks.
I had heard someone had been shot, and my initial reaction is, I don't believe it.
I don't see anyone getting shot out here.
And I just felt like...
There was a lot going on at that moment, and there was a lot of confusion that they maybe meant to have caused.
Did you see, you know, Matt, when you walk in, did you see any cops?
Yeah, so when I got up the stairs, and this is still outside, this is the West Terrace, I saw a group of cops inside the tunnel, and I was going to walk the pitchfork to them, and then I thought that that would be a bad idea, because if I approach...
Cops with a weapon, they might shoot me on the stairs.
So then I tried to go back down the stairs, but I couldn't because there was this tide of humanity coming up.
But eventually we were able to find a way to get rid of the pitchfork.
And you'll notice that no one was hurt with a pitchfork in January 6th, right?
It wasn't used as a weapon.
There's mention of sightings of pitchforks.
But no one was hurt with a pitchfork, to which I would say, you're welcome, America.
Yeah, absolutely.
Did you ever see the cops ever say, hey, this is a restricted area, no one is allowed to be here, you must leave immediately?
Did you ever hear anything to that effect?
No.
At one point, my phone went off and it was a mass alert from Mayor Bowser saying, there's going to be a curfew today at 6. That's what Mayor Bowser put out in the afternoon.
And it was one of those alerts that is pushed to everyone's phone.
So at one point, all of our phones started going beep, and we looked at it.
Oh, six o'clock curfew.
She could have said at that point, they have a lot of ways of letting us know, but no one said, get out of here.
Let's talk about the controversial stuff here, which is that you were charged, in a sense, with violence or fighting with the cops, something involving a shield.
And this is essential because, as you know, in the kind of current debate about all this and debate about the pardons, there's a kind of a standard trope on the part of the media and the Democrats.
And it goes something like this.
It's, hey, listen, Mr. Trump.
Hey, listen, Mr. Republican Senator, it might have been one thing to pardon the peaceful protesters, but what about the violent ones and specifically the ones who were attacking cops?
Right.
Which includes me.
Which includes you.
So let's talk about, first of all, what you did, and then let's go...
Then let's talk about the issue more generally.
So let's start with, what was the violence that you took part in on January 6th?
There was a lot of pushing between the cops and the protesters on the stairs at a certain point that went to a lull.
When that went to a lull and the tunnel had sort of cleared out, I was just sort of standing there and I prayed, what do I do?
And I got a strong inclination that I should go to the top of the stairs.
And I went to the top of the stairs.
I see shields.
I start pushing gently.
And then I start pushing a little bit more forcefully.
Basically letting them know that I'm not here to do any harm.
But I just want to see, you know...
The cops are pushing forward, is what you're saying.
And you are pushing back with your hand?
Yeah, well, I just sort of pushed against the shields, and I pushed against them a couple of times.
At one time, I'm just sort of doing one of these, pushing on the shield, and a hand reaches out between the shields, and it goes right here, tap, tap, tap.
And my face was down, because I'm extremely tired and disoriented by this time.
I'm not thinking well.
I've been tear gassed multiple times, pepper sprayed.
I couldn't leave the area because we were kettled in there.
And it was pure chaos.
I didn't know what else to do.
Someone taps me on the shoulder and I look up.
And right here is the nozzle of a pepper spray canister.
And it goes off right in my face.
And thank goodness I had really long hair in my glasses because it could have gotten right in my eyes.
But I'm knocked back.
I know what it is, and I'm autonomically doing this, which the prosecution said I was trying to hit the cop's hand.
I didn't make physical contact with any cop at any time.
I only interacted with the shields.
And I heard laughter at that point because it was a very puerile ruse to sort of tap me on the shoulder and make me look up.
I have three brothers.
I was laughing too, in spite of myself.
I knew that was a really stupid thing to fall for.
So I'm laughing.
I'm falling backwards.
I get up.
I have a kind of monologue with the cops there, and I tell them, look, I don't want to be here.
This is not how I thought this day would go.
I'm sure you feel the same.
I'm going to get out of here.
And that was pretty much the extent of the interaction.
At no point did you strike a cop.
I did not interact with those shields with the intention to cause any kind of physical harm to anyone.
If you grow up in America, which apparently many people in the DC do not do, we have sports like football and hockey where you slap each other around because you're wearing pads, right?
So pushing on a shield, to me, that doesn't indicate an intent to harm someone, just like a coach.
Padding a football player on the shoulder pads, that is also not assault.
So, interacting exclusively with the shields, I thought, you know, the fact that I secured a weapon from the premises, I fist bumped another guy who was able to hand over a pocket knife that he found on the ground to the cops.
Clearly, I didn't have any intention to cause harm.
