Monday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson revealed the names of President Donald Trump associates who face a subpoena from the Biden Justice Department for alleged connections to the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot.
Carlson called the DOJ’s tactics harassment, illegal, unconstitutional and unlawful. He added the politicization of law enforcement at the federal level threatened the country’s democracy.
Partial transcript as follows:
CARLSON: So, the upside of having a senile president is that no one takes him very seriously and so it’s possible for the rest of us to see something like that, a declaration of war on an entire political party in a two-party system, which would leave this, if we were to follow his urging, a one-party state. It’s very easy to dismiss that as the ramblings of a man who has no idea what he’s saying and a lot of people did and yet the very next day, the morning after Joe Biden delivered that speech at 8:30 a.m, a woman called Lisa Gallagher was sick in bed at her home in suburban New Jersey.
Her daughter came upstairs and told her that the FBI was waiting outside. Now, Lisa Gallagher is not a criminal, never has been. She is an active Trump supporter, particularly on Facebook. She did Trump (flag on her lawn). She’s a patriotic American. She describes herself as a rule follower. She’s never once been in trouble with the law at any level, and she had nothing whatsoever to do with January 6 and yet, outside her door with three FBI agents with guns. “We got an anonymous tip you were at the Capitol on January 6.” That’s what they said. Gallagher was terrified. “I thought they were going to take me out of here in handcuffs,” she told the show this morning.
Ultimately, her husband came home and the two of them showed the FBI agents her daily calendars from January of 2021 and finally convinced the agents that she was not at the Capitol that day. Imagine armed FBI agents showing up at your house because you supported Trump on Facebook and demanding records of your whereabouts on a date nearly two years ago and of course, the FBI already knew that Lisa Gallagher was not there because they have sophisticated facial recognition software, so they were never planning to arrest her. The point (and this is a theme in every authoritarian regime), the point was to use government agents to intimidate enemies of the regime on the basis of an anonymous tip. “I have never been so frightened in my life,” Lisa Gallagher said.
The rest of us should feel the same way. Snitches? Anonymous snitches? The secret police showing up at your door when you’re in bed? This is Soviet and there’s no other word for it. But it’s not just Lisa Gallagher. The same thing is happening to dozens, maybe scores of other supporters of the former president.
Amy Kremer, for example, is a former Tea Party member and a candidate for the House of Representatives. She also obtained special permits for the National Park Service, which authorized Donald Trump’s rally on January 6, 2021. To be perfectly clear, Amy Kremer never went to the Capitol on that day. She never encouraged anyone else to go, either. But for the crime of organizing a lawful political event, an election justice rally protected by the Constitution, Amy Kremer is now being terrorized by Merrick Garland’s DOJ.
On Wednesday morning, FBI agents showed up at her home, first at the home of her ex-husband, carrying a subpoena for her daughter Kylie. Kremer received a call from Kylie’s stepmother saying, “The FBI is here for her.” The FBI subpoenaed demands, all communications from Amy Kremer and Kylie, including their social media posts from October 1, 2020 to the present day.
Now, why would the FBI, Joe Biden’s FBI need Amy Kremer’s daughter’s Instagram posts? Because this isn’t about the events leading up to January 6. Obviously, it’s about mining all of her personal information. This is harassment on political grounds. It’s illegal. It’s unconstitutional. It shocks the conscience of everyone who sees it, but the number of people who see it is very small because it is not covered by any media and it’s not just happening to Amy Kremer. This show has obtained a subpoena from Merrick Garland’s DOJ issued in the past week and what it demands is both unlawful and without precedent in American history. The subpoena claims to be investigating, “any claim that the vice president and/or president of the Senate had the authority to reject or choose not to count presidential electors.”
Now keep in mind that any claim you make as an American citizen about electors, any claim you make about American politics, period, is protected explicitly under the First Amendment. That’s our core freedom. It’s why we live here. It’s why we’re proud to be Americans. It’s why so many American servicemen died protecting our country. Those are the freedoms that they fought to preserve. That’s why nobody prosecuted leading Democrats in 2016 when they sought to reject electors for Donald Trump. Right. It’s why none of those people, including Kamala Harris, is now in jail.
But right now, according to the subpoena that we have obtained, Merrick Garland’s DOJ is demanding all communication from the following people on this topic and let’s be clear before we read their names, that it is not clear what the investigation is actually about and that’s the most terrifying part.
