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Feb. 11, 2025 - The David Knight Show
50:59
Ex-Navy Contractor Turned J6 Political Prisoner Reveals Shocking Frame-Up in Exclusive Interview
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Joining us now is one of the J6 prisoners who has been pardoned by President Trump.
His name is Timothy Hale Cusinelli, I think is the right way to pronounce that.
Let me know if that's the right way or not.
32 years old, Navy contractor, held a government security clearance, and he was there on January the 6th.
I want to talk to him about what happened there, and especially about what happened with his trial.
And with his prison sentence, and of course, the way he was attacked in the media.
He was significantly attacked in the media.
So, joining us now is Timothy Hale Custinelli.
Did I pronounce your last name correctly?
That would be correct, sir.
Good job.
Thank you.
Okay, well, great.
I'm glad you're out of prison, and I've looked at this, and just so you know where I'm coming from, I strongly encourage everybody to stay away.
I was worried that it was going to be an entrapment.
And it turned out to be a bigger entrapment than I had anticipated in terms of 1,500 people being given excessive charges and excessive punishment for what happened there.
But I'd like to get your story.
Tell us a little bit about why you went.
Well, sure.
I was a government employee.
I served the country for about 12 years by the time of my arrest.
I majored in history.
I very much believed in civics.
I went to the Capitol in a suit and tie, and we'll get into how they did a frame job on me, but I went there thinking that essentially it was just going to be a historic day.
From my perspective, it would either be the last public speech President Trump would give as president, with his one term, or if they did pull a rabbit out of their hat, then this would theoretically be the beginning of his second term.
I thought it was going to be a historic day.
And so I just went there to support the president, and that was essentially it.
I didn't even realize there was going to be any protests over at the Capitol.
I thought it would just be the speech at the Ellipse, so that was a surprise to me.
I think that's what a lot of people expected, yeah.
Tell me a little bit more about what would the rabbit be that they would have pulled out of the hat that day?
Yeah, I mean, theoretically, if Mike Pence had done, you know, as...
Trump and his supporters have wanted.
If they had done that and they, let's say theoretically, they challenged the certification, then maybe they could have sent it back to the states.
They could have analyzed if there was fraud, anything like that.
I mean, that was pretty much it.
And it's not to say that it was a 100% guarantee.
I don't think anybody...
Really felt in their heart that everybody in Congress was going to do everything that they wanted.
But it would have been nice to at least see it challenged.
Because it seemed that from election night onward, there was just sort of an attempt to brush things under the rug that people saw as inconsistencies.
Yeah, the judges were just running from it.
They didn't even want to hear the case.
And I got fired because I said on the 14th of December, I said, okay, well, that's it.
They've turned in the Electoral College.
Their window for contesting this stuff is essentially over.
Thomas Massey said if they'd sent us a second slate of electors, and of course there were...
Four Republican states, Republican-controlled legislatures, and two of them had Republican governors as well.
And if they had taken, since they were getting thrown out of the courts left and right, and none of the judges wanted to put themselves in that position, it was too hot of a potato.
I said, if they would have made their cases...
To these Republican legislatures, they might have gotten enough of them to send a second slate of electors.
And then, as Thomas Massey said, we would have had a choice.
You know, do we go with a slate of electors that's coming from the governor or the slate of electors that's sent by the state legislature?
But they didn't do any of that.
So that was the thing.
I said, on the 14th, I said, well, that's it.
There's not any official slate that you could even make the case for that.
Because you could always make the case.
That the legislature had the power to do that.
And that's where they would have heard the determination if there'd been a difference between the legislature and the executive branch in these different states as to which slate of electors they were going to have.
But yeah, that's all beside the point.
So you went because it was going to be a historic day.
You went to overthrow the government in a suit and a tie, right?
Unarmed, as all these people did, right?
Disavow.
That's the thing.
It doesn't even make sense.
Even when you look at people who went in there with body armor and stuff like that.
People wore armor, for instance, because previously it stopped at steel rallies.
People were getting stabbed by Antifa.
There's a context to this.
If you know Trump supporters...
You know that if that was their motivation, they mostly wouldn't have gone unarmed or armed with flagpoles.
And so the narrative makes no sense.
That's right.
So after the day, how long before you start to have engagement from the Biden Department of so-called justice?
How long did that take?
Right.
It took about a week.
So I was a union rep.
You had mentioned I worked for the Navy.
I was a Navy weapons contractor.
So I secured Navy bases and the kind of facilities that rearmed warships.
So I was a security contractor there, and I was also a union rep.
So I had a very poor relationship with the management of that company because they violated, it doesn't matter, but basically they violated laws that protected veterans.
And so we were always at...
I was actually working with my local congressman, Chris Smith, who threw me under the bus after the fact.
Was he a Republican or Democrat?
Yeah, he's a rhino.
He's a rhino out of New Jersey.
So management tipped off NCIS that I was in D.C. Not necessarily that I did anything wrong, but just that I was there.
And so they came to my home, my apartment on the base.
Looking for me.
