INSIDE the Proud Boys Trial, the Charges, & Why It’s the Most Important Jan. 6th Trial Yet

Welcome to the Liz Wheeler Show. I am shocked that Republicans in the United States Congress have not issued a single subpoena about January 6th, not one. How long have they been in power now? It’s April. It’s the middle of April. Actually, they’ve had power since January, and they’ve issued zero subpoenas to try to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th. Like we all know what happened. We know that the federal government essentially staged this. We know the federal government had undercover informants. We know that these undercover informants were serving as agitators. We know that these defendants, these January 6th defendants were essentially entrapped. We know that they’re being charged unfairly held in pre-trial detention, solitary confinement. We know what’s happening. We saw the January 6th tapes, that Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy gave to Tucker Carlson. We saw for ourselves with our own eyes, video footage from inside the Capitol. 

When this so-called insurrection was happening, it was mostly nothing. There were people that were like walking around, and you can argue that they shouldn’t have been in there, and that’s fine. But to argue that their terrorists and Insurrectionists is absurd. There are a lot of Republicans, some conservatives even who don’t like to talk about January 6th. They want us to just move on. Just forget about it. Just move forward, they say, and my question to the people who ask that question, my question to them is, what do you want to move forward too? If we have a federal government that is allowed to abuse us as citizens, allowed to entrap us, allowed to incite and organize violence that they then exaggerate and charge as something that it was not, what do you think that we’re gonna have to move forward too? What is our country gonna look like if we allow this to happen? 

And when it does happen, if we allow the people who propagated it to get away with this is what I don’t understand about the people who don’t wanna talk about January 6th. It’s still going on. Right now, in our legal system, in our criminal justice system the charges against people who were part of January 6th are still being tried. There is a trial going on right now, the trial of The Proud Boys. That is the most pivotal trial yet regarding January 6th because it doesn’t just involve the Proud Boys. You can think what you want about the Proud Boys. It doesn’t just involve them. It has implications for us. It has implications for the presidential election in 2024. It has implications in what the Department of Justice or the Special Council might be planning for President Trump. So, we’re gonna talk about this with one of our favorite guests on the show today. She is a senior contributor from American Greatness, Julie Kelly. And we’re gonna break it all down. Let’s get to it.  

All right. Joining me today is friend of the show. She’s a senior contributor at American Greatness. Julie Kelly, thank you for being here. I appreciate it. 

Hey, Liz, always such a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. 

All right. Today, we’re obviously gonna talk about some nitty gritty stuff, some in the weeds stuff related to what’s happening in the ongoing saga of January 6th. I obviously don’t mean the insurrection, I mean the government using January 6th as a pretext to target people who have political views that they don’t agree with. I wanna start with some of the updates that’s happening in the Proud Boys trial. We have seen admissions from government officials that there were undercover informants, more government, undercover government informants than we originally thought that were embedded with the Proud Boys. But before you get to that information, can you give us a quick summary of what that trial is, why they’re still on trial, what they’re being charged with, and why this is kind of one of the pivotal ones? 

Great question. So this trial is entering, I believe it’s maybe 12th week, 11th week. Jury selection started in December. This is an extremely long grueling trial for everyone involved. I actually feel really bad for the jury. But this is the Seditious Conspiracy trial against five members of the Proud Boys, including its leader, Enrique Tarrio. They were charged with seditious conspiracy last year. None of them, only one of the five is charged with any sort of violent offense. Dominic Pezzola, who used riot shield to break one of the windows. Otherwise, none of the men face any weapons, charges, violent assault charges, vandalism, et cetera. So how do you overthrow a government, Liz, or a government body when you’re all going in different directions, the leader isn’t even there and no one has any weapons. And I mean, this is the sort of case that this Biden-Monaco DOJ is bringing against January 6th or so. 

