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Jan. 31, 2025 - The David Knight Show
33:10
From House Arrest to Hell: J6 Survivor Rachel Powell Exposes the Dark Side of 'Justice' in America
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Time Text
We want to talk to her about her experience.
Rachel Powell has now been pardoned, a mother of eight children.
She's got a lot to say about this experience.
And folks, this is something that applies to everyone in our country.
I have seen over and over again what happens in the so-called justice system when the government has an agenda.
And it can be a political agenda like January the 6th.
It can be some other agendas that we see people get railroaded for.
And I've also talked to some of the people who have been railroaded in these kangaroo courts about the kind of treatment they get in prison.
This is something that really needs to be reformed.
And the political weaponization has been going on for a very long time, but we've now seen it to such an extent with the J6 people, so many of them, and in such a public way, that it is important for us to shine the light on that.
There's a group called Patriot Freedom Project.
They've been there to help the people that are being politically persecuted for J6. And now that this thing is over for them, it's time for all of us to take a look at what our Justice Department is capable of doing to people.
People who are innocent of any major crime.
What do you want to tell us about January the 6th and how this all began?
Well, I can tell you that January 6th began because many of us believed that there was election fraud that was not addressed.
And so when the president decided to have a rally in Washington, D.C., many of us have been ready for that for years.
I mean, personally, his election being stolen wasn't new news for me.
I knew that there had been problems with the voting machines for years and years.
And it's a breath of fresh air to finally be talking about it.
Although, when it came to January 6th, there was a huge block on speaking about the election fraud.
And I lived in the state of Pennsylvania, so I knew it happened.
I saw it with my own eyes.
You know, we went to bed knowing Trump won.
And then we wake up.
And we're told Biden won.
It was insanity.
And so we went to the Capitol that day, not meaning for, at least most of us, not meaning for it to get out of control, but it did.
It got out of control.
And, you know, I think most of us, if we could go back in time, we would change that.
But we never expected it to end up the way that it did with our families destroyed in years in prison, in the judicial system, losing our houses and our homes and our families just being destroyed.
We never expected that.
Yeah, I did expect that that was going to happen, quite frankly.
I warned people about that, and I got fired for warning people.
But the issue is that none of that excuses what Biden did, or what the Justice Department did, right?
And so regardless of what anybody thinks about the election either way, or what they, I was telling everybody was going to be agent provocateurs there, they were going to, you know, I said, stay away, they're going to, you know.
set up something for the people that are there but regardless of all of that it's what happened in the aftermath of that that I think is Something that is universal, that everybody ought to be concerned about on both sides of the aisle.
Regardless, even the Democrats ought to be concerned about this kind of stuff.
And many of them are.
They know that because they got involved in politicized warfare against people, that it may be coming back on them.
And so that's why Biden put out a bunch of pardons as he was leaving, because he's set up this precedent for this type of thing.
But I've seen it with a lot of different cases.
It's one of the reasons why I thought this was going to happen.
Tell us what happened then on January 6th.
It says here that you broke a window at the Capitol building.
Tell us about that.
Okay, well, when I got to the Capitol, it was before Trump was even done speaking.
I was way back at the Washington Monument.
I could not...
I could barely see the screen that he was projected onto.
And so I just went to the Capitol ahead of time.
And when I got there, I was one of the first people there on the West Side, which is considered the violent side.
And at the beginning, we were standing on public sidewalks.
And I've been to a lot of protests because through COVID, you know, we were a draconian state.
And so I've been through a lot of COVID protests.
You're allowed to stand on public sidewalks, but I never saw one get out of control like this.
And so when I'm standing at the barricades by the Capitol on a public sidewalk, the officers up on the balcony, they just started shooting down into the crowd.
And we were very confused.
People were yelling up to them, stop, stop.
You know, we love you.
Stop.
We're on your side.
There was a man beside me, Joshua Black.
I didn't know him.
I still don't know him, but he was beside me.
And I know his name now.
He got shot through his cheek.
And from there, you know, tear gas, pepper spray.
And when protesters were met with violence, some of them became violent.
And I don't think that...
Most of us intended for it to happen that way, and it doesn't excuse my behavior, but I did go up onto the balcony area where I should not have been, and I was by the tunnel, which was extremely violent, and mostly I was just washing people's eyes out as they came out of the hallway, and eventually there was a man pile where Roseanne Boylan was at the bottom.
I listened to her die.
I heard her screaming for help, crying out, but by the time we got to her, she was dead.
And after that, I broke a window.
The value of the window was $600.
