BREAKING: Credentialed "Blaze Media" Journalist CHARGED by FBI for Documenting J6 | INTERVIEW
SUPPORT THE SHOW: Join https://censored.tv using promo code OFFENSIVE to keep independent media and journalism alive!
_______
Steve Baker is a journalist for TheBlaze.com (Blaze Media) & was formally charged for J6 by the FBI for documenting the protest and unrest around the Capitol Building. This sets a terrible precedent for both the Biden DOJ and FBI who are now targeting legitimate members of the press purely based on their political bias. This may end up at the Supreme Court one day (case currently pending at SCOTUS to combat the abuse of the DOJ against attendees of Trump's January 6th rally)
_______
Follow Steve on X: https://twitter.com/TPC4USA
_______
My next guest has been both an independent journalist and worked for familiar publications like The Blaze.
He's currently a contributor there.
However, years after January 6th occurred, he's now being officially charged by the FBI for the grave sin of doing his job and documenting a historical and breaking news event.
Steve Baker, welcome to Slightly Offensive for the first time.
Yeah, the second part of that question is going to be fun to answer because we don't know yet.
My actions on January 6th were simply this.
I showed up at the Trump rally with another writer, another journalist of some renown.
I'm not going to name his name because he didn't go into the building.
He doesn't deserve any attention.
But the bottom line is that we went there to cover the event.
As it happens, neither one of us are or were Trump supporters.
We just were doing our job.
And I come from a more libertarian background myself.
And I was there specifically because I thought from the pre-publicity about the event, you know, when Trump said something was going to be wild, I thought maybe he was going to unleash the kraken about the alleged stolen election.
But I'd never been on a record either about talking about the election numbers or the election fraud.
It just wasn't my area of interest.
But the bottom line is that we stayed there at the ellipse.
We watched most of the speech and then we headed over to the Capitol because that's where events were planned.
There were six permitted events by the Capitol Police on the Capitol grounds that day.
And there were marches that were scheduled and all the above.
And so that's where everybody was moving.
And my friend and I decided to get ahead of that crowd and we started moving that way.
By the time we got to what would be the reflection pool on the west side of the Capitol, we started seeing smoke, started hearing flashbangs.
We could hear the sirens.
We could see the fluorescent jackets or our vest of the MPD, Metropolitan Police Officers descending down the stairs.
And I just looked at my colleague and I said, well, that's where we're going.
And so we ran up there at 1.19 p.m.
I turned my camera on and began catching all the violence on the west side.
I began to, you know, I ran camera throughout that event.
And then when the lines broke through a little bit after two o'clock and they started going up underneath the scaffolding, that's where the stairs were.
I eventually joined that crowd behind several hundred people.
I was not on the front lines.
I never did any battle.
I never attacked any officers.
I didn't, you know, I did get hit by some bear spray, but I was downwind from it when that happened or OC spray or pepper spray from the police and protesters, by the way.
And then Once that door on the northwest side, a door you might may or may not be familiar with, was breached.
Um, I did actually follow into that building after, again, several several hundred people had moved in in front of me.
And then I uh I made my way through.
I documented what I saw.
I eventually captured one of the key moments of Ashley Babbitt's end of life.
I didn't catch the shooting, but I was the only journalist there on the south exit that captured her body being extracted from the Capitol.
There, I actually wandered up on her on the lower, uh, lower level on the south exit, and then I posted up there at that door because as I was getting there, the EMT units and the gurneys were coming in, so what comes in must come out.
So, I posted up on the back of that door, turned my camera on, and I captured the extraction of her.
And as a result of that, my videos have been used all over the world: HBO documentary, New York Times documentary, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So, what I'm trying to understand here is you were there on January 6th.
You admit that you were there at a professional capacity.
You were not there to support the president.
You were attending an event like other journalists were attending, and you did what a journalist should do: follow the action.
I mean, we're not even talking about modern journalism with clicks and views.
This is you go where the story leads.
That's a very, very standard journalistic position.
You follow the story, and in this case, it was physically following.
And so, explain to me then between this time, when you first heard from the United States government several months later, what was their interaction with you and what did they want to know?
Well, I, you know, certainly after everything was moving so fast after January 7th, you know, they began making arrests immediately and they were making random arrests and they were making arrests of people that did no violence.
