Critics of the harsh prosecutions in the January 6th debacle continue to be vindicated. Those who have said the whole thing was a setup keep getting proved right by our own Department of Justice. According to lawyers for Zachary Rehl, a Proud Boys chapter leader charged with seditious conspiracy, the government failed to disclose that one of the witnesses scheduled to testify was actually a confidential informant for the FBI. Surprisingly, the Associated Press reported it.
Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer for former Proud Boys chapter leader Zachary Rehl, asked a judge to schedule an immediate emergency hearing and suspend the trial “until these issues have been considered and resolved.” Lawyers for the other four defendants joined in Hernandez’s request.
Hernandez said in court papers that the defense team was told by prosecutors on Wednesday afternoon that the witness they were planning to call to the stand on Thursday had been a government informant.
Hernandez said this informant had infiltrated their defense team and was even attending prayer meetings with the defendant’s family. Worse, the government knew the witness was an informant in December but did not disclose that information until Wednesday. The defense had asked for a list of all FBI informants involved in the Proud Boys in discovery. The DOJ failed to provide all the names and instead they have been trickling out. It’s starting to look like there were more government informants in the Proud Boys than Proud Boys.
Holy sh*t this is beyond dirty.
DC US Attorney Matthew Graves' office notified defense team TODAY that a defense witnesses has been an FBI informant since the BEGINNING of the case thru start of trial.
"The CHS participated in prayer meetings with…the defendants' families." pic.twitter.com/6bso3gpRef
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) March 22, 2023
“The allegations about the existence of yet one more previously undisclosed CHS after various other alleged full and complete disclosures of all the CHSs involved in the case demonstrate that there are reasons to doubt the veracity of the government’s explanation and justification for withholding information about the CHSs who have been involved in the case. Moreover, the government disclosed this information for the first time on the day before the witness was scheduled to appear,” wrote Hernandez.
This is justice?
The New York Times identified the latest informant as Jen Loh, whose real name is Jennylyn Salinas, a Texas-based activist who ran Latinos for Trump but also worked with the FBI, providing information to them about her friends’ actions. Not only has she been involved with multiple defendants in the case but their lawyers as well. Did she provide legal strategy information to the DOJ that is prosecuting the defendants? If so, there couldn’t be a clearer violation of attorney-client privilege.
According to the New York Times, Hernandez “described what Ms. Loh has been doing as a ‘surreptitious invasion’ of the Proud Boys’ defense team” and demanded the government cough up any more informants hiding within the Proud Boys circle no one is yet aware of.
Prosecutors are of course denying that they put Salinas up to infiltrating the defendants’ defense team. The government would never do that, they say. Suuuuure.
Prosecutors have insisted that they never asked Ms. Loh — whose real name is Jennylyn Salinas — to cozy up to the defendants, their relatives or their lawyers. In fact, they said in court papers filed on Thursday, they cut ties with her two months ago after learning that she planned to appear at the sedition trial as a witness for one of the defendants, Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys’ former leader.
Salinas also denies ratting out the defendant’s legal strategies. Her protestations are truly bizarre. The Times interviewed her and she does not seem to understand what it is she did or why people call her a fed.
In an interview on Friday, Ms. Loh said that she had never spied on the Proud Boys or their lawyers and said that the F.B.I. never asked her any questions directly related to the trial that is now unfolding in Federal District Court in Washington. She also confirmed that she had parted ways with the bureau when she started talking with Mr. Tarrio’s lawyers.
Ms. Loh maintained that while she provided the government information about some of the defendants before the trial began, her interest in their families and legal situations was genuine.
“It’s hard to see people calling me a rat and a fed and things like that,” she said. “I think it’s sad that we’ve gotten so polarized in this country.”
Related: What We Weren’t Shown About Jan. 6
Hilariously, the Times is spinning this story to make it sound like the many informants embedded with the Proud Boys weren’t instigators of the Jan. 6 riot — and maybe they weren’t; we don’t know. It’s funny because it seems the defense team is calling as many of them to the stand as they can find, because they believe their testimonies prove that the defendants did not go to the capitol with the intention to stop the transfer of power, as the state has alleged.
On the day before the Capitol attack, Mr. Lizardo [also an informant] accompanied Mr. Tarrio (who was himself a former F.B.I. informant) to a meeting with Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, in an underground parking lot in Washington. At that time, Mr. Rhodes’s chief lieutenant in the Oath Keepers, Greg McWhirter, the group’s vice president, was also working as an informant for the bureau.
While not much is known about the identities of the other informants in the Proud Boys, the bureau had placed secret sources in several chapters around the country, including in Cleveland and in Salt Lake City, according to a private log of internal F.B.I. messages obtained by The New York Times.
According to the Times investigation, there were at least 20 FBI informants embedded with the Proud Boys. “Matthew Walter, a former chapter president from Tennessee, told the Times last month that he had a relationship with the F.B.I. that lasted several months around the time of Jan. 6 and added that as many as 20 other members of the group did as well.”
At a court hearing on Thursday, attorneys for the defense argued before the judge that the government has made egregious errors of omission in this case.
“There’s more C.H.S.s than there are defendants in this case,” Sabino Jauregui, one of Mr. Tarrio’s lawyers said, using an abbreviation for confidential human source, the F.B.I. official term for an informant.
“I asked my intern the other day if she’s a C.H.S.,” he said.
Consider that the four Proud Boys on trial for so-called “seditious conspiracy” are the only defendants facing this serious of a charge. And if the most serious case they have against Americans involved in the Capitol riot is this much of a clown show, imagine how bad the DOJ’s cases are against the rest of the J6 prisoners.
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