I wish I could go back and pay for the window.
In my opinion, a $600 window is not a reason to destroy a family for four years and leave children without their mother.
No.
And just cause us to lose everything, especially considering I never went there with intent for that to happen.
And neither did anybody else that I know that's a January 6th defendant.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's where the excessive punishment comes in.
You know, the conditions under which people were kept, the ramping up of charges.
They got four years.
You got four years for a broken window.
What were the charges?
What were the charges that they gave you?
I had three felonies.
And six misdemeanors.
My main felony was the obstruction of justice charge, the 1512 obstruction charge, which the Supreme Court later ended up throwing out for January 6th people, which had a huge effect on my case.
So they were using charges on protesters that they have never used before.
And I have to wonder, why did I have that charge?
But yet the January 6th committee, who destroyed evidence, They didn't get that charge.
Instead, they got pardons.
Why did I have to sit in a federal penitentiary when they get to go free, and they literally destroyed evidence?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, it is amazing, and I think people need to see it, and people need to take their partisan blinders off and look at this, because as I've said, I've seen this happen to people both left and right.
The denial of due process, the ramping up of charges.
It's very rare that we even have jury trials anymore because they put so many charges on people that most people will do a plea bargain.
Is that what happened in your particular case, that they ramped it up?
Did you do a plea bargain or did you have a trial?
Okay, I did not take a plea bargain because it was full of lies and I'm a person of morals, so I can't sign a document.
That is full of lies.
And it would have given me almost four years.
So I took a bench trial.
I didn't have a jury trial.
A bench trial is where the judge makes the decision.
And we decided to do that because we needed to talk about this obstruction charge, which is up to a 20-year felony.
It's a huge deal.
And, of course, I was found guilty of all of my charges.
But later on, the Supreme Court, they...
Said, no, you can't do this.
And so then I had to be resentenced, but I had not been resentenced yet when Trump pardoned me.
So did you actually go to jail or you were waiting to get your resentence before you went into jail?
What happened after the trial?
I spent three years on a very strict house arrest where I literally could not go out in my yard, couldn't go to the grocery store, couldn't get a haircut, couldn't...
Take my kids to part of the medical appointments.
Literally watching my kids play in the yard from inside the house.
Could not go out to work most of my three years.
They wouldn't let me leave the house at all.
And that did not count towards my time served.
So then I ended up with a five-year sentence of which I spent over a year in a federal penitentiary.
Most of my time was at Hazleton, the SFF Hazleton in Brewston Mills, West Virginia, where the conditions are horrid.
We had cold water for showers because multiple buildings have no hot water.
We were forced to house with biological men, sharing cells with them, forced to share a cell where you're locked in with them.
You have to change and use a toilet in front of these.
They're all sex offenders that are there.
There's basically no medical treatment.
The facility is still doing teeth cleanings from 2018. And if you need a tooth filled, forget it.
They're going to wait until it's so bad they have to pull the tooth from your head.
I could just go on and on about the conditions.
The roofs leak so bad we would have to catch the water into big trash cans and containers.
It is awful what is going on.
In the prison system and how people are being housed right now.
And that's where they put me.
And, you know, they didn't have to send me to a facility that was a higher facility.
They could have sent me to a camp that was a minimum.
But the FBOP, the Bureau of Prisons, they decided to continue on with this terrorist rhetoric and put me in a higher...
Security prison.
Yeah, and I've talked to people who have been whistleblowers, who have challenged the government on certain issues, and they've even got prisons they call communication management units, and basically it's solitary confinement and no communication with anybody on the outside, because these are people that they, you know, the next step, I guess, after all the social media.
Cancelling and censorship.
The next step is that they put you in a prison so that you can't communicate with anybody.
People need to wake up to what has happened with our government and how they are doing this to individuals in terms of the kangaroo court processes and everything.
And it's interesting that you didn't have a jury trial.
But, you know, a jury trial...
Now, with the instructions that the judges give, it doesn't really help.
They'll tell the jurors that they don't have the ability to nullify something, which is really what the juries are primarily for, to look at not just the facts of the case, but to look at the law, to see how it's being applied, to look at the penalties that are involved.
And if jurors were doing their job, they would not have let the Department of Justice get away with all these trumped-up charges that were struck down by the Supreme Court.
And if they saw what the penalties were going to be, that somebody's going to go to jail for multiple years for a broken window, a jury should stop that.
But of course, in a place like, was your trial there with the judge, was that also in Washington, D.C.? Yes, my trial was in Washington, D.C. I think all of them were, I think.