The reason, and your question is so on target there, the reason this trial is so important to the government is because when, and if unfortunately, these men are convicted, this is the natural tie into Donald Trump. You will recall in the October 2020 presidential debate when Fox News host Chris Wallace and Joe Biden prompted Trump on a number of occasions to say something about the Proud Boys, condemn the Proud Boys. They were trying to compare the Proud Boys to BLM and Antifa. So Trump said, okay, Proud Boys. Stand back and stand by. Some of them took that as a call, you know, to action, to be prepared for whatever was gonna happen after the election. But they’ve used that clip in this trial a few times, and I think that this is what the government, what special counsel Jack Smith, will use these, leverage these convictions, if that’s what happens to further, maybe even bring the same charge against Donald Trump for seditious conspiracy. So that’s why this trial is not, I would say, the most important trial that this DOJ is conducting. It has conducted related to January 6th. 

Well, let me try to understand this. So, seditious conspiracy, I’m familiar with this. This is essentially treason. It’s just a legalese for treason. To commit seditious conspiracy, you have to try to overthrow the government of the United States. That’s what treason is, or irreparably harm the government of the United States. But isn’t what the Proud Boys did, is they mostly talked about this sort of thing, right? This is based on text messages and emails and the fact that undercover informants heard them discussing this. But this was never shall I say, a realistic plot and certainly never something that they actually carried out. Correct? 

Exactly right, Liz. In fact, the one document that DOJ has insisted and even brought up in the trial, it’s something called 1776 returns. The government has alleged that this was sort of the roadmap for the Proud Boys that this was their plot to, to use by force. And that’s the terminology in the, in the charge to use by force sort the peaceful transfer of power. This document, Liz, not only was not written by any of the Proud Boys, it was sent from, it was created by a former, maybe a current government intelligent operative, sent to a lady friend of Enrique Tarrio who said, hey, by the way, email this to Enrique. See what he thinks. There’s no evidence that Enrique Tarrio ever even opened this email. But the DOJ and prosecutors, as dirty as they are, have tried to convince the jury that somehow that plan that was not written, shared, or even read by the Proud Boys, was sort of their roadmap. 

But to your point, almost all of the evidence is text messages in parlor chat groups, in separate chat groups. We also know that there were FBI informants in all of those chat groups, that has been confirmed during the trial proceedings. So the whole idea that they planned to assault the Capitol, overthrow the government, is pure folly. What they were there to do is what they had done at other events, especially through 2020, that was to help law enforcement and protect people who are being assaulted and attacked by BLM and Antifa rioters. They showed up in Portland to try to protect the courthouse and to help police officers there. Four Proud Boys were stabbed by a BLM activists rioter in December of 2020 when they were there for the other stop to steal rally. So the Proud Boys might be loud mouths, you know, they might be raucous guys. They’re not violent, and they were certainly not there to overthrow the government. But that is what this DOJ is trying to present. And unfortunately, Liz DOJ has an almost 99% conviction rate in Washington D.C. So the outlook for them is pretty grim. 

The scary part to me is the precedent that it seems the DOJ is trying to set where they’re painting the words, whether it’s text messages or this email that the leader of the Proud Boys received. We don’t even know if he opened it. He certainly didn’t endorse it or put it into action but trying to equate words with actual violence. This is something that we’ve seen happen as it relates to President Trump. That him saying, you know, peacefully and powerfully protest outside the Capitol or march on the Capitol, is being interpreted as some secret dog whistle, some secret language or signal that he was sending to his reporters that meant be violent. I’m laughing because the idea is so absurd, but this is what the Left is trying to do culturally is tell us that our words are violent. It seems like DOJ is trying to codify that. 

And Liz, more importantly, these are words that are being exchanged in private. These are in private conversations. It’s not like they’re taking to, you know, Fox News and they’re broadcasting this night after night after night and inciting people to violence. These are just guys talking stupidly in some cases. And so the idea that you would take these private chat messages and blow this up into a huge plan to overthrow Congress on January 6th is ridiculous. But look, this is a lot of what we saw in the Whitmer fednapping hoax. I mean, these were guys who were stitched together by the FBI. That’s not really the case with the Proud Boys, but the Whitmer fednapping. We know the FBI had more informants and undercover agents then they had actual targets. But most of the evidence was in these group chats. 