And they ended up finding my roommate and they strapped a wire to him to get him to incriminate me.
Wow.
And they went to extreme lengths to try to set me up.
Yeah.
So they have him wearing a wire and they tried to get him to get you to say certain things.
Were they successful in that?
You could say, yeah.
I had been drinking that night somewhat out of depression.
I was like, that did not go the way I wanted it to go that day.
And I was just kind of like, you know, waiting and just, you know, they were saying each day just got a little bit worse in the coverage.
These guys were insurrectionists, 20 years in prison.
It's like, oh boy.
My roommate was a BLM guy, but we had gotten along.
We'd known each other for years.
We lived together for years.
And so typically saying incendiary stuff was like not.
It was not strange in our household.
And so, yeah, he had basically recorded me saying, yeah, I think there might be a civil war.
And then when I said, I don't actually want a civil war, they cut that out of the transcript so they could use it to deny me bail.
So I get denied bail and I get sent to solitary confinement in what they call the D.C. Gulag.
How long were you in the D.C. Gulag before you got a trial?
16 months, a year and a half before I got a trial in solitary.
And then I was there for about two years in total before I finally, after I was convicted, I was sentenced to four years.
So I did another year in the Bureau of Prisons.
But President Trump signed what's called the First Step Act.
So that gave me First Step credits if I took classes and stuff.
So I only had to do three years on a four-year bid.
So that was nice.
Tell us what it was like in the D.C. Gulag for 16 months.
You know, when we first got there, there was solitary confinement.
So you were in your cell 23 hours a day.
You barely got out an hour to shower or to use the phone.
You couldn't get legal visits.
They used COVID-19 as an excuse not to provide you visitation with family, to see your lawyer.
If your lawyer did show up and he did get in the building, sometimes they would just not allow you to leave the unit.
It's funny enough, Marjorie Taylor Greene came to the jail to inspect her conditions in the summer of 2021, and they turned her away.
The same day, they also turned my lawyer away.
So they would play games like that.
You couldn't have religious services.
You couldn't receive communion.
There was basically no medical care.
And what's interesting is that a lot of these things, they would hold you hostage.
They would basically use – well, COVID was sort of a Trojan horse for the facility in D.C. to deny you any civil rights.
But what they would also do is very tricky.
They would offer you civil – they would offer you your rights if you took the COVID shot.
So they would basically hold you hostage to the jab.
So, oh, you want to go to church?
Okay.
You just take the shot and you can go.
And they would promise – and granted, not everybody took it.
A few people did, and they lied to them.
So it was all just carrot and stick.
So even after they took the shot, they wouldn't give them the promised – Privileges, right?
Yeah.
We were segregated from the rest of the unit as well, so we were forced to be...
I wanted to be in general population, actually, because we would have had more freedom, but they actually segregated us.
In a facility called CTF. You had CDF and then there was CTF. CDF is Central Detention Facility.
That's the main jail.
We were in Central Treatment Facility.
It was a literal madhouse.
It was a nut house.
Feces, hair clumps, stuff jammed into the walls and the corners of everything.
And the guards actually admitted they cleared that out for us weeks before January 6th.
They knew we would be there.
Wow.
Yeah, it was a setup.
They planned the houses there.
It was a setup.
Absolutely was.
How big was the cell that you were stuck in for 23 hours a day?
I'd say it's about 7 feet.
Wow.
7 by 7?
Yeah, roughly.
And, of course, you're in solitary confinement.
You don't have anything to read.
Do you have a light?
What kind of situation is it with that?
Yeah, there's a light switch.
But, I mean, you don't necessarily need it, even though it's dark in your cell.
You know, there's artificial lighting throughout the entire unit nonstop.
And even outside of D.C., like I went to a facility before that, the marshals move you around the country.
They call it diesel therapy.
They just bounce you around until you settle down where you're supposed to be.
I remember they did that to a congressman and just destroyed his body doing that.
You transferred him from one place to the other.
Yeah, and that's what it was.
So before D.C., I was in a place called Northern Neck, Virginia, or the Warsaw facility, and they just kept the lights on yourself.
24-7.
So, I mean, good luck sleeping.
And there's just other things like that.
In D.C., your cell had a toilet, a bed, quote-unquote.
It's basically a metal bunk bed, and you have an inch-thick foam mattress.
And you have a three-inch wide window, but there's nothing to look at.
The only view I had out of my window was a graveyard.
There's a graveyard right outside the jail.
So it was kind of not the most optimistic thing.
And you don't have anything that you can read either, right?
No.
No, unfortunately.
Eventually, we got some Bibles mailed in, but asking for that was like pulling teeth.
The jail didn't want to provide us, and even to have our own Bible studies as opposed to getting to have religious services, that was a complete pain in the butt.
and there were these tablets, these black tablets, they were like these bricks, and you could theoretically find stuff on there to read or to look at, but they charged you for it.
So in order to have entertainment tablet access, you'd have to have money on your books.
And that wasn't exactly, that wasn't exactly beneficial for people who were broke, you know, so there was Wow.
everything behind the paywall.