They were, because they wouldn't move our venues.
And in my opinion, the right thing...
To do would have been to move venues because what I saw going on with election fraud in my state was probably different than what somebody else, you know, in Iowa would have seen.
You know, we all traveled to D.C. together, but D.C. was just biased against us.
There's no way that we could have gotten a fair.
Jury trial.
I've spoken to multiple other J6ers that said when they were choosing their jury that the judge had to persuade people into being a juror because the jurors were saying, I can't do this and not be biased, and the judge persuaded them to.
Don't worry about it.
Yeah, you can't get a fair trial like that.
No, no.
And it was really a sham process, and I think everybody saw it, but it was really...
Horrible what happened to people.
So for you, you were under house arrest for how long, and how long were you in the prison?
I was on house arrest for almost three years.
Well, no, for three years.
And I was in a federal prison for over a year.
So I've lost four years of my life.
I was arrested in February, right after January 6th.
Talk a little bit about that, how that affected your family.
You're a mother of eight children.
What's the age range of your children from the youngest to the oldest?
Well, my oldest is 28, and my youngest is 8. So some of my children are adults, and they're having children of their own.
And I have grandchildren.
And I have the most beautiful, wonderful, supportive family anybody could ever ask for.
But it's been hard.
An 8-year-old and an almost 14-year-old and a 16-year-old are still minors in my household right now.
And so when January 6th happened, there was five of them that were minors.
And it just destroyed everything.
I mean, we had to sell our family home.
A lot of people don't know this, but at the beginning, a judge actually wouldn't let me see my children unsupervised.
I had to go through mental health evaluations to see my children.
I've never had any problems with my children.
I've never been a type of parent that loses custody or anything.
I was a housewife for 17 years, homeschooled my children.
We love each other.
It's been really hard.
I had to watch my children come into the prison at least probably about once a month they came to see me.
And it was really, really hard.
And I honestly, I don't know what kind of trauma we're going to have to recover from this.
We haven't really gotten there yet.
But I'm sure there's going to be Some.
Probably a lot.
And I don't even know where to start rebuilding our life, you know.
Well, I really appreciate you talking and speaking out about this because it is so important for people to see what our government is doing.
And I know that, how long has it been that you've been out now?
Oh, geez.
Not even two weeks.
I mean, wait, is it a week now?
Wow.
My days are just going together.
I've not been home that long.
And thank you for, you know, I know it's a difficult thing for you and, you know, for not taking the time fully off and to make it a priority to talk to people about this.
Because, again, this affects everybody regardless of what the issue is.
When the government starts to come after someone, it can really be vicious.
But we've seen elements of this coming for a very long time with mandatory minimums and building out the prisons decades ago.
We've seen SWAT team raids, some of them, against the wrong people.
We've seen some of the pro-lifer people who were SWAT teamed, other people that have just been pardoned by Trump.
But this whole idea that the SWAT teams, the civil asset forfeiture, we've been moving in a very dark and dangerous direction for quite some time with the federal government.
And it's been a bipartisan thing that's been supported by both sides and.
What do you think when you hear some of the people like Lindsey Graham that are upset about the January 6th people being let out?
And Chris Christie.
It just blows my mind that they could be upset about this.
And I gotta wonder what is going on behind the scenes that would say that or even pretend to believe it because they have to know what we've gone through.
They have to know that most of us went there with no intent of January 6th getting out of control.
It's shameful.
It's shameful.
Shame on them for not taking a minute to see what is going on in this weaponized justice system.
What would you like to see happen now?
Because what you were doing, you mentioned the fact that you're there, you're on a sidewalk, which is...
Typically allowed, public sidewalk.
And you also have the stated right in the Constitution to assemble and to redress your grievances with government.
What do you think should happen to the people that were involved in this, whether we're talking about judges or prosecutors or, you know, even the police officers who initiated the firing?
What do you think should happen at this point?
Well, I have mixed feelings about it.
I definitely think there should be a thorough investigation.
A lot of key players might not be able to be prosecuted now because of the pardons.
But I think our country needs to start moving on.
I mean, we should investigate it, but we need to move on from January 6th.
And instead of focusing on...
That day we need to start focusing on how we can fix our country.
What can we do to make it never happen again?
How can we reform the prison?
What can we do about the judicial system?
That's really where our focus needs to be so this can never happen again in America.
I agree, yeah.
The excess charges, shutting down jury nullification, all these other things, this kind of weaponization.
Those were the jury was such an important institution as a check for the kind of abuse of power that is always going to come along.