Two of the group chats were started by the lead FBI informant. They collected video evidence at events that the FBI organized and invited these guys to. So the idea that there was some kind of amplification of this braggadocious chatter, we’re gonna go to the Capitol, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that. But Liz, that’s a lot of the evidence in almost all of the January 6th cases, are private messages, things that they posted on Facebook or on Twitter or Parlor, memes that they posted. I mean, we saw what happened with Douglass Mackey, but memes mocking the 2020 election have been used as evidence in sentencing memos when you talk about the criminalization of free speech that is happening before our very eyes. And it’s certainly happening in the case of the Proud Boys. 

Yeah, and I think you’re right, that the criminalization of speech is also not just about the Proud Boys, but it’s how the Special Counsel, but the Department of Justice really, intends to get to Donald Trump. So, talk a little bit about this judge, Judge Kelly, you and I have talked about him before. Very corrupt, very partisan, very unfair individual. Talk about his response when the defense has pointed out the fact that there were undercover informants who were actually agitating crowds in the name of the Proud Boys. 

You know, Judge Tim Kelly, we are not related, thank God. But look, he’s a creature of the Department of Justice. Not only was he in charge of, it’s called the Public Integrity Section, but he worked for the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office for years. This is the same office that is prosecuting every January 6th case, excuse me, he was not head of public integrity. I’m mixing him up with Jack Smith. But Tim Kelly worked at Maine Justice. He worked for the DCOS attorney’s office. He also is a staffer for Senator Grassley when he was on the Senate, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He’s a creature of the beltway. So he is going to protect the government, and especially prosecutor, some of his former colleagues who are bringing this case. He’s even been criticized by major news companies, Liz, for holding so many sealed hearings and allowing so many sealed documents to go on the docket. 

And a lot of those sealed filings briefs have to do with the presence and action of FBI informants. So he’s really been allowing the government to get away with concealing and delaying, withholding that information. So today, shockingly, he never fails to surprise me, is we now know that there were undercover D.C. Metro police officers in the crowd. And just recently and this was in another case, Liz got video and confirmation of three undercover D.C. Metro police officers who were dressed in plain clothes. They were mingling with Trump supporters. One of them can be heard on his own camera, pushing people towards the Capitol saying, keep going, keep going. Go, go, go. Pushing them towards the Capitol, which is restricted grounds. You can hear the other two officers with him saying, whose house? Our house, you know, USA USA, they’re not acting as undercover police officers who are trying to find, you know, interrupt potential crimes on January 6th. 

No. They were there to instigate and move people towards the building. When this was raised in the trial on Tuesday, Judge Kelly blasted not the government, of course, never does he criticize the government. He blasted one of the defense attorneys for saying, and he said, I’m shocked that you would say an officer chanting is attempting to incite the crowd. Well, then what was he doing? I mean, you didn’t have to chant anything. You could mingle with the crowd as an undercover officer and not say a word. No one would run up to this officer and say, hey, you’re not chanting USA, you must be a fed. I mean, that’s ridiculous. So Judge Kelly, once again, instead of blasting the government for delaying this until the last stages of the trial is instead condemning defense attorneys for bringing it up. It’s just crazy to watch what’s happening in Judge Kelly’s courtroom. 

It’s banana republic stuff. Yes, it’s banana republic stuff. Let me ask you about another court proceeding that happened, that some people are pretty disappointed in the outcome of this, but others like yourself are saying there could be a silver lining to how a court ruled. So, to back up here many of the charges that are levied against these January 6th defendants are a charge of obstruction of an official proceeding. They’re not all being charged with seditious conspiracy. There’s just a few that are being charged with that. Most of them are obstruction of an official proceeding for getting an inside the Capitol during when Congress was supposed to be in session. This obstruction of an official proceeding comes with quite a bit of prison time and has been used very liberally by the Department of Justice in their charges. But tell me about the questions about the elements of this statute and how this could potentially work in the favor of these defendants. 

