Some of the many people who came from across the country and gathered at the Ellipse near the Washington Monument in Washington, DC, January 6, 2021, in support of President Donald Trump and in protest against what they viewed as a fraudulent 2020 election.

Many people from across the country and the world showed up to lend support to President Trump in a January 6, 2021, protest against what many perceived then and now as a “stolen election” filled with fraud, illegal voters, boxes of ballots supposedly found in the middle of the night and more. Were those concerned about the integrity of the 2020 election wild eyed, radical, crazies? An astounding No! Those who pilgrimaged to the nation’s Capitol were middle American families from all parts of the USA! They were legal immigrants to this country from countries where they had experienced communism and tyranny, they were people who had felt the boot heel of communism in their face from totalitarian regimes the world over and were here by the grace of God to warn native born Americans of what they could visibly see happening here and where our country is heading fast and furious!

The US government is currently prosecuting those who dared express their concern and right to protest at the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, January 6, 2021. There are over 900 people charged with seditious conspiracy. The “crime” of seditious conspiracy is actually a “thought crime” just as was described in George Orwell’s book 1984. And just to be clear, I am Not talking about those who caused physical damage, attacked police or were in any way violating laws that protect persons or property against violence or physical damage.

What I am speaking directly about are those who were “thinking” a certain way. The people who were in Washington, DC, that fateful day at the Washington Monument and Ellipse area to see and hear President Donald Trump and afterward peacefully marched up the street to the US Capitol were concerned that the 2020 election was askew, not legitimate and perhaps fraudulent. That describes most, if not almost all, of the people who were at Ellipse and the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

How do I know this? I was at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, along with several people who journeyed with me to the nation’s Capitol. One of those was my associate editor Zoe Warren, who offered for SC Lt. Governor last election cycle and video interviewed many people at the Ellipse and the Capitol for news presentation January 6, 2021. Zoe was also paid a visit by the FBI just for exercising his God given rights as an American under the Constitution! Read about that here.

Zoe and I both witnessed the people who were there with their family, with their children and parents, we interviewed many of these people. The videos were placed on TheStandardSC YouTube channel for the entire world to see and hear what actually happened there. This fall YouTube decided we somehow perhaps had ‘dangerous thoughts’ by not agreeing with the baloney they are promoting now about “insurrection” and how Trump supposedly directed his supporters to assault the Capitol and take it for the people. In doing so, YouTube goes along with the lie and has destroyed thousands of hours of work by removing hundreds of videos that visually showed what was actually happening January 6th and at other venues. In doing so the people will not be allowed to see the multitudes of people who were peaceful while pushing baby strollers, carrying “Stop Communism” signs, ” Don’t Allow Communism into the US” signs, Asian-American refugees from Vietnam, China and elsewhere. This was not a violent, riotous crowd! This was a family oriented crowd of I think over a million people, at least hundreds of thousands of people. And no doubt they were probably from everywhere around the country and around the world, many who had experienced communism first hand and were there to warn Americans.

But, those with good intentions were not alone. There were those who had come as shills, charlatans, and thieves of liberty. A group of those chameleons was witnessed amongst the 1-2 million of Trump supporters who perhaps had criminal intent on their minds as they marched toward the US Capitol. Their motives were not pure and their actions were wrong.

There was a brood of vipers who were dressed in black and camo with backpacks walking to the People’s House —the US Capitol–and while doing so were digging into their backpacks and pulling out their “uniform” to deceive. They were changing their black hats and camo, shirts and clothes along the walk way to the Capitol building into the clothing that Trump supporters were wearing.

In the book 1984, one merely had to think of a new and or different governmental style and express ideas contrary to what was the current status quo and you had a new “criminal”. That type thinking goes contrary to the founding fathers and the ideas they expressed in the Declaration of Independence where they said, that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

Reasonable people discuss ideas to make government better all the time, that does not necessarily mean they want to overthrow it. What is currently taking place is a witch hunt to enact punishment on reasonable people who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The January 6 crowd was infiltrated by troublemakers who were there to create trouble and put the blame on their political enemies.

Unfortunately, many good people got sucked in to the vacuum. Obviously, King George was not open to discussion and he didn’t see declaring independence as a right. Peaceful assembly and protest is still a guaranteed right under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. When peaceful people are fired upon by Capitol police for standing at the People’s House for no crime, it is akin to stirring a hornet’s nest. Somehow, elitists don’t recognize the legitimate rights of others.

According to an article in The Epoch Times, defense attorneys are arguing that the FBI has been using general warrants to pick up the private locations of thousands of phone devices of people who were on the Capitol grounds January 6th, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The warrants allowed the FBI to foment criminal charges against Trump supporters without probable cause in an illegal four-acre pursuit to issue criminal charges.

Following the January 6th Capitol protest the FBI issued general warrants to Google and other telecommunication companies to surveil who was on or around the US Capitol January 6th. Interestingly, that day in Washington, DC there was no cell phone signal to those who brought their phones until after President Trump had vacated the public speaking area. Apparently, the FBI or perhaps another agency, had all cell service blocked while the huge crowd was in the Ellipse area, if not along the way to the Capitol.

Defense attorneys are arguing that general warrants are unlike the common uses of search warrants, which are served to specific people for specified circumstances. General warrants, by contrast, seek the identity of potential defendants first with alleged crimes charged to them later.