But it's interesting, as some people pointed out, Merrick Garland was not part of it.
It was his Justice Department that was running all this stuff.
I would like to see this investigated, and I would like to see them move on away from the subject of the protest to the broader principle of the right to protest and the right to do process.
And the prohibitions against excessive pardon.
Talk a little bit about being under house arrest, and they did that to you for three years, and then they escalate that up to the next level, and you've got to leave your home and your family, and as bad as the house arrest is, you've now got to go to a prison.
Talk a little bit about that.
Well, the prison conditions were terrible, and so I'm locked away in a cell where sometimes I'm locked in there for days, and I'm not just missing my family, but I'm enduring these horrid conditions that nobody should have to live with.
You know, to have to live in a cell where the roof leaks and I'm catching the water into buckets, to know that If I get sick, I could die in there because the medical treatment is that bad.
I've known two women in the past year that literally had to be resuscitated and brought back to life.
And I'm not making this up because they didn't get treated until it was almost too late by the time the prison took them out.
When I was forced to house with biological men in my unit, the one in my unit, he was in there for raping adults.
Another one that taught in the music room, that man was in there for selling a nine-year-old little girl in a sex string.
And these things were very, very traumatic for me.
And living continually, day after day, of not knowing.
Is an officer going to come in my room and just destroy it because they're mad at me?
Am I going to get called into the lieutenant's office because I just want to see my family and just have a visit with them where there's vending machines and a children's room open?
You know, because that happened.
Trying to get the visiting fixed.
I had to endure an extra, not just one strip search, but an extra unnecessary strip search every time I saw my family for the first six months of my stay.
That's just punitive.
It was terrible.
It was terrible.
I don't even understand how this has happened.
And so, especially considering the conditions that we've had to live in while we're in prison, how could they want us to stay there?
How could they not want us to be pardoned?
I just don't understand.
Are they enjoying the torture that we're receiving at the hands of our government?
Because that's what it was.
I've had nightmares.
There's been nights that I've woken up since I'm home thinking I'm not pardoned, gasping for air.
And that's how hard it's been.
Imagine that you don't just have me, but you have over a thousand other people that have experienced a lot of this.
Other children that have had their parents whisked away from them.
A lot of them breadwinners.
Daddy's gone.
Now who's going to pay the bills?
Honestly, I don't even know where I would be and my family would be without people helping us.
I know Patriot Freedom Project.
They're helping me get back on my feet with the living situation, and they're the ones that flew me home.
I've had stories that I've reported of people who just got turned out in the middle of nowhere.
They transferred to them at the last minute somewhere, and they've lost their job.
Some of them have lost their family connections over this stuff, and it's like, I'm stuck out here.
And so tell us a little bit about the Patriot Freedom Project as well.
Well, I can tell you Patriot Freedom Project has been with me from almost the beginning.
At the end of the first year, I needed another lawyer.
And they helped me find a fantastic lawyer.
They helped me pay for the legal bills, which was huge.
Because, you know, I sold my house to pay for this situation.
And that doesn't last long when you are paying lawyers and you're in these type of situations.
And so they helped me, and Cynthia Hughes even came to the house to visit me when I was on house arrest because I couldn't leave.
They got my children to meet Trump twice, which I can tell you was a huge moral booster for my children.
Trump told them he was going to help us, you know, just hang on, just hang in there.
After that, we believed we knew Trump was going to help us.
We didn't know when or how, but we knew that he was going to help us, and that really got us through.
And then after I got out of prison...
How far along was that before you met Trump and he said he was going to help you?
Well, I didn't meet Trump.
They did.
You were under house arrest, right?
Yeah.
My children met him twice in 2023. At his Bedminster golf course.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people were looking at it, and there's been a back and forth as to whether or not he could preemptively pardon people.
And as I pointed out, we saw that happen with Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.
But even going back to all this rhetoric about insurrection, the first time they put that law through, you had the guy who was president didn't want the Civil War to continue.
That's what it was ultimately about.
Johnson, President Andrew Johnson, preemptively pardoned all the Confederate soldiers that they were going to do that with.
And now we've seen Biden do it.
So the question was, I guess, Trump's lawyers were telling him not to do it at that point in time.
It was two weeks before he left, and I guess a lot of us were very concerned that he didn't.
Pardon people at that point in time.
But I'm glad that he did it.
And that was 2023 that you were able to meet with him.
What else in terms of the Patriot Freedom Project?
So this is a...
An organization that helped you with legal fees.
They helped in many other ways with your family.
And what else are they doing right now?