So, obstruction of an official proceeding is part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that was passed in the wake of the Enron scandal. So this was passed and signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002. It was attempt to close up some legal loophole that dealt with destroying evidence that was under congressional investigation. In its 20-year history Liz, and judge after judge has noted this, it’s never been used in this manner, basically to criminalize political behavior, political speech, political activity. But this has been weaponized. This is an Andrew Weissmann special, Andrew Weissman, who really acted like Robert Mueller, the chief the Special Counsel. This is the obstruction count he wanted to bring against Donald Trump. It is a novel, unprecedented use that has nothing to do with the original purpose of this law. But it doesn’t matter. 

The Department of Justice has now slapped this felony charge against more than 300 January 6th defendants, including many who committed no other violent act. This was the charge I think the most famous defendant, Jacob Chansley, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding, and was sentenced 41 months in prison. There’s been only one judge out of all of the D.C. District Court judges, only one who dismissed this count against three defendants. And that judge was Judge Carl Nichols when he dismissed it twice. DOJ appealed Judge Nichols, this dropping of this charge. So it went to the Appellate Court, D.C. Circuit Court in December where there were oral arguments. And just this past Friday issued a 107 page, what one judge described a splintered decision, which it is, Liz. It’s very confusing. But it certainly does not in any way codify the government’s use of this obstruction felony. 

There was one outright dissent by Judge George Kassis. And he gave a very lengthy, detailed explanation as to why this should not apply in these cases, was never intended to be used this way. And he sort of said, what you were just pointing out that the sentencing is up to 20 years in prison, that is only commensurate with destroying or tampering evidence in a criminal investigation. It is not commensurate with, say, parading in the Capitol, which is, you know, a six month penalty, a low-level misdemeanor, or any other disruption of a government proceeding. So his argument, I believe, was very strong. The other judge who partially agreed with the woman, the judge, the Biden appointed judge who is forcing now Nichols temporarily to reverse his order, he kind of split the baby. He said, okay, I do believe sort of the statute does apply except my reading of corrupt, meaning the corrupt intent of committing this crime, was very narrow. 

And so that’s where the discrepancy lies, not just in the applicability of the statute overall, but the definition of corrupt. That whoever was committing obstruction did it in a corrupt way, that they were seeking some illegal benefit from doing this. Well apply that to Jacob Chansley. Liz, you’ve watched that video a million times. Like I have. What illegal act or benefit was Jacob Chansley getting by sauntering through the Capitol building with Capitol Police next to him the entire time? You know, what was someone like Timothy Hale who was kept in pretrial detention for 16 months after being charged with obstruction, not convicted, charged. He walked through, you could see him. He’s not assaulting anyone. He’s not screaming at police officers. He’s not breaking windows. What unlawful benefit did any of them seek in this? And so the bottom line is DOJ knows they’re in trouble with this. 

It will probably go to the full circuit court, the full Appellate court. This was a three judge panel, which is kind of where it starts. But it looks like Liz, and I’ve written about this for more than two years, this eventually has to end up at the Supreme Court. They really have to weigh in, because if this is overturned, then it goes back to its original purpose. But if this is codified even by the court, you can use that. And, you know, eventually the tides will turn. Maybe, hopefully we’ll have time to do that. But you’ll be able to use this non-violent felony comparable to destroying evidence, to criminalize disrupting a congressional proceeding. Think of how that would have worked in the Kavanaugh days. You would’ve had hundreds of people in jail for years for what they did, which was far worse than what anyone really did on January 6th. So my article is up on American Greatness and amgreatness.com, if anybody wants kind of the, you know, a little sketch out of this very complicated ruling, but there will be a lot more to come on this. And motions are already flying based on this opinion to drop this count in other cases. So we’ll see what happens. 