And I had no clue what was going to come my way.
But by July of 21, so some six months or so afterwards, I kind of just anticipated that I was going to be not bothered because I'd had a 20, 25 year history of being a writer.
And I thought that, okay, well, they're not going to mess with me.
I certainly fall under what I would consider to be a First Amendment protection of some sort.
But I mean, let's be perfectly honest: journalists are not protected from or allowed to enter restricted spaces.
So, if they were going to bring charges against myself or other journalists, whether they're independent or whether they work for media organizations, the fact of the matter is, is that if you're going to bring charges against one, you have to bring charges against all.
And that's not what's happening.
All of the independent journalists that I'm aware of that have been charged have not been regime supporting in their narratives.
And as a result of that, because they were either Trump supporters or whatever the case may be, they didn't submit their stories to the New Yorker or to BuzzFeed or somebody like that.
Then, that's or in their stories, talk about being amongst the insurrectionists in their stories.
Well, then, these guys have been subjected to charges.
And so, I just anticipated that maybe I was going to slip through that crack because of my libertarianism and the fact that I was, you know, I was not a Trump guy.
And as it turns out, my subsequent investigations have not been favorable to the narrative.
And then in July, I was contacted by the FBI.
I was took, they were very cooperative with me, and I was cooperative with them.
They worked with my travel schedule.
I was on the road a lot.
And eventually, of course, I turned that over to my attorney right away as far as the scheduling was concerned.
He became my booking agent.
And my attorney finally found a convenient time for him, me, and the two FBI agents that wanted to interview me in October.
So it took some time.
Nobody was in a hurry about it.
And there was no reason to be in a hurry.
I'm not a danger to society.
I did no violence that day.
I didn't break any property that day.
I didn't breach any lines that day.
And I ultimately did the interview in October.
They, of course, said that we'll be back in touch if the Department of Justice wants to move forward with charges of any kind.
And then on November 17th of 21, I, or my attorney received an email from an assistant U.S. attorney out of Philadelphia by the name of, I don't know if that was me or you, but my attorney received an email from Anita Eve, an assistant U.S. attorney out of Philadelphia.
And she said to him that your client is going to be charged within the week, me being that client.
And that was November 17th, over two years ago.
And we obviously were kind of surprised that that was going to happen.
But this is the crazy part, Glijah.
You're not going to believe this, is that she included two statutes with which she was going to charge me, or they were going to charge me.
One of those statutes was interstate racketeering.
Now, I don't know how many cases of January 6th trials and defendants you've followed, but have you heard of anybody else that was going to be charged with interstate racketeering?
Yeah, the only thing that we were able to surmise or guess or conjecture in any way was that they were going to allege that I had purposefully conspired to travel across state lines for the purpose of making money off an illegal event through licensing and selling my videos that I captured that day.
I mean, that was the only thing that could possibly make sense.
Of course, we were laughing at that.
And so we went on a media offensive immediately.
I'll tell the very, very short version of that story.
We did press releases, launched the media offensive.
I started doing interviews, radio, written press, television, podcasts, et cetera, et cetera.
And we seemed to have backed them off.
And that was apparently what happened because despite the fact that her email to my attorney said that I would be charged and arrested within the week, we did not hear from them again for 20 months.
And then in August of this year, I received my, well, my attorney received a service of process notice for me to be to respond to a grand jury subpoena for my work and my videos from that day.
And we did, in fact, comply with the subpoena.
And then we didn't hear from them again through this process until today.
And then my attorney received a phone call from the same exact investigating lead investigative agent that interviewed me over two years ago.
And he said that they needed me to report in my hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, and that I would need to self-present at that time and that I was going to be charged.
And that he claimed he didn't know what those charges would be and wouldn't know until the judge, the magistrates actually signed off on the warrant.
And until that point, he wouldn't be able to tell me what the charges are.
They're leaving you in this limbo of, okay, well, yeah, you're going to be charged.
You don't know if it's misdemeanors.
You do not know if it's felonies.
You do not know the extent if they're seeking prison time, if they're seeking home arrest.
You just don't know any of these things.
And they're leaving you in limbo, but they're clear.
They've asked for your footage.
They've looked at your stuff.
They knew you were there in a professional capacity.
Let me clarify then.