So that's the D.C. Gulag, and then you spend 16 months there, then they transfer you to another prison facility.
What was that like?
Better in some regards, you know, Prison and jail are different animals.
We were pre-trial detainees in D.C. In prison, though, I was on Fort Dix.
It's funny because in the Army, I actually worked on Fort Dix here in New Jersey, but there was also a prison to it.
On the prison side, it's not what I was expecting.
Working on the Army base, I would be told when I was a reservist, they would say, Working for the prison.
It's a guard or something.
It's a white-collar prison.
I'm like, okay.
I figured that meant that it would be financial crimes and stuff.
But no, it's all child molesters and illegal aliens.
It's used as an ICE facility, and it's a low security for all kinds of degenerates.
So that was interesting.
But, you know, it was just...
Killing time.
Then I could read.
So, that's what I did, non-stop.
I'm surprised that, you know, kind of a low-security, white-collar prison would have child molesters in it.
I guess they don't consider pedophilia to be much a big deal.
You'd be surprised what the BOP considers them.
Yeah, they're a protected class, actually, unfortunately.
Wow.
Well, tell us a little bit about the trial and about the charges that they brought against you.
Well, first of all, tell us what you did that day besides wearing a suit and tie.
Did you get involved in any kind of violent altercation?
Was there any property destroyed?
Did you go into the building?
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, so I actually did go inside the Capitol.
I was in there for approximately 40 minutes.
So for that time, I wandered throughout hallways.
I took some selfies with statues in an area called the Crypt.
Someone had put a Trump flag in a statue's hand.
I'm like, that's pretty funny.
I'm not going to lie.
I danced in an area called the Capitol Visitor Center.
And basically, I just goofed around until the cops told us to leave.
And that was pretty much it.
No, I never engaged in violence.
I never damaged anything.
I didn't steal anything.
I didn't really do any of that stuff.
What I was charged with was a statute called 18 U.S.C. 1512. For those who haven't been up to date on the way they prosecuted us, this is a statute that relates to tampering with documents.
And so the original statute is called tampering with a witness, goes back to the 80s.
After the Enron scandal, they adjusted it.
They amended it with a substatute in 2003, and they call it obstruction of an official proceeding.
It has to do with tampering with documents or destruction of documents.
Mm-hmm.
next Enron.
They never applied that to protesters, rioters, whatever you want to call it.
And so after January 6, the Biden administration starts indicting a bunch of people with this fake felony charge and basically saying that because both houses of Congress were in session together, that was obstruction of an official proceeding, just ignoring the fact none of us tampered with documents or even attempted to. just ignoring the fact none of us tampered with documents I got convicted under that.
And basically, all they had to do was show that there was evil intent.
The term is corrupt intent.
I mean, what is corrupt?
Typically, if you don't mean it's evil, then you mean that there's some sort of self-gain, like a corrupt judge or a corrupt executive.
None of that even made sense.
And so last year, actually, the Supreme Court finally overturned the application of that statute.
They overturned 1512, I believe, in June of 2024. And that's great, but myself and many others spent years in prison over a statute that turned out to not be applicable.
How did that affect your sentence before Trump pardoned you?
That they overturned that?
You know, I would have done a year max because my other charges were misdemeanors.
So, I mean, the maximum you can do for a misdemeanor is a year.
I mean, they theoretically could have stacked it consecutively, but they don't typically do that.
You get sentenced concurrently.
The longest charge or longest sentence per charge, that's what your time is based on.
But because I had that fake felony, they were able to give me years and years more.
Even then, even then, my...
They have what are called sentencing guidelines.
And so, I mean, judges, again, they're guidelines, but typically the judge will go within a certain sentencing range based on point systems that they use to calculate how bad your offense was, your characteristics, and the other thing.
And I should have gotten approximately like 17 to 21 months, even after going to trial and losing.
But instead, because my judge had to make an example out of me, he sentenced me to 48 months or four years.
That's over twice my guidelines.
So because of that felony, yeah, they were able to put me behind bars for years and years and years.
I got screwed, but I kind of got lucky compared to a lot of my other friends.
I have friends from the D.C. Gulag who got 8 years, 12 years, 14 years.
And so that felony was used to destroy people.
It was basically a Trojan horse, just like the COVID stuff.
And they used that.
And they gave it to President Trump on top of it.
For those who aren't aware, in the D.C. case, they charged President Trump with 1512. It was just a weapon.
The whole time it was a weapon.
Of course, he didn't do any time.
How do you feel about the fact that you weren't pardoned before he left?
You know, I've thought about that, but I don't think he even knew enough about things going on at the time.
Like I said, I was a history major.
I look back at pardons, and I don't think they should be issued flagrantly.
I think back to Adams.
And this is why I think pardons were a good idea, but when I think back to Adams, you know, he actually seriously studied the cases of people, like, during the Frey's Rebellion, for instance, and it's a funny quote where he says, these weren't insurrectionists, these weren't, you know, this wasn't a rebellion, basically.
He says that this was just a riot, and these were miserable, he says, miserable Germans who were as ignorant of our laws as they were of the language, something like that.