And we’ll post that link too, guys, just FYI, we’ll post it over on Lizwheelershow.com/locals. For anybody who wants to read, highly recommend it. The crux of it though is that there’s no precedent, or there’s been no, there’s no legal history of what the definition of corrupt intent to obstruct this government proceeding. It’s not just, oh, you’re obstructing because it’s an accident, or you’re obstructing because you’re mentally ill, or you’re obstructing cause you’re, you know, you stupidly did something at the wrong time. There has to be like intent. That’s the underpinning of our criminal statutes is criminal intent. It’s interesting to me that the Department of Justice has chosen this as the most popular charge, the charge they’re using the most when there isn’t any precedent to reign them in. 

Well, unfortunately, Liz, and you know this from from our conversations with the exception of one judge, every other judge has signed off on the DOJ’s novel use of the obstruction statute. You know, even the judge who wrote the final order, this Biden appointed judge, she also admitted in 20 years, it’s never been used this way. The judge who wrote the dissenting opinion said, there’s no case law that exists. It’s never even been tested in court this way. So we can’t even look at, okay, well, yeah, the, you know, this political protestor, they, you know, interrupted this Senate proceeding or, you know, whatever. There’s not, it’s never been used that way. But, for the courage of Judge Nichols to buck his colleague’s group, think the D.C. District Court you know, this never would’ve even made it this far. And the real the real outrage about how they’re using it is to turn otherwise misdemeanor cases into felony cases. 

And what happens when you plead guilty or convicted of a felon, lose your right to vote. People have lost their firearms. They’ve lost their jobs because now you’re a convicted felon. You know, you didn’t go hold up a liquor store. You walked into a government building with police standing right there, did nothing wrong, and turned around and walked out minutes later. So it’s really destructive. I mean, people are going to jail for years after they’ve been convicted or pleaded guilty. Matthew Perna, who, when he found out that the government was gonna, that this DOJ was gonna ask for years in prison after he pleaded guilty to obstruction, he hanged himself in his garage because he did not wanna spend 3, 4, 5 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to obstruction thinking he would get a few weeks maybe in jail. This is a very poisonous thing that this DOJ is doing, playing games with people’s lives, weaponizing and bastardizing a law that had nothing to do with political protests. 

In fact, when George W. Bush signed the law in 2002, he said explicitly, this should not curtail people’s using redress of government grievances. He kind of, in a way, saw, had that, okay, maybe this will be weaponized. He explicitly said that when he signed the bill. But here, you know, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco’s DOJ doesn’t care, and they get away with it, Liz, because of how these judges are behaving like people like Judge Tim Kelly, how they are conducting themselves and denying due process, presumption of innocence, and just fairly reading the law, interpreting it the way that it should be, because they want these people punished and they want the DOJ to get all of these victories, which of course they are. 

Ugh. It really, it’s heartbreaking. I mean, heartbreaking to hear about people like Matthew Perna. It’s awful. It’s also infuriating to think, I mean, this is what we said all along about January 6th. It’s an effort to criminalize all of our speech. It’s an effort to relegate half the country who dared to support Donald Trump as literal terrorists. And to have that in, essentially in our criminal code, to make it to criminalize us so that we’re always afraid to vote how we want to dissent from the Biden administration or whatever other liberal is in charge, and to voice our conservative opinions. They want us to be afraid because they want us to be afraid that if we take part in our self-governance, we’re going to be unfairly imprisoned. Just like these January 6th defendants. Talk to me about Jacob Chansley for a second though. 

 And talk about his sort of conditional release. He’s in a halfway house now after having served a certain amount of his sentence. And there was some speculation. There were some headlines actually after he was moved to the halfway house, that it was because of the exculpatory evidence that existed in the January 6th videos that Speaker McCarthy had given to Tucker Carlson. The ones that we saw where he was just being escorted around the Capitol very peacefully, chatting it up with the cops around him. I don’t think that’s the right take, though. I don’t think that he was released because of exculpatory evidence. You can correct me if I’m wrong procedurally here, but this is very normal for this to happen. 