I know this is worth noting, because this is such a pale shadow of these left-wing protests.
I mean, even a left-wing protest on a campus gets...
Seven times more aggressive than this.
Not to mention, we're not even talking about the BLM Antifa riots, which involved, I mean, hand-to-hand combat, often using weaponry against the cops.
And those guys, far from being prosecuted, were lionized as social justice heroes.
So you have these gross double standards.
But the thing I also want to highlight here is that...
Every action that you take, including raising your arm to block your head, is treated as violence.
Isn't that right?
It's treated as violence.
Reed Christensen, one of the defendants, is an elderly man, and he was pushed down by the cops.
And as he's pushing down, he reaches out to catch his violence.
And that freeze-frame moment where his hand is going towards the cop, for some reason, that was convincing to the judge and jury that he was trying to...
Grab them.
And it's just unbelievable that someone would think that an old man falling and reaching out would be trying to strike at people as he's falling.
And so he got a sentence for being violent.
He got six years.
He got six years in his sentence.
And he was elderly.
I'm sorry, Reid.
You don't approve of that term.
But he was a retired man, an army veteran, former chip engineer for Intel, the computer company.
Obviously, another man like me, capable of acting in the capacity of high trust.
And they gave him six years as a thank you for his service, I guess.
I mean, you also mentioned the guys who were...
Around Roseanne Boyland.
Talk about that.
Well, okay, so the defendants, I personally, I may have seen Roseanne Boyland, but I don't recall it.
There was a lot of chaos.
And that's one thing you have to remember, is once we were sort of pushed into this, we weren't pushed in, we flowed in, but we couldn't get out that West Terrace area.
Pure chaos at that point.
It's absolute pure chaos at that point.
And there's very little we could do to protect ourselves.
And a lot of the people coming up the stairs to interact with the cops, if they were elderly or if they were female, they came down the stairs with bloody heads.
I'm not the only person who made that observation.
So some of the people who interacted with the cops with regards to Roseanne Boylan, who...
I think the official story is that she died of medical complications.
Well, there's a lot of medical complications in that baton that was repeatedly banging against her head.
But people were trying to stop the cops from attacking her, from hurting her.
And sometimes they would use whatever was handy.
You know, and there were a lot of things like the pitchfork.
There were a lot of things that were there.
It's like, how did that get there?
A crutch?
A baseball bat?
Where are these items coming from?
So, you're saying your suspicion is that somebody left?
I mean, it's very odd in a capital to have these motley assorted items, right?
I mean, I've taken capital tours.
You don't see a pitchfork over here, a baseball bat over there.
I mean, that's just abnormal.
It's sort of strewn around the place.
But, you know, there was a BLM protest in Dallas one day when I was still working in Dallas, and I noticed that there were pallets of bricks lying around.
You can't explain things like that.
You just have to be cognizant that it's happening.
All this stuff, Matt, is on video.
Let's forward, because of time, to the actual trials here.
Because something very funny is going on, right?
You would expect in a normal judicial trial, whether it's a judge or a jury, the judge is going to say, all right, let's take a look at the video.
Wait.
I see the cops raining blows on this woman.
I see these guys putting up their arms to block it.
This is not called violence against the police.
This is the normal defensive action of any normal person in this situation would do this.
They're not trying to harm the cops.
They're trying to stop blows from raining on this poor woman.
And I would say to the defendant, you're being falsely accused.
You're free to leave.
This did not happen.
Fairly severe sentences.
Very severe.
Including you, what was your sentence?
My sentence was 28 months, ultimately.
I had already served 9 months by the time it was finally given to me.
It was actually a little bit on the light side for a lot of these people, like I said.
A good many of them got 6 years.
You would get the heavier...
If you were attacking with a weapon, so if you use the PVC pipe against a cop wearing a helmet, then that was a deadly weapon charge.
The situation in the courtroom was very, very bizarre because you could never believe that it was happening.
My case was The first case where someone had been convicted of pushing on a police shield in the history of American law.
In other words, you're saying going back to the civil rights movement, pushing a police shield has always been something that just happens.
And it's hardly interfering with the duties of a police officer if he's there that day to contain a crowd.
Pushing on, interacting with the police shield is basically what the cop is there to do.
And the prosecution admitted, because we were trying to find a baseline for where we're at with sentencing on this kind of charge.
And has this ever happened before?
And Marina called them and said, hey, what do you guys know about this?
Has this ever been done before?
And the prosecution themselves said, no.
No, no one's ever been charged with that before.
And you had a judge who, in a certain way, was not as...
Not perhaps as vindictive as some of the Obama judges or the judges appointed by Clinton.