It's kind of funny, but I do think clemency and mercy are things that are important.
I don't think even he suspected that the DOJ under the Biden administration was going to go so balls to the wall after he left office.
Go as hard as they did.
I don't think most Americans did.
I think years into it, people were like, why are they still doing this?
And so, I mean, again, I can't read the man's mind.
Well, there was discussion that was going on with his personal attorney, Cipollone, and others who were advising him not to pardon people.
So they were aware of it.
They were talking about it.
And of course...
You know, there were long historical precedents, even if you go back to the Insurrection Act.
The Insurrection Act, which was done after the Civil War, was really kind of an act of vengeance against Confederate soldiers.
And you had Andrew Johnson pardon them all blanket, you know, just blanket pardon because we're not going to continue the Civil War.
But within Trump's lifetime, it was pretty well known.
What happened with Richard Nixon being given a pardon by Gerald Ford?
And so we had precedents that were there.
And so I was kind of wondering, since he decided that he would pass over it, I suspected that it was his lawyer giving him advice that you don't want to kick the ant bed by pardoning these people because they'll all come after you.
Well, they came after him anyway, although...
He didn't go to jail for any of this stuff like everybody else, but it was, I don't know, I thought it was an interesting thing.
I always, I wonder how the people that were there saw it.
I saw it as a total betrayal of all of you, but, you know, you think that he really didn't know.
Yeah, and here's another thing to consider, too.
You know, playing devil's advocate here, if most of us were just given misdemeanors for trespass or things like that, not that we should have been, but if that were the case, if the law was applied even-handedly, I don't think it would have been such a humanitarian disaster.
But when Trump left office, the DOJ went crazy, and they engaged in what they call the shock and awe campaign.
And they started, you know...
Raiding people's homes, raiding people at gunpoint, putting rifles in defendants' wives' faces.
They're defendants whose wives had miscarriages because of how they were raided.
They really went over the top.
Keep in mind, I'm not defending rioting, but when you look at the riots before and even after, because they were rioting in D.C. after we were in jail.
When you look at it all, It was a strange precedent that was set.
And keep in mind one thing also as well.
I don't think President Trump...
I think there were elements that set President Trump up just like they did with us.
I don't think he knows.
I didn't.
I don't think he knew at the time why the riot actually happened.
The media had framed everything as we were insurrectionists.
We're trying to overthrow democracy, blah, blah, blah.
The average person today probably still doesn't know what actually started the riot.
And the riot started because Capitol Police officers were throwing ordinance into the crowd and they incited a riot.
So it was a result of it was a result of excessive force.
But that video wasn't even made public at the time.
So, you know, I give him leeway with that because I don't think he knew the full story.
I I think they were lying to him as much as they were lying about us, frankly.
What did you think he meant when he said, meet me at the Capitol?
What was his intention?
He didn't go, but what do you think he was going to tell people to do?
I think it probably would have been just the same thing.
It would have just been people...
They're listening to a speech or, you know, waiting to see if anybody in Congress challenged the results.
I don't think it would have been anything more than that.
The chronology of events.
So there were people knocking barriers over at the Capitol before Trump's speech was even over.
And when I was there, if you look at the video, you can hear people are confused because there are people already leaving his speech mid-speech at the Ellipse.
There are caravans of people walking down city blocks to get to the Capitol.
And you can actually hear in one of my videos from my phone, someone behind me is like, there's some sort of a march going on.
And so there were people doing this even before he said we were going to go to the Capitol to peacefully and patriotically protest.
You have to assume that he knew people were going to knock barriers down or something like that.
And I don't think he did.
I think that actually it made him look really, it made him look bad and it actually, it was embarrassing and it actually, I think it set him up for a lot of legal trouble.
So I don't.
I don't blame President Trump for January 6th.
I actually think that if you look at the Metro PD's body cameras, they had backup cops show up at the Capitol and they're telling each other, they set us up, they set us up.
And they're like, yeah, absolutely.
And so the question is, who's they?
Because the Capitol Police at the time answered to Nancy Pelosi and the Metro PD answered to Mayor Bowser.
And so if there was a setup, and I think there was, I think it was elements within the D.C. infrastructure and the I think it was elements within the government, and I don't even think it was just Democrats.
I think there were probably elements within the GOP leadership, like McConnell maybe.
I don't know that.
But the way that both parties were sort of in unison with the insurrection narrative, I wouldn't be surprised.
I think there was collusion the entire time.
I mentioned the way that they weaponized the 1512 charge.
The courts co-signed all that.
So really, all three branches, I think, whether it be even the executive with the FBI, we know there were FBI agents in the crowd.
I know some of their names.
I found one of their houses here in New Jersey.
We've identified feds.
There were feds there.
You have them on satellite phones.
You have CHSs, confidential human sources.
We know that the infiltrated groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, we know their names.
So, yeah, I mean, it was definitely an operation.
I don't blame President Trump whatsoever.
I think he was set up as much as we were.
The question is, to what extent was the infiltration?