Right. You’re exactly right. It did not have anything to do with the footage that Tucker showed. Jacob Chansley has already been in jail since the beginning of January of 2021, really few days after he turned himself in. So he was incarcerated under pre-trial detention orders. So Judge Lamberth, I checked the docket. He signed his probation release in January. So of course, this was before the footage was shown. To your point, it is Jacob, I’m sure got, you know, time served or well, he did get time served from when he was in pretrial detention, but also good behavior. So this is not, it doesn’t have anything to do with that, except that it, I think, really got people’s attention to see footage that they had never seen before. See that this man is languished in prison now. 

It’ll be, you know, two years, more than two years kept in solitary confinement conditions. But Liz here, getting back to the obstruction charge, what if that’s thrown out by the Supreme Court? What, or even the D.C. circuit, the full circuit comes back and says, no, we’re dismissing this. What happens to people like Jacob Chansley? I mean, their lives have already been destroyed. It’s too late to go back to the Department of Justice and say, hey, you know, it’s the old line. Where do I go to get my reputation back? It’s not even a reputation. I mean, he’s been in jail for something he never should have been. A lot of people are, dozens of people have been convicted and taken plea deals for this. And so that’s why I really hope that at the end of the day, these people are exonerated, and the Department of Justice is exposed for what they, you know, what they’ve done with this felony count. 

 So, but getting back to what you said about Jacob Chansley no, it didn’t have anything to do with that footage. But I’m very anxious to hear what Jacob has to say when he’s released. I followed his case from the beginning, and I’ll tell you, listening to his sentencing hearing was heartbreaking. I mean, he’s a veteran. He has PTSD, he has mental health issues. You know, he begged Judge Royce Lamberth for mercy. He said, I’ve been in solitary confinement for over 300 days. You know, I didn’t do anything wrong. I love my country. The government wanted 51 months in jail and Judge Royce Lamberth, Reagan appointee, I’m telling you these old judges, what they’re doing to people. I’m not so sure I would act that way in my latter years of life, but showed Jacob Chansley no mercy, and sentenced him to 41 months, again, underscoring the real villains in this whole process, which are these federal judges. 

And it would be too late for him. What do you think the Supreme Court would do if this question of what corrupt intent means under the statue of obstructing of a government proceeding, what do you think the different justices would say to that? 

I mean, I guess I would have faith that they would see the corrupt definition, the definition of corruptly that Judge Walker detailed in his partial concurrence, partial dissent, I don’t even know what you would call it but very, you know, he goes back to Tudor England and he said, look, corrupt doesn’t just mean, you know, you’re acting crazy one day. You have a mindset where you’re obstructing something to get an illegal benefit. This has to do with fraud. You know, this has to do with bribery. This doesn’t have to do with walking in the open doors of the, you know, the senate wing of the building. So I would have to believe that the majority would not just see how the origins of 1512c2 that’s the, I don’t know, I guess you would say the statute, how it’s defined that they would see the origins of how that came to come into law. 

But also drilling down on these definitions of corruptly and seeing that really is, would not apply to any of the defendants. Now, how quickly that gets to the Supreme Court, I’m not sure. The people who, the attorney who’s representing the defendants in this case you know, they could ask for immediate cert by the Supreme Court soon. Because this is, I mean, DOJ just charged someone with obstruction on Friday. So it’s not like they’re holding off and they’re waiting for, you know, for the full court or every higher court to weigh in. They’re just gonna keep pushing right ahead. So hopefully there will be some judicial relief soon, or at least some more clarity, because this appellate ruling, everyone agrees basically this appellate ruling is clear as mud. So we need some sharper opinions as to the obstruction count. 

Wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall when those debates were going on, when they were writing this very convoluted opinion here? And by the way, we’ve been told that we can expect hundreds more charges coming from the Department of Justice charging January 6th defendants with this specific charge. I mean, obviously, they’re not gonna be charged with violent crimes. Those charges for the people that committed vandalism or broke windows, that stuff’s already been charged. So it’s going to be this charge, and we know that they have a hundred more coming. So if I’m the defense attorney for these individuals, I try to get the Supreme Court to act on it as quickly as possible. Because right now, that’s your best, like, your highest likelihood of recourse and avoiding the government being weaponized. I wanna ask you about Tennessee though. 

So these three Democrat lawmakers in the state of Tennessee participated in what I’ve been calling a transurrection. They are ostensibly there to protest in favor of gun control. It’s really about well, defending the queer theory shooter this transgender individual who murdered these six Christians. We all know that this horrific mass murder was done in the name of queer theory. Instead of targeting queer theory, instead of identifying it so we can eradicate it, these radical leftists are using guns as scapegoat as they often do. These three lawmakers did what seemed to me, Julie, to be almost the same thing as what the people on January 6th did. They barged their way into the well of the Tennessee State Capitol. The speaker of the house did not give them leave to speak. They pulled a bullhorn out. They were leading protestors. They got expelled, but they’re already being reinstated. What’s your take on this? Is this the same thing, or is this totally different? 

I mean, I think in a lot of ways it’s worse, right? Because these, I mean, these protestors and what these legislators did, I mean, they did lead an insurrection. We have to apply the same words that the Left does, right? So this is an insurrection, you know, they tried to halt a government proceeding, but look, what they did in many cases is worse. They got really, they were very close to lawmakers. The insurrectionists who the Tennessee three brought with them they assaulted police officers. They obstructed police officers from doing their job. Same sort of charges that we see with January 6th. But look, in incidences like what happened in Tennessee, just fully expose the hypocrisy of the Left, right? People can look at January 6th and be appalled at what they saw or what they thought they saw that day. 

They can want you know, rioters or protestors, whatever you wanna call them, to get the book thrown at them. Okay, fine. And that’s our side, right, Liz? We know that. But then you look at what happened in Tennessee, very orchestrated, actually, a more dangerous situation there led by legislators who aren’t called insurrectionists. Now they’re called heroes. So we’re gonna see more of that, you know, the idea that you can protest in a government building during a government proceeding. We’ve thought all along, if it doesn’t get violent, that you know, that’s part of the deal. We’re allowed to do that. But what happened in Tennessee is worse. I thought Republicans did the right thing. Now of course, it looks like they’re reinstated from whatever the laws in Tennessee are. But if there’s a Republican governor, which there is, right? And a Republican attorney general they should be considering the same kind of criminal charges that January 6th protestors have confronted. I doubt that they will, but it’s definitely something that they should look into. Obstruction of an official proceeding in this case is federal. It has to do with federal crimes. But there has to be something comparable in the books in Tennessee I would think. 

You would think since it looks to me to be about the same thing. I mean, listen the tolerance, our bar for how much we tolerate the disruption of government proceedings. When it is political speech, it’s pretty high. Like we tolerate annoying people. We tolerate annoying disruptions. You can tolerate all of that to the level that we do. And you can also say that you don’t like it. It’s fine if you look at January 6th and say, yeah, I don’t think the people should have been in there. I wouldn’t have done it. You know, it’s fine if people wanna say that. Well, also coming to their strong defense, when the government uses what they did, maybe it was not inadvisable, but uses what they did and pretends that it’s a crime that they didn’t commit, it’s totally fine to have to be able to look at that and say, yeah, I don’t think people should do this. But also our bar for tolerance is high, but we’re not gonna play by different rules than the Left, otherwise, we are going to lose. Julie, thank you for being on the show. Everyone, go follow Julie on Twitter. She’s at Julie underscore, Kelly two. You can find her work on American Greatness. She’s a senior contributor over there. Again, Twitter is Julie underscore Kelly two. You can find her work on American Greatness. Julie Kelly, thanks for being here. I appreciate it. 

Always so great to be with you, Liz. Thanks. 

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