The FBI and Department of Justice have aimed their legal guns at an investigative journalist because of his reports about the mostly peaceful protest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The FBI will arrest Blaze writer Steve Baker on Friday morning, he and his attorneys say, to retaliate for his uncovering facts that belie the Deep State bureaus’ account of that day.
Baker must surrender himself to the FBI pursuant to a warrant for his arrest for as yet unspecified crimes.
2½-Year Campaign
The campaign to punish Baker for recording the events at and inside the Capitol began “more than 30 months ago,” he explained in a note above a news release from his attorneys last month.
DOJ has twice told Baker they would indict him within days, he wrote, but the indictments never materialized. As he explained in a commentary piece for The Blaze in October, Baker willingly agreed to a meeting with FBI agents on August 5, 2021 in Cary, North Carolina. But they canceled after he and an attorney arrived. The agents told Baker they needed permission from higher-ups to speak with a journalist.
Baker and his attorney met with FBI agents for two hours that October 18 and offered to turn over his video of the J6 events. FBI agents thanked him for not attacking law-enforcement officers.
That November, his attorney told him that he would be charged with interstate racketeering and property damage under 18 USC 1952 (a)(1)-(2) and 40 USC 5104 (e)(2)(d) and (g).
Baker surmised that the FBI wanted to charge him with a crime for licensing his videos, which HBO and The New York Times used in reports on the day.
The other charge, apparently, arose from Baker’s admission that he stood on a bench inside the Capitol for a better view of the peaceful protesters. Standing on a bench inside the Capitol violates federal law.
While awaiting charges, Baker continued investigating the official J6 narrative and learned in March 2023 that the FBI was “terrified” of what he had found out in his work.
In December, he and his attorneys — one had grown into a team — learned that charges would be unsealed. But again the government postponed them. DOJ also told his attorneys a decision had not been made to charge him, and would not explain what the charges would be.
So after no indictment for three years from the day of the events, he wrote in the news release, “it is clear that any move to do so now will be in retaliation” for his reporting. Baker revealed “perjured testimony by key government witnesses Harry Dunn and David Lazarus,” he wrote. As well, he revealed “the true identity of the ‘passerby’ who discovered the pipe bomb outside the [Democratic National Committee] headquarters a short distance from the Capitol. The ‘passerby’ was actually a U.S. Capitol Police Officer.”
As well, just last month, Baker revealed that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was not in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Instead she was at DNC headquarters when the cop discovered the pipe bomb. The leftist Mainstream Media confirmed Baker’s scoop.
Now, the Arrest
So now the FBI and DOJ are gunning for Baker — more than three years after January 6.
“I must turn myself in to the @FBI at 7 am, and then the FBI (or US Marshalls?) will transport me to the Dallas courthouse, where I can meet my attorney at 9:30 am,” he wrote on X. “I’m then scheduled for a 10 am hearing before the magistrate.”
Prosecutors ordered him to arrive in “shorts and sandals,” even though “we’ve been told that my charges are non-violent misdemeanors.”
Worse still, “we do not yet know the specific charges,” he continued:
Technically … they are still “under seal” until the warrant is served. All else is as yet unknown. By this weekend, I will officially be a misdemeanor domestic journo-terrorist. (Something like that.) And so it begins.
In last month’s release, Baker’s attorneys, with former federal prosecutors among them, said the federal government is retaliating against the intrepid writer for his reporting.
Despite the 26-month campaign, “Steve has been unrelenting in continuing to report on his investigation into the events of January 6 and the legal proceedings taking place in the District of Columbia over the past three years,” his attorneys wrote:
Hundreds of hours of work by Steve resulted in him uncovering video evidence that calls into question the truthfulness of testimony by two key prosecution witnesses in the first Oath Keeper trial — US Capitol Police Officers Harry Dunn and David Lazarus.
The video Baker discovered contradicts Lazarus’ testimony in the Oath Keeper cases about his location in the Capitol. Lazarus corroborated Dunn, who “changed his description of those events multiple times.”
As for Harris’s whereabouts when the cop discovered the pipe bomb, “video evidence shows a near total disinterest by the Secret Service Agents assigned to VP Harris’ protective detail when the pipe bomb was supposedly found,” the attorneys continued:
Curiously, the Secret Service cannot produce any of its various forms of internal communications — audio recordings or otherwise — from January 6.…
The Department of Justice was forced to correct misrepresentations made in court documents about the location of VP Harris, having alleged in many early cases that she was inside the Capitol when, in fact, she was at the DNC headquarters.
The attorneys wrote that the J6 “defense community” believes the pipe bomb was a “ruse” to divert Capitol Police manpower away from the Capitol. And they wrote, “there was a politically motivated desire for the scheduled and permitted protest activities on the afternoon of January 6 to become an unruly spectacle.”
The attorneys claim to “have information that Steve’s reporting has so agitated officials in multiple federal agencies that an effort is now underway to find a basis to charge Steve with more serious crimes.”
That, they said, would be “evidence of retaliation against a journalist exercising his First Amendment rights to report information that is embarrassing to government officials.” The attorneys feared that FBI agents would raid Baker’s home.
The attorneys claim the DOJ broke “institutional norms” and that many journalists “went inside the Capitol building to capture what was happening there.”
But “it is only now — after Steve has broken two major stories greatly embarrassing to the DOJ — that he is possibly being targeted for arrest and possibly felony prosecution.”