And I'm hoping with this new administration they investigate that, because a lot of lives...
I think the people in the corrupt Justice Department...
And the judges and all the rest of them, they need to be impeached.
They need to be tried and imprisoned, I believe.
And I think it's interesting that Biden did not pardon Merrick Garland.
If anything, he was running this whole thing, so he needs to do it.
But I go back and I look at, you know, we say that Trump was an innocent victim and all this stuff.
He made more money with that Save America grift that he did than he did in the presidential campaign that he had.
And the guy that I worked for was running Stop the Steal.
And he made millions of dollars off of that.
So, you know, they kind of directed people in it.
I was trying to get people to go away from it.
I could see this all coming from months ahead of time.
I knew the people who were running this Stop the Steal stuff, and I knew what they were in it for.
And I knew they didn't care about the supporters that they were setting up.
They just wanted the money with all that stuff.
But let's talk a little bit about the...
What happened with the trial aspect of it?
You said you went to trial rather than taking a plea bargain.
How do you feel about the way the trial progressed?
Because I've covered a lot of these political stories, and whenever the government's got a beef against you, and it's something that is highly politicized by them, I know that they pull out all the stops.
What was the trial like?
It was very surreal.
And I'll start with this.
You have what are called voir dire hearings.
And so this is jury selection.
And you only get so many strikes for cause where you can be like, no, we can't use that guy.
They're biased.
No, we can't use that person.
We can't.
Correcting errors there with that potential juror.
Jury selection was bananas because everybody on my jury more or less worked for the government.
Yeah.
They worked for the department.
Yeah.
Who was your lawyer?
Did you represent yourself or did you have a lawyer?
I had a lawyer.
His name was Jonathan Crisp.
He's a JAG officer.
So he's a colonel in the U.S. Army and he represented me then.
And yeah, it was...
It was crazy.
These were all DOJ employees.
They actually tried to put someone from Chuck Schumer's office, one of his aides, on my jury.
It's crazy.
You would think DC is biased enough as it is because of the voting.
The voting pattern there, the political bent.
And then you would think it's even more biased, of course, because it was so...
DC's so condensed.
Obviously, everyone there was familiar with January 6th.
Maybe not the truth, but certainly the reporting on it and the perception.
But they were especially biased because they would tell you they're biased.
Like, hey, can you be fair and impartial on this jury?
No.
Okay, sounds good to me.
You know, like, that seriously, well, I have the transcripts.
It was that bad.
They made their hostility towards us and President Trump very well known.
How did the JAG officer feel about this?
This wasn't his first rodeo.
How did he feel about the whole process, the jury selection, the trial, everything?
Do you feel like it was rigged?
Yeah, I mean, look, even he was surprised by how that trial went down because, you know, look, lawyers are not particularly known for being, like, you know, particularly right-wing partisans.
You know, they work within a system.
It's similar to any, you know, professional.
I think that they like the thrill.
You know, I think that they like being...
They want to be the best, and they like to win cases.
Winning is their prerogative.
Granted, a lot of them make backroom deals with the prosecutors and stuff like that, but this wasn't that situation.
We fought, and we couldn't get our evidence.
It's crazy.
I ended up winning with the sentencing enhancements later on, but during that trial, and even before that with motions, The court would give the prosecution anything they wanted.
We wanted to change a venue because of bias?
Denied.
We wanted bail?
Denied.
We wanted to suppress this?
Denied.
And so it really was that the court was colluding with the prosecution.
And that's really what it was.
It was an uphill battle.
We weren't going to win.
We did what we could, but at the end of the day, we put the government to its burden.
The government...
Technically won by convicting me, but they still didn't actually prove their case.
Let me ask you about evidence.
You know, exculpatory evidence, like video cameras and things like that.
Were you able to get any of that, or did they deny that to you?
You said that they were selective, and of course we know they were.
They cherry-picked what they wanted to show.
What happened with that aspect of it?
And they're still hiding video, by the way.
I thought Tucker had all that stuff.
No, unfortunately.
I don't know what happened with that.
I think that they released some CCTV, but frankly, it's barely a fraction of what exists.
They're still hiding thousands and thousands of hours of video.
We eventually, in the DC GL, eventually we would get access to another tablet.
Basically, it was this clear tablet where we could stream video off of a website called evidence.com.
And basically, this is where they had all the CCTV and MPD body cameras, though not really all of it.
They would secretly, at night, drop thousands of hours.
They would have video dumps in the middle of the night, especially after people's trials, after they'd already been convicted, exculpatory evidence.
And, yeah, basically they hid this under protective orders as well.
So if you're a defendant and you want to go public, like, hey, the cop I allegedly assaulted because they were murdering a woman at the Lower West Terrace Tunnel, yeah, the video of her getting killed right here, that's under protective order.
I can't tell the public.
You know, stuff like that was suppressed.
The government did not want the video getting released to the public.
They put protective orders on it.
The judges imposed it.
This was really just a way to gatekeep and keep the truth under wraps.
And so, yeah, I mean, if it wasn't an uphill battle already, it certainly was that.