Do you think that they waited several years to speak to you or to move forward?
Because of these are some hypotheticals that I keep wondering.
Is it that they were litmus testing the public to see what threshold of targeting individuals they would be okay with?
Is it B that they were trying to watch the action of Congress and of checking the Justice Department and they saw no action?
Or three, is it just because they're backlogged and they have so many people that maybe your case was a little more complicated because you were a journalist or they weren't sure they could win it.
And now they finally feel like they have enough evidence.
Like, what do you think is really going on here?
Because it seems very bizarre with all the crime going on in the United States that we would waste resources, particularly on this case.
You know, I know most cases of J6 are of the same, but this is a clear-cut non-grata.
And we can speculate about this for hours if we wanted to.
But let me just give you an inside look here.
I actually spoke to a mainstream journalist today who is a legal affairs court reporter for one of the big media companies.
And he told me that he actually had spoken to some members of the sedition hunters today.
And they even expressed surprise that the DOJ would waste resources on me, considering that they have identified something on the order of around 200 individuals that they have identified for doing violence and property damage who have yet to be arrested by the DOJ.
So why put me up at the top of the pile when they actually have what they deem to be violent offenders waiting just for any notification at all from the feds?
So I mean, I honestly, I think I know the answer to this question.
The fact of the matter is, is I've been poking the bear for two years now.
And we have just recently, only in the past few months, released some very revealing stories, damaging stories to the government's narrative, damaging to Capitol Police, damaging to the Department of Justice.
And I think that we're looking at just pure simple retribution right now and that they intend to shut me up.
As it comes, as it happens with these charges, one of the first things they do is they seek to prevent me from traveling to DC.
And the last thing they want me to do is working here right now.
It does appear to be political targeting genuinely, because, you know, I would say at the very least, if they wanted to try to hit you with some ticket, like I said, like some, you know, check you with some, even if it was an egregious fine, like $6,500 and it was like, you entered into a restricted area, you know, learn your lesson, bud, type of, you know, 1980s top movie, you know, don't you dare step foot.
This is an expensive, expensive step you took there, son.
You know, I mean, of course, that'd be arbitrary.
I would fight that too.
And I don't think any level of perception for being a journalist would make sense.
But, you know, that's more like red taping, right?
And that's, that's, that's different.
And that's when we're, we're more accustomed to that in America of like minor abuses of the justice system.
We're accustomed, you know, towards, you know, getting a 24 hours in jail, you know, for a bunk DUI test or just something stupid and you got to fight it in court.
But like to press charges and to go through this and to spend years of investigation, I don't think there is any other explanation than the fact that you were targeted.
And so, on a personal level and on a professional level, I want you to touch on two aspects here.
How are you feeling about this personally?
Do you think you're going to get jail time?
Do you have a clue of what might be going on?
And then, on the second side, I don't think any consequence here is justified.
What do you think this sets a precedent for for journalists?
And do you think they're going to use your case, like I mentioned earlier, as a litmus to further prosecute journalists like myself, like Richie McGinnis, or anybody else who was there that day working on official credentials for publications that are on the wrong side of the political spectrum?
Yeah, another great question because I've been following these trials closely and obviously with particular interest to those who claimed to be journalists.
There was a lot of people that suddenly became journalists that day because they had a cell phone camera and that was their first line of defense, or at least they tried to use that in their trials or their motions going forward.
And of course, those were all shot down.
But those who were, in fact, legitimate independent journalists who had to face these trials, who had backgrounds and records of having press passes and being contracted by media companies and the like, who have been convicted and who went to trial, we're seeing them receive prison sentences for misdemeanors.
Now, if they had taken a plea deal as the government wanted, because that's what's what the DOJ wants from everybody on these four basic misdemeanor charges that they're handing out to most people.
If you play nice and you take a plea deal to a parading charge or the glorified trespassing charge, you can get out of there with two years probation, $1,000 fine, a few hours of community service.
But if you decide that you want to defend your rights or you want to make some sort of argument about selective prosecution and say, hey, he was doing the same thing I was doing.
You didn't charge him.
Why are you charging me?
He's an independent journalist.
There were 60 of them that went in the building that day and you're not charging them.
Why are you charging me?
You try to go in there and make that judge or make that case in your trial.