You said they're helping to get some of the J6ers home and connected back with their family.
Is that correct?
Absolutely.
They got me home.
They put me on a plane.
And I'm in a situation where I'm going to have to move and I've got to get a place to live.
And they're helping me pay for that, which is going to be a huge expense.
And I wish I had permission to share names, but I don't.
But I know, I mean, I've heard Cynthia talking on the phone with other families, and there's a lot of them out there that she's helping them with their living situations.
And it's huge.
It's huge.
Because what would we do right now when we don't have incomes yet and we've sunk all of our money into this process?
Oh, it's amazing.
That's why I say the opportunity that we have here...
If they will continue, and if those of you who have been hurt by this will continue to speak out about it, we have an opportunity to get some real reform of the so-called Justice Department and some real reform of the prisons.
And that's what I think needs to be the primary focus of all this stuff.
I hope that it focuses on reform even more so than what would be perceived as revenge.
But I think when you have people who have led this, I think one of the ways that you get reform is to actually punish some of the people who did this kind of stuff, like Merrick Garland.
If they know that there's not going to be any consequences for this, then they will do it again.
No matter what kind of laws you put into place, they will ignore them if there's no consequences.
So I think there really does need to be, I know that it'll be portrayed as just vengeance, but there needs to be some justice, I think, for some of these people.
And I hope that that happens.
So at this point in time, they're helping you to get your life back together again and helping people find employment opportunities and that type of thing?
Is that correct?
That's absolutely correct.
And I think that they have big plans coming in the future, too.
So people should stay tuned to what Patriot Freedom Project's going to do because I think we are at a time in our country where we can make great changes and we can really make America great again.
And I think Patriot Freedom Project will be There'll be a good player in that.
That's good.
And I hope that they make it nonpartisan.
I hope that they don't make it all just about Trump or MAGA or whatever.
If they make this a bigger problem, they might be able to pick up some assistance.
When I looked at some of the grievances, and I'm not a supporter of Black Lives Matter by any means, but I've talked for a long time about police brutality, about the justice system and how that is set up, and I saw Black Lives Matter.
As making this a partisan issue rather than having people who have been harmed by this, who are black and white, conservative and liberal, they should all come together and demand that there be some reform of the system.
And I said, you know, by making this all about...
Just black people.
They're going to make sure that nothing really happens with it.
So I hope that this project is going to expand out and say, look, this affects everybody.
Because I've talked to people across the board, a lot of different issues.
The only thing that they have in common is that they got the government really angry at them for one reason or the other.
And the government then just pulls out everything.
To get these people and to punish them in many, many different ways.
I got a comment here from one of our listeners.
It says, plea bargaining is 98%.
The system depends on it.
If everybody demanded court, the system would have to drop 98% of the cases because they can't handle it.
You know, that is true, and I've seen that.
Even with traffic cases.
When I lived in Texas, everybody had the right to demand a jury trial.
If you demanded a jury trial on your traffic case, your speeding ticket, they would drop it or drop pretty much all the charges.
And that's one way that you can turn it around because they really do hate to do jury trials.
It is interesting to see how that happens.
But it's going to be interesting to see what happens with the Freedom Project.
Their first priority, your first priority is to start to get your life back together again.
So I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this because it's such a...
Very important issue for so many different people, but I know that you've got to get your life together, and I know they've got to help people, but I hope that they will continue on with that and really push for freedom in this project, because we have so many different issues with the system.
Is there anything that you would like to tell people specifically that we didn't really cover about this whole thing?
Just that the fight's not over yet.
You know, we can't just go back to not caring.
We really need to get busy because right now in this country, this is the time for change.
We can see everything moving into a positive direction.
And so we just need to work, work, work to save our country.
You know, because I feel like we were really at a pinnacle where...
We were either going to lose our country or save it.
And with Trump in office, I think that we're going to save our country if we work and we keep paying attention.
We have to fix these systems.
We have to change the government.
And I'm excited.
I hope everybody in the country is excited for what we're going to see happen.
Yeah, it is something that is important.
Certainly, we need a lot of reform in the country.
And we need to get back to the rule of law one way or the other.
And I hope that that happens.
And so I wish you the best.
I'm so sorry for what happened to you.
And my sympathies go out to you.
I'm ashamed of my government for the kind of things that it did to you and the other J6 people and to so many other people.
And I hope that we can do something to make that change.
So I'm so sorry that that happened, but I'm so happy now that you are out, Rachel.
And best wishes to you.
Thank you.
That's right, boys and girls.
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