It was almost impossible for some people to build their cases.
Not everybody was incarcerated with us.
We actually did eventually, using that system, we kind of broke into it a little, kind of hacked it a bit.
You know, quote-unquote hack.
Not really, but...
We found backdoors to find certain things without actually having to sign the protective orders, and we were able to watch thousands of hours of video.
And we proved that there were provocateurs in the crowd, but also the cops initiated the riot.
But people on the outside, a lot of people who did get bail, they didn't have access to this sort of thing.
And basically, when you're a defendant, if you're not actively spending hours upon hours watching video, you only have what the government provides you.
So the government will provide you their worst-case scenario, and they'll give you nothing exculpatory.
It's called a Brady violation.
And so, yeah, basically...
You're screwed.
If you're looking for anything that actually works in your favor, you have to go find it yourself.
And most lawyers on the outside didn't know what they were looking for.
They basically only had to go off of what the government offered them.
And those of us on the inside who did see the truth, we were censored and we couldn't tell the public.
for, and again, even to this day, and this is what's so messed up, and this is why like, I look at the House Republicans like, what are you doing?
Because I don't know if you heard this, but like, they started releasing a lot of CCTV a year or so ago on a Rumble page, but they started blurring people's faces.
And you think, well, that's interesting, because the FBI already has all this video, and they have facial recognition software.
Why are they blurring people's faces?
The sedition hunters have been finding people just with pictures of their clothing.
Like, that's interesting.
And I think that they were hiding confidential sources and feds inside the crowd, personally.
That's my opinion.
They stopped doing it, but that was just weird.
It just seemed like there were just constantly these barriers to hide the video from the public so that they can't find out what actually happened that day.
Oh, yeah.
I was not surprised at all.
As a matter of fact...
The morning of January the 6th, my program runs in the morning.
All this stuff kicked off about an hour and a half after the program.
And I warned everybody for the final time.
I said, stay away from it.
It is going to be filled with agent provocateurs.
They're going to provoke something.
I knew this was going to be happening because of the things that Alex Jones was doing when I worked for him and all the rest of the stuff.
So I knew that was going to happen.
I've been saying it for weeks and weeks on air there before he fired me.
but i could see this stuff shaping up right after the election happened they immediately started talking about how they're going to raise money it's going to be like falling off a log and boy certainly they did raise a lot let's talk about the personal attacks on you and As more than anybody else, I think, when I Google your name, I see, you know, in conjunction with January 6th, I see the BBC everybody coming after you as the Hitler mustache.
Capital Rioter.
And they put pictures up of you.
And let me see if I can pull this one up here.
Yeah.
Now, was this a joke, the one that they've got there?
Because, I mean, it looks like you're...
Well, you tell me, what was the circumstance of this?
What were you doing with this?
Right.
It was a joke.
It was a joke, and I did not go to the Capitol looking like that.
And so, just to be perfectly clear, that's from a year before January 6th.
I was an internet comedian, if you want to call that.
I was a satirist.
My whole life I produced satire.
And so that was basically political satire aimed at Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
With the COVID lockdowns.
Long story short, he did an interview with Tucker Carlson.
And Tucker Carlson said, yeah, COVID's bad and all that, but what about the Constitution?
And Phil Murphy says, well, Tucker, that's above my pay grade.
I remember that.
And so I did a series of reaction videos on YouTube and stuff like that where I posed like that.
And I'm like, yeah, emergency powers.
Why would you ever question the state?
Right on.
And it was ironic.
But that gets completely lost in translation.
It was a year before January 6th.
I did not go to the Capitol with a Hitler mustache.
Like I said, I was there in a suit and tie.
The CCTV shows this too, but if you look at the pictures, it's just like, well, that doesn't match up at all.
That doesn't comport with reality.
And the reason they did that was, well, one, again, to further prejudice any potential jury.
Two, to smear me in the public.
Three, to cover up the fact that I was entirely peaceful and I didn't actually do anything at the Capitol.
And four...
And this is, again, take it with a grain of salt, but I think they were trying to frame me as the next Timothy McVeigh, or a far-right extremist who was a potential security threat.
The FBI just came to my house last week to return my property after I was arrested for January 6th.
Well, the problem is, they didn't return any of my property.
All my property, according to them, is still in the D.C. office.
This was the Newark office here in New Jersey.
And the property they gave me, they returned to me, was a postcard.
Well, it's like, well, that's interesting.
I never got this postcard.
I didn't even know it existed.
Well, what's the postcard?
Well, the return address is to the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. Well, that's weird.
There are phone numbers there for me to get free money.
Two numbers, one out of Nevada, one out of Florida.
And it basically has a bunch of racial epithets on it.
And it's like, well, this is interesting.
And so what's interesting is that the officers, the FBI agents, they said, oh yeah, this came for you right after you got arrested.
It's like, well, I never got it.
Well, they mailed it to the base I was living on, the Navy base I protected.
Well, I still never got it.
And again, the address was not towards my apartment.
It was specifically to the Navy.
And what I suspect is that if I had not...