Then they not only find you guilty, but they're sentencing you to two, four, six, eight months in prison.
I got to be careful while discussing these things with you because of the grave nature in the morally bankrupt condition that our justice system is involved in.
There's no other way to say it, except this is a shit stain on the reputation of not only our Justice Department, which I guess is not that good at the moment, but also of our intelligence community.
How dare they, on a purely legal ground, prosecute people like yourself?
And I mean that.
And I hope they feel ashamed at night.
I hope they don't believe their narrative of this being anything less than entrapment.
And if anything, you know, as a journalist, the only thing they might be mad about is that the more that we've pried into things, the more we've seen that this was, at the very least, a government entrapment scheme.
And I will hold to that.
And so maybe you don't want to comment on this because of the sensitivity of this.
But is that what you found as well?
Is that this is a much more complicated and less cutthroat issue than just some people mad about an election, that this appears to be in some ways either facilitated, allowed to happen, or at the very least, I should say, the government could have done more to prevent the level of damage or intrusion that people had into the building, but failed to act.
Like, what is your understanding of this on their level?
You know, some of my most recent reporting for the Blaze has been the fact that we have proved absolutely irrefutably by the videos, by the time codes on the Capitol CCTV, by my many, many days of being in that video room harvesting video.
We have proved that there have, in fact, been set up.
We've proved that there's been cover-up.
In fact, my most recent story that was released this past Thursday was about a Capitol Police officer who used Capitol Police time, Capitol Police resources to initiate and publish an anonymous letter, which was prompted by Representative Jamie Raskin, put this Capitol Police officer up to that to use Capitol Time, Capitol Police time, and resources to do this.
It was a major hatch act violation, as a matter of fact.
And in addition to that, it was something that was not only participated in by an elected official, a congressman, and an anonymous Capitol Police officer of a highly political and highly partisan political nature.
But there were also involved in that some mainstream media journalists that actually helped this officer craft that letter.
Now, that doesn't seem like a great big story in the grand scheme of things, but I can tell you that from our sources inside the Capitol Police and actual information that I receive, as well as screenshots of their internal comms and their leadership, that they were freaking out about this because ultimately what we showed was this officer committed a termination or terminable offense in this thing that he did.
And then in the lying about it thereafter, he should have been terminated, but he was protected.
And we have seen his disciplinary report.
He received no disciplinary actions whatsoever because this particular officer is none other than the hero of the day on January 6th, Officer Harry Dunn, who's received Congressional Medal, received presidential medal, accolades, and the big cherry, which is the book deal.
Never finding until January 6th that the greatest form of bravery would be being an author.
Hopefully, as an author, you don't end up covering a story that gets you put behind prison for doing your job either.
You know, we don't wish that level of persecution on these people.
But I do want to end on this.
I do want to end on this, Steve, because it's very hard for me to remain professional and to not let my personal bias get in on this story because the things that I witnessed that day, the things that I understand, I mean, even talking to you, right?
People say, oh, there's a risk talking to people who are being charged and stuff.
And what I say to the justice system that is charging journalists, you've got to understand the kind of hell that they're going to be put through if they take this any further, especially with people who are operating under their press credentials.
But I don't put it past them.
You know what I mean?
Like, I mean, I have press credentials from the Capitol building that I've received in the Capitol building, cleared by the FBI, but I'm not confident that the justice system won't go a step further and go after these individuals.
But when we're sitting here and the precedents this sets, what message is this sending to the American people?
Because I just wonder, you know, how much further can they go before they just blatantly are objectively and pridefully intruding not only on our God-given rights, our constitutional rights that God has given us, but intruding on our human rights, our ability to speak, walk, and move freely in our country.
At what point do we say enough is enough, Steve?
Because to me, this is a long time ago, but especially if it wasn't then, it's now.
If the people don't rise up against this and they don't let their voices be heard, I'm not talking about just in my circumstance, but in so many of these trials, if they don't understand the main focus of the DOJ's attacks and the weaponization as it relates to January 6th, it is 100% against free speech.
And you're thinking, oh, no, no, no, it's against the violence, it's against the insurrection, it's against the obstruction of an official proceeding.
And all of that is completely wrong if you don't watch the individual trials from the top to the bottom, from the smallest cases to the biggest cases.