You had a Trump appointee, and yet you said, and I believe you're right, and this is true of others as well, he too kind of goes with the official storyline.
He too dispenses what seems to be a disproportionately harsh sentence.
Why would that be?
Why would even a Trump judge not look at the facts of the situation?
Is this like an old boys club of these judges?
Or how do you understand that?
How do you read it?
It's hard to say.
My impression of Judge Nichols is that he was very concerned about this concept called collegiality.
He wanted there to be collegiality between the prosecution and the defense attorneys and apparently between judge and judge.
And I feel like because he felt that way, he felt like he was constrained in his ability to make certain rulings or judgments based on what his cohort was doing.
Now, what's interesting about that is that kind of mentality never got in the way of Emmett Sullivan, who actually was my first judge before he finally...
Officially retired.
This is the guy in D.C., the left-winger, the...
Emmett Sullivan, the judge who, when the DOJ dropped its charges against General Michael Flynn because they lied about the case, went way out of bounds and hired a separate outside prosecutor to continue the case against the person he was supposed to be judging.
And that's when Trump stepped in and said, okay, I'm pardoning.
General Flynn, because this is ridiculous.
And most attorneys, most people who are experts in law would agree that that was beyond the pale.
But you didn't see that kind of courage to stand out from the crowd on the part of the conservative judges.
And you have to understand, this in many ways rang very false.
Trump started in 2016 under a very similar cloud of suspicion, right?
Right.
And there were similar protests.
Trump did not send the FBI around the country to round up Americans because of their political views.
Joe Biden did.
And that stark difference in their reaction, to me, indicates that one person was a legitimately elected president.
And one person really wanted to nip that conversation in the bud by making people afraid.
So what you're saying is that January 6th, in that sense, is a unique event in American history, at least in modern American history, in that it is a systematic regime.
I mean, I'm assuming if some guy took a baseball bat or a PVC pipe and starts, you know, I mean, that guy's doing something wrong.
Under normal circumstances, that guy does deserve a penalty proportionate to what he did.
On the other hand, Trump gives pretty much a blanket pardon with the exception of some commutations to the oath keepers.
My question is, do you agree that the systematic violation of people's basic rights in this A targeted prosecution is so egregious that the blanket pardons are completely justified.
Oh, absolutely justified.
I would go further to say that not just us, but also the Oath Keepers needed to be completely pardoned.
And I'm glad to see that he went on to do the Face Act victims.
Yeah.
But I met someone in Beaumont Low who is actually given a three-year sentence for...
Calling the Capitol Police when he was drunk because the Capitol Police were harassing his sister, possibly for political reasons because this was after January 6th and this was the time when the Capitol Police were sort of setting up field offices to try to call the threat or the menace of conservatism from the American political landscape.
I feel like that man...
One of the things I noticed in confinement, and I think we talked a little bit about this at dinner, is you get in a situation like that, and now you're in a position to look at other guys, people unconnected with January 6th, and in some cases unconnected with politics.
And you get the idea that there is a lot Of abuse in our justice system.
Absolutely.
They will go after a doctor and accuse him of administering illegal pain meds by finding some old woman who goes, Yo, you gave me pain meds.
I didn't really deserve those pain meds.
And then what they do is they go to the doctor and say, listen, you're facing three years in prison, but if you agree to pay a $100,000 fine and not to practice again, we'll give you six months.
This kind of legal bludgeoning goes on all the time.
It affects white-collar and non-white-collar defendants.
The fables that we hear as kids about, you know, in civics class, about American justice, better that, you know, nine guilty men go free than one.
It's all nonsense.
It is.
It is.
You're innocent until proven guilty, supposedly, but once the prosecution opens their mouth, you're guilty until you can prove your innocence.
Well, let's pause there for a minute, because let's see, you know, why is that true?
Here's why it's true, I think.
you'll notice that in in cases and this is actually even true in fictional depictions of cases right first of all they always love to bring in the defendant in handcuffs right right in a kind of prison uniform there's that ritual the jury is this is the guilty man he's obviously did what we're accusing him of doing right
and the second thing is that the prosecution is has all these levers in the system itself where they can say something like um we're going to put additional charges on you and you'll face 10 years.
But if you sign on this paper here and say you did it, you'll get one year.
So now think about it.
Whether you are guilty or innocent makes absolutely no difference.
Who's going to roll the dice on 10 years when you can get out in one year and get back your life?
Absolutely, but that's not the choice.
It's not one year to 10 years.
It's more like 3 to 6 years to 20 to 30 years.
A lot of times now.
They've really run away with the system.
Over 85% of federal case defendants will plead.
And so they start with very strong case that way.
They give you a plea deal which is just horrible.