Assistant Public Defender attorney Rebecca Fish, representing January 6 defendant David Charles Rhine, of Bremerton Washington, said, “The geofence warrant requested and authorized here collected an alarming breadth of personal data.”

Fish asked U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to quash location-history evidence as well as the “fruits of that evidence, obtained by a modern-day general warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

For Google to identify users who may have been on or near the US Capitol on January 6th, Google had to ping millions of phones signals of people who had their location history feature activated. This was no small matter  Fish wrote in her motion to muzzle the ‘geofence warrants’. It involved “numerous tens of millions” of people she wrote.

Fish wrote that Google had to “search across all [location history] journal entries to identify users with potentially responsive data and then run a computation against every set of coordinates to determine which records match the time and space parameters in the warrant.”

The cyber search inquiry was run on over 500 million user accounts and devices on tens of millions of people  recording “5,723 unique devices” that could have been in the area January 6th. The Google cyber search used data like GPS satellite tracking, WiFi networks, Bluetooth beacons, cell tower location and triangular tracking. These signals record and track a person’s location and movement every two minutes whether the phone is in use or not and whether or not the phone is turned on or off.

It is known that Google map radius location is not accurate with a high error rate. Fish stated in her motion that there is “up to a 32% chance that the user in any of this data is actually not within the radius surrounding the estimated location and could be somewhere else.”

Judicial Watch president, Tom Fitton, said that these type dragnet warrants are in violation of the First Amendment and may have a “chilling effect” on exercise of guaranteed First Amendment liberties. Epoch Times reported that Fitton said, there is a “huge area of land around the Capitol that is typically accessible to the public.” He added that perhaps thousands of those surveilled “were there in unknowing violation of the rules, exercising their First Amendment rights.”

The investigations seem to go beyond people suspected of violence or other criminal activity at the Capitol, said Fitton. “The group of individuals I think they’d be interested in are those who entered the building or engaged in violence,” he commented. “And how does this warrant get them to that spot? Well, you know what it does, it gets them to be at the spot of, ‘let’s scare folks from participating in other First Amendment-protected activities in the future.’”

Fish wrote that “the government equated presence to criminality.” In fact, in the David Charles Rhine case, FBI warrants “sought identifying information for any device for which Google was 68 percent confident the device was somewhere within the geofence at a single moment during the four-and-a-half-hour geofence period.” A 68 percent confidence level is basically a 2 in 3 chance of being identified within that geofence area within the time period specifically. Unfortunately, GPS and other tracking is very inaccurate regarding time and location coordination. These are not good odds if you’re one of those incarcerated and looking at spending upwards of 20 years in prison.

Ironically, but not surprisingly, prosecutors defended their practice of violating guaranteed rights by saying Rhine failed to show his Fourth Amendment liberties were violated by their search warrants.

Department of Justice attorney Francesco Valenti argued that “even if the defendant could show a Fourth Amendment violation, the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule would preclude suppression.” He added that “any defect in the geofence warrant would not invalidate the subsequently obtained warrant to search the defendant and his electronic devices.”

in the January 6 case of United States v. Lloyd Casimiro Cruz Jr., attorneys are also seeking to dismiss cell phone location data because search warrants were the “fruit of the poisonous tree…” of Fourth Amendment violations.

In February 2022, Cruz, was arrested in Polo, Missouri and charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. Cruz’s attorney, John Pierce, argued that the complaint against Cruz was “an unlawful blanket general warrant of cell phone location data, which plainly lacked requisite specificity.” He further argued that investigators used metadata to identify Cruz, “rather than first having probable cause to identify Cruz and probable cause to believe Mr. Cruz had committed an offense as required by the 4th Amendment.”

Attorney Pierce asked U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton “to open a more wide-ranging inquiry into the FBI’s use of these unconstitutional warrants,” stating the investigation is relying upon “one of the worst general warrants in American history.” He wrote in a motion “The entire complaint against the defendant originated with an unlawful blanket general warrant of cell phone location data, which plainly lacked requisite specificity.” Pierce continued that “The warrants in this case plainly lacked probable cause with any particularity regarding the persons and things to be searched or even the crimes to be alleged.”

The process being used by the Biden administration through the Department of Justice appear to be a backhanded attempt to attack President Trump and to punish his supporters. Those being held are literally political prisoners being held in jail some without bond for almost two years! Many are being denied basic human needs while in jail and some are suffering brutal beatings “worse than Gitmo”, torture, being stripped, dragged, hogtied and humiliated by guards, including one prisoner having an eye put out and blinded.

“Some of the law enforcement approach is ‘we’re going to figure out who was there and then work to kind of rule people out.’” Fitton said, “the process being used has it backward… no, that’s not the way it necessarily works because you’re not subjected to having your material vacuumed up by the government just because you happen to be in that area. That’s not appropriate.”

Michael Reed is Publisher of The Standard newspaper, print and online. TheStandardSC video media channel is being censored by dominant social media groups like YouTube. YouTube, owed by Alphabet (Google), removed and destroyed all of our video work without permission or remuneration. That has stopped all potential donations from our many supporters on that venue. If you want to continue to see independent thought and reports please “like”, comment, share with a friend, and donate to support The Standard on this page to assure the continued availability of news that is ignored too often by the dominant media.