What is this? On what grounds are you demanding my private communications with people? They never say but included in this precedent-breaking sweep of political opponents of the Biden White House would be former White House adviser Bernie Kerik, who was the former police commissioner of New York City; Boris Epshteyn, who is the current attorney for Donald Trump (At no time in American history has it been okay to grab the personal communications of someone’s lawyer because those are privileged. Not anymore.) Matt Morgan; Justin Clark; Kenneth Chesebro and Mike Roman; RNC official Joshua Findlay; Trump Attorneys John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Joe DiGenova, James Troupis, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Victoria Toensing, Cleta Mitchell, and Bruce Marks. We could go on and on and on and on.
The DOJ is now going after former White House official Stephen Miller, a frequent guest on this show, with a subpoena. Why? Well, it could be because Stephen Miller went on this network and said, “If we win these cases in the courts, then we can direct the alternate state of electors are certified.”
In other words, he didn’t call for the insurrection, much less violence or a coup. He called for alternate electors to be seated if the court ordered them to be seated. In other words, he was following the constitutionally prescribed process post-election. He’s doing what is supposed to do. He was following the rules, but under Joe Biden, that apparently is now a crime. By the way, every one of these people has to hire lawyers to defend him or herself and a lot of them at this point, after two years of harassment by Joe Biden, can’t afford it.
In addition, we should say, we’ve obtained the subpoena, this subpoena goes on to demand the communications from dozens of other Republicans and people who have spoken to them, including State Representative Jake Hoffman in Arizona, Republican National Committee member Kathleen Berden in Michigan, former U.S. Representative Lou Barletta in the state of Pennsylvania and Republican State Party Secretary James DeGraffenreid in Nevada, among dozens and dozens of others.
So, what is this about? It can’t possibly be about January 6, the fake insurrection, the only insurrection in history with no guns, the insurrection in which the only person shot to death was a Trump supporter. No, the point of this is to suppress political dissent, to hobble an entire political party and to keep any of these people from ever participating in American politics again and by the way, the cost to each one of these individuals or to any person at whose house the FBI shows up is enormous. Ask anybody you saw the FBI showed up with guns at their home what that’s like. By accusing these people of insurrection for asking questions about electors by comparing them to Confederate soldiers, Merrick Garland’s DOJ plans to disenfranchise them if not jail them. Really?
So, prohibit people from participating in American politics in the name of democracy? Too ironic to be real? Oh, it’s real. It Just happened in New Mexico. A state judge in New Mexico just removed an elected county commissioner from office, overturning the will of the voters. Why? Because he had dared to exercise his constitutional rights by participating in the election justice protest on January 6. So, this is a full-blown political purge. That’s not a talking point. It is not in any sense a conspiracy theory. It’s completely real and it began shortly after January 6 when Republicans, as usual, just as they were after the death of George Floyd, were so blown back, so intimidated by the aggression of the rhetoric from the other side that they let it happen.
And because they let it happen, as with the BLM riots, its effects are accelerating now. So, if you’re accused of supporting Joe Biden’s political opponents, you could be visited by armed agents from Joe Biden’s FBI. As you reported last year in our documentary, which was mocked, turned out to be prescient, it has happened to people living as far away as remote Homer, Alaska.
PAUL HEUPER: It really felt like it was a violation of our space, definitely, to have people barge in uninvited. We gladly would have sat down and had a cup of tea with them went, “Okay, what do you need?” You have to tear my door down. You don’t have to terrorize me with guns and handcuffs and all of that.
MARILYN HEUPER: I turn around, they cut me with my hands behind my back and put me in a chair.
PAUL HEUPER: Initially, they would not present a search warrant.
MARILYN HEUPER: And then we ask, “What is this about?”
PAUL HEUPER: What are you doing inside my house with guns and handcuffs?
MARILYN HEUPER: It never occurred to me they would actually think we had anything to do with anything inside the Capitol because we never made it inside the Capitol.
CARLSON: So, why is this happening? Because no one pushed back against it. Why did the lunatics get to defund the police, something that no normal person supported, the overwhelming majority of Americans never supported them, but they did it anyway. How did they get to do that? Because there is no opposition, no one pushed back. George Floyd died. They started screaming, calling everyone a racist and everyone just obeyed their most ludicrous demands.
January 6 is exactly the same thing. “It was an insurrection. It was a racist insurrection.” No, it wasn’t. What are you talking about? No one said that. No one pushed back at all. So, it got completely out of control, and at this point, it’s not just a threat to the Republican Party. On one level, a lot of conservatives say, “Well, who cares? Mitch McConnell is inconvenienced? No one cares.”
That’s not what it’s about. It’s a threat to the American system. This kind of behavior, politicized federal law enforcement, is a threat to democracy. It’s a threat to the system we live under. It’s a threat to everything we have that’s valuable. We cannot allow this, but no one’s even mentioning it.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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