Like, oh, all you got to do is spend like 10 years in jail.
Wow.
That's the deal?
And then after that, After that, the remaining percent who don't take the plea deal, only like about maybe 3% to 4% of them will be found not guilty.
The rest of them will be found guilty.
So we have a federal agency that's working at about 97% efficiency rate, which is unheard of in government.
Pretty much what it means is if the feds come for you, you're going to jail.
And there's very little you can do to beat that system.
In fact, almost no one does.
It's a system where you basically have to bend over backwards to convince them that you're not a threat and, oh, I'll go along with whatever you say, just don't hurt me.
You want to, you know...
It's a system of appeasement rather than an actual trial by jury situation.
And it was much worse for the Jan Sixers now that I mentioned the word jury.
Your wife made a striking statement at dinner and you agreed with it.
We're coming to the end of our time.
I think it's wrong to call them silver linings, but it's sort of like there are certain lessons you learn from an experience like this.
And somehow, strange though it seems, you feel like you're maybe wiser or I won't say better for it because it's better if it hadn't happened to you, obviously.
But what do you take from this that helps you as a person coming out?
Strength.
I take strength.
I take mental, physical, and spiritual strength from it.
It's a hardship.
That I can now place along with other experiences like riding Navy submarines and say, you know, I have been in these difficult environments and I've gone through them and I have a lot more sort of psychological resilience, you could say.
A deeper relationship with God.
I pray more.
I pray better.
I'm a better prayer of prayers.
And I read more scripture.
I read more books on theology.
And I don't know anyone who goes through that experience and doesn't find some sort of connection with the divine.
It's not always, of course, the Christian God.
I meet Jews.
I meet Muslims in prison.
But an experience where you're basically a jailed political dissident.
And you have to suffer the wrath of people who hate you for what you think.
You end up digging deep.
And you also develop a very different sense of what humanity is capable of on both ends of the scale.
So you see people who are extremely vengeful and cruel.
For no reason.
And then you have the random stranger also who is benevolent and kind and will give you the shirt off their back to help you even though they don't know your name.
And I think you also have, we all do, the idea that certain people stick by you and certain people don't.
And it's very eye-opening.
Yes.
I once read that a lot of times when people are in social company, they camouflage their feelings, right?
So it's not until some incident occurs that illuminates how you truly feel.
Like if, for example, let's say you discover that an uncle that you have died suddenly.
And it's left you a big inheritance.
Your immediate reaction at that point is going to tell you a lot about your relationship with your uncle.
If you're absolutely delighted, oh my gosh, I got a million dollars.
That just tells you how you felt about your uncle.
And so, even in normal social relationships, and I know in your case you've had some family members who were...
They basically villainized you for what happened and then there were others that stuck by you.
Yeah, so there were a lot of my wife's friends.
She's just an amazing friend maker because they were very understanding and helpful.
My friends just sort of melted away.
My friends, of course, I knew mostly from work, so they were my co-workers and they kind of melted away.
Some of them saying, well...
If you're not guilty, then you'll be fine.
And I'm telling them, hey, look, this process, I wouldn't be here if this was a fair process in the first place.
So, Matt, let's sum up as we close out here.
You have this event January 6th.
You've gone through the ringer.
You're out.
You're going to come back on board, do some things with me, do some things with Danielle, and do some things on your own.
How do you think that this whole episode is going to be seen historically?
I mean, in the beginning, it seemed like the left controlled a narrative.
We were on the defensive.
We were rolling the stone up the hill.
Do you think that that has somehow...
Do you think that the other side of the narrative is breaking through?
The American people must have seen enough in order to elect Trump.
If they truly thought that Trump was trying to stir up an insurrection, if they truly thought that this was an effort to subvert our constitutional system, I don't see that people would have voted for Trump.
Yeah, I don't understand what all the hand-wringing is about because the whole country basically looked at this enormous lawfare PSYOP and said, this is fake.
They obviously were also thinking about us January Sixers at the same time because the media and the Democrats made that a huge part of their platform.
In addition to that, I just lost my train of thought.
That's okay.
Well, we're talking about the American people rendering their verdict.
Yeah, so the American people rendered their verdict, and that is probably one of the most wonderful things about this whole process, is that we suffered together under the Biden regime.
Not all of us went to prison, some of us did, but we suffered together.
In the end, the American voter was able to effect their own sort of release from that situation by voting for Trump.
I mean, it's almost, Matt, as if you had all these highly twisted trials with sadistic judges and prosecutors and biased juries, and then finally you had...
A jury of your peers, a.k.a.
the American people.
Right.
And they have finally weighed in, and their verdict, I have to say, maybe we'll close on this, is a resounding not guilty.
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