If I had done better during my bond, if I had been given bail, I think that they were attempting to set me up as some sort of foreign asset or something like that.
I did get bail by a magistrate judge, but the district court overruled it when the government appealed, so I had to go all the way to D.C. That's why I had to go there in the first place, from Jersey to D.C. And when I was in D.C., I started getting suspicious mail from white nationalist organizations asking if I wanted books and puzzles and stuff like that.
I'm like, I'm not responding to any of this mail.
There were multiple times where the feds were using informants inside the jail as well to try to get me to discuss plotting another Oklahoma City bombing, things like that.
They were trying to set me up as a domestic terrorist.
That's one of the reasons why I, as a nonviolent defendant, was constantly being denied bail.
They were trying to set me up, and it just never went anywhere because I knew what they were doing.
So this is a very long way of saying they set me up and they framed me for a narrative.
Yeah, that's all that you see when you look at it.
Now, the BBC article says they added over the course of an internal Navy probe into you that 34 of your colleagues said that you had extremist or radical views pertaining to Jewish people, minorities, and women.
When did that internal Navy probe happen?
This happened after my arrest when I was no longer the union rep, and they could basically squeeze my co-workers and my employees.
So I'd mentioned the issue with management at the company.
They had been threatening people at the job, and I couldn't protect them as the union rep anymore.
Now, first off, that report is a lie.
They did not interview 44 of my coworkers.
If you actually look at these NCIS reports, which took months for me to actually get access to, and half of them are redacted.
Half of them are, you can barely read them.
The quality is so poor.
And again, these interviews were being done all the way up until March of 2021. I was arrested in January.
These weren't my co-workers.
There are some of my co-workers, but for the most part, these are just Navy petty officers.
These aren't people.
These are not my co-workers.
And so they manufactured a bunch of stuff.
If you read the questionnaires, they say things like, well, I heard from someone who heard this.
It's all hearsay.
It's just, it was completely manufactured.
I actually, when I finally got out of prison, I was able to reach out to my actual co-workers and they sent me screenshots and stuff that completely contradicts us.
I still talk to my co-workers.
I actually have released screenshots that show, again, I was the union rep.
They voted for me to protect their civil rights.
I won every minority vote.
Every black, Hispanic, and Asian employee voted for me to defend their civil rights for management because they were the ones who were discriminating against them.
So this is complete nonsense.
It was just a narrative.
But again, This was created by NCIS. It's not like the TV show.
They're not the good guys.
NCIS, they're the feds.
They're basically the FBI for the Navy.
And again, the Navy and the FBI were both there to set me up.
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because, you know, my sense was that from what I've seen in political trials and things like that, that there is exculpatory evidence is withheld and smears and things like that against people.
I wouldn't have you on if I really believed that that was the case.
But I wanted to hear it from you and give you a chance to respond to these public attacks on you because they don't give your side of it.
They don't ever talk to you in these hit pieces from the BBC. We're getting lots of USAID money as well.
Let me ask you, though, when you did the parody of the governor saying that this is above his pay grade, did you get involved in any protests in terms of, you know, one of the things that's always concerned me, it bothered me so much to see what was happening with lockdown, what I call medical martial law from the very beginning of it.
And I didn't understand why people were so passive with all this stuff.
I mean, I didn't go do any protests, but I wouldn't comply with any of it in the public sphere.
and um and and i looked at this as being predicated on uh money that was being paid by the uh by the presidents by the trump white house uh he gave money to the hospitals to identify to point finger people and say they had covid and gave them money to put them on the ventilators gave them extra money to to do remdesivir and all the rest of the stuff and created the vaccine and i i knew where this stuff was headed because i had
I was aware of all of the war games that they'd done since Dark Winter on.
For 20 years, they had been doing this stuff.
So I looked at all that stuff, and I felt that Trump was complicit in it.
Did you not feel that he had any complicity in this?
I never really looked at it like that.
The way I looked at it is that...
It was an unprecedented sort of thing in terms of the sheer scale of all of it.
And when you look at the timeline of it, I don't feel like there was any attempt.
I think a lot of these policies back then were really, from the top at least, I think it was kind of assembled piecemeal.
That's the way I look at it.
Band-Aid here, I think that that's really what it was.
I think, though, that it just provided a great opportunity for massive civil rights violations, especially more so by the governors.
So, I mean, eventually, after a certain point, I mean, they were still doing COVID lockdowns in D.C. a year after January 6th.
So I can't put that squarely on the shoulders of President Trump.
I do think that, you know, I mean, look, hindsight's 20-20.
I don't think it was malice.
I do think, though, that there might have been people promoting it, like Fauci and stuff like that.
What about the fact that he put Fauci in power and gave him a medal on his last day?
And the fact that he continued to push the vaccine after people were dropping dead?
I covered that for years, and up until just a few months ago, Trump was still pushing that.
You don't see that in hindsight?
Well, you see it in hindsight, but again, that's kind of what I'm saying, is that at the time, I think it was reactionary.
I think it was reactive, not proactive.