And let me just give you a quick example.
If you were a grandma or a young couple and you walked into the Capitol for five minutes and you took a couple selfies in the rotunda and you didn't chant and you didn't cheer and you didn't say USA, USA, or whose house, our house, or stop the steal or anything like that.
And you walked out, then you got the four basic misdemeanor charges.
You were able to plea down to one of those and then you got your two years' probation and you were then allowed to go back home and try to repair your life because you lost your job.
Your husband lost his job.
You got kicked out of all your clubs.
You got kicked out of your church.
Your neighborhood disowned you.
And so you had to deal with all of that.
And so, but you, but you got out of there with a base, you know, probationary period for a couple of years.
But if you're the same person, same age, did no violence, and you walked through there and you chanted and you paraded and you waved a Trump flag or some other sort of flag, and then you decided that, hey, that was just my speech there.
Then you decided to either go to a bench trial or a jury trial or whatever.
You got two, six, eight months in prison, even on the misdemeanor charges.
And so it's about speech.
It's about what you said when you were in there.
And then you take it all the way to the nth degree and you look at Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers.
He didn't go inside the building and he never called.
I was there.
I covered every single day of his trial.
Nine weeks, I was there sitting in the media room, press room, every single day for that trial.
And not one single FBI agent that the government brought in by the prosecuting team to testify against those oath keepers ever could produce or say that they had written or verbal evidence of him or any other oathkeeper leadership ordering the stopping of the certification, storming the Capitol, attacking Congress members, or otherwise, you know, anything else untoward.
The only thing that they had from those guys, they were a bunch of ex-military, ex-cops, and they talk shit all the time.
That's the way they talk.
They talk Revolutionary War stuff.
They had chat groups where they talked this kind of, you know, braggadocio, bravado language.
And so they were able, the prosecution was able to run this high-definition video AV psyop on the jury at high, you know, high speed and show them all these scary words that these guys had said months and months even before January 6th was even planned.
And that's what they were convicted of.
So Stuart Rhodes is a political prisoner.
He was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison because he said scary words because he did no violence.
He carried no weapons.
He didn't enter the Capitol.
He didn't hurt anybody.
He didn't order anybody to go into the Capitol, but he said scary words.
So they're coming for all of us for our scary words.
It's alarming and it's a threat that everybody should recognize is not just something you're watching on the screen.
Things have escalated to levels when it comes to targeting of civilians, particularly of American citizens that are currently in the state doing their jobs, I might say, for the betterment of the country.
This is a new level of persecution.
And I just wonder what's next, who's next, and what's going to happen.
Steve, our hearts are with you.
We'll continue to track the story.
I'd love to hear personally from you and any developments that are going on so we can try to amplify this and keep eyes on it.
Because I think we've been successfully able to do so with Owen Schroyer by getting a lot of eyes on something and by pressuring early on.
We were able to do a lot more, especially with this journalistic cover or with the fact that they were working there in a professional capacity.
So, Steve, if people do want to keep tracking with you right now, supporting you, as I ask all of my guests on the show, one, where can people support and follow you?
And two, I don't even know if you're religious at all, but for those who want to pray and help in the spiritual battle or just be there to encourage you, how can people be supporting you in your mind, in your spirit?
I've had attorneys calling me and I actually had one attorney pray for me over the phone today.
And those are certainly coveted and welcome.
And obviously, you know, look, I will continue to pray for justice.
That's it.
Justice, whether it's me or whether it's the Owen Schroeders of the world or whether it's any of these other guys.
I just want justice.
And that's all I'm asking for in my case.
As far as supporting, as far as following, my internet and social media handle is very simple and it's universal, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, or my locals blog.
That's where my blog is.
It's TPC, the number four USA, TPC4 USA.
And they can follow all of my stuff on, you know, obviously it's posted everywhere at this point.
But then, of course, obviously my articles are all on Blaze Media as well.
And I can't stress enough that as much as we're keeping a professional capacity here as an American and as a fellow journalist, I genuinely, my heart hurts for you, for your personal life, for what this means for the country, for those that love you, and for those that still believe that perhaps there is hope in this country.
We salute you.
We encourage you and wish you the strength of God and the American spirit as you battle a very corrupt Department of Justice that has weaponized the government in all the wrong ways and capacities.