Again, in terms of malice versus whatever, I think the administration now is more deliberate than it was the first time.
I think that Trump came into office expecting that it was, even though the government was corrupt and it was the swamp, I think he still thought that there would be more of a meritocracy sort of thing going on, where he could find the best of the best and trust experts.
I'm not saying that that's correct.
I'm just saying that that's what I think it was.
That versus now, where he's kind of pulling people in, like RFK or whoever from across the aisle.
To put them in that sort of a meritocracy.
That's the way I look at it.
That's the way I kind of looked at it back then.
I'm a pragmatist as well.
I think corruption is inherent in government.
I think people are corrupt.
And so I don't see everything that I dislike or even the corruption that I can identify.
I don't think that it's always some massive thing.
I don't want to get into Montesquieu and stuff like that.
I just think that in government you have to take it for how it is, not how you want it to be.
I'm not an idealist.
I think that power is something that needs to be wielded with suspicion.
And I think maybe President Trump wasn't always as suspicious of the right people that he should have been.
But I don't think it was malice so much as it is that There's so much of our system that is just opportunistic and selfish and corrupt.
And, you know, I wouldn't want to be the one in charge, I'll say that.
Yeah.
Well, I guess we disagree on Trump, but I certainly, you know, I think that we all need to be concerned, regardless of what our political understanding of this is and what we believe.
I think we all need to understand that a fair trial...
is essential to all of us and that any of us can be caught up in a weaponized government like this.
I've seen it time and again and it's in so many different areas whenever the government gets its sights put on you if they see you in contradiction of their the goals that they want to achieve they will do anything To destroy you, they will throw the Constitution out, and they are not bound by any of that.
And I think that is something that all of us need to be concerned about.
It's one of the reasons why, when we talk about the justice system, we want to make sure that even the guilty people We don't have a lynch mob.
We go through due process because we all want to have that due process.
We all want to have a fair trial.
And it bothered me a great deal.
as much as I had divorced myself from anything to do with Trump or the Stop the Steal stuff or the Save America grifts.
I hated to see what happened with the people on January the 6th.
And I hate the fact that the government can get away with this.
And so I hope that Trump is going to do it.
And I hope it's going to be done in a way that is not just personal revenge, but in a way that's going to be real reform.
I think people need to be the people who, the really dangerous people, the people who really committed the insurrection were the Department of Justice and the FBI people who dedicated so many resources to
to persecuting their political enemies, and I think they need to pay a price for this as a warning to other people because if they don't go to jail, if they don't lose their jobs and go to jail, then these other people are going to feel that they have a free pass to do the same thing for those that they want to come after.
And so I think going to jail would be a good thing.
I think even for when the next administration comes around, that some of the people who are there now would be concerned that when another administration comes, it's a left-wing Democrat version, that they would be going to jail if they were to violate that they would be going to jail if they were to violate So maybe they'll abide by it a little bit more carefully than the FBI has in the past, because the FBI has been all over the place since its creation, from what I know about it.
So it's good that you're out.
I'm glad that you're out.
I'm glad that this has been pulled back.
I hope we see some real reform.
I hope we see some people who did this stuff punished.
Tell us a little bit about your life now and what is ahead.
Thank you.
Well, right now, it's just sort of rebuilding.
You know, it's just an unfortunate reality that you can't just pick up where you left off.
So, I mean, I lost my military career.
I lost my, you know, contracting job.
But, you know, I think that adversity is there to make us stronger.
And so, now that...
The pardons are out and everybody's out of jail and prison.
I actually have been reconnecting a lot with all the men that I was incarcerated with.
And so we're working together.
I've been actually interviewing the guys I was locked up with and I've been uploading these interviews and calling it January 6th Unfiltered.
And these are going to serve as primary sources, but long story short, we're actually writing a history book about this, about the D.C. Gulag and about really everything.
Because, again, what they did to me is just a fraction of it.
There were dozens and dozens of men who got framed like that.
And so we're going to correct the narratives, we're going to talk about what actually happened that day from our perspectives, and we're going to record...
Years and years of government abuses in those jails, the civil rights violations, due process, and all that.
Yeah, I've been covering this for a long time, going back to the Ammon-Bundy trial, and all the Bundys, and how they railroaded that.
Even people who tried to help expose medical kidnapping, Marty Gottesfeld, and they put him in a communications management unit, along with Francis Schaefer and everything.
Look into that.
Get some of the people to talk about that.
I haven't heard them, I don't think.
They put the January 6th people in any CMUs, but that is another thing.
It's kind of like a domestic Gitmo that they are setting up for political prisoners, and that's the way they're using this stuff.
Well, I'm so glad that you're out.
Timothy Hale Cusinelli.
I'm glad that you're free.
I know that you are glad.
And let's hope that we can get this information out and that we can get some real reform and that we can get this before the eyes and ears of the American public to understand what their government is actually capable of.
First time you see it, it truly is amazing.
And I guess you experienced it for the first time when you saw it when you experienced it for the first time.
So thank you for joining us.
I appreciate that.
I appreciate you.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
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