Generally, prison is for those convicted of crimes, not those only accused. Under normal conditions, most who commit non-violent federal crimes, who are first offenders, and who do not present a flight risk are released before trial. All of those descriptions apply to most of the persons arrested in connection with the events of January 6, but these special defendants are being held before trial for many months, some even without indictments having been issued by grand juries. The Biden Department of Justice appears determined to make a special example of these MAGA prisoners.
Many may not realize it, but the federal Bureau of Prisons is an agency in the Department of Justice and therefore under the control of Attorney General Merrick Garland. The Bureau of Prisons is a deeply troubled agency in the best of times. (Only weeks ago, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 68-page report entitled “Sexual Abuse of Female Inmates While in Federal Prisons.”).
However, the Justice Department is reserving some of its harshest treatment for January 6 prisoners who are being held in the notoriously brutal District of Columbia jail. In October 2022, 34 of these prisoners wrote a letter detailing the harsh conditions they have endured. Many report being denied visits from family, and even from their attorneys. Indeed, those prisoners actually requested a transfer to Guantanamo Bay prison, where at least prisoners are given exercise, time outdoors, access to religious services, and medical care. According to the letter, they have been denied religious services. Prisoners who have refused to take the dangerous COVID injection are treated even more harshly. Some describe beatings by prison guards.
January 6 prisoner Todd Gardner agreed to a guilty plea to avoid the notoriously anti-Trump District of Columbia juries. He is now awaiting sentencing, which has been delayed for seven months. He recently wrote an “open letter,” published on the AmericanGulag.com website, detailing the abysmal conditions in the D.C. jails.
As a J6 defendant, I am treated poorly, harassed and physically abused. We get fed terrible food in portions smaller than elementary school. I have to constantly ask for money from my mom to get food from the commissary. I have been denied my medications and toilet paper. I have also been denied basic human necessities like water and kept from communicating with my attorney.
In June 2021, journalist Julie Kelly, author of the exposé book entitled, January 6, exposed on television the inhumane conditions in “Biden’s ‘Deplorable Jail.’” Those January 6 prisoners who spoke with Kelly, and laid bare the jail’s Third World conditions, later reported how they were retaliated against by being locked down, including 24 hours of solitary confinement. One prisoner messaged his family, “We just found out they are locking us down for an entire week in retaliation for that [television exposé], with no phone calls, no rec time, 5 min showers, and 24 hours in our cells.”
On July 8, 2021, Obama-appointed federal judge Randolph Moss declared “absolutely unacceptable” the D.C. jail’s refusal to allow a prisoner to see the evidence against him. The judge declared that the jail’s actions were “not consistent with due process.”
On October 13, 2021, Reagan-appointed federal judge Royce Lamberth “held the District of Columbia’s corrections director and jail warden in contempt of court” for mistreating prisoners, and asked the DOJ to investigate potential violations of civil rights. The DOJ claimed that prisoner Christopher Worrell, who suffered hand injuries and a lack of treatment for cancer, had “invented” his medical needs. Eventually, Judge Lamberth ordered Worrell released for treatment, citing “deplorable” conditions in the D.C. jail, and stating that the court had “‘zero confidence’ that the D.C. jail would provide proper treatment and not retaliate against Worrell.”
More often than not, however, judges presiding over January 6 criminal trials appear to be accepting the allegations filed by DOJ lawyers as true and some judges have both attacked President Trump and reprimanded attorneys representing January 6 defendants.
In sentencing January 6 defendant Kyle Young, Obama-appointed judge Amy Berman Jackson accused former President Trump of “trying to subvert” the Constitution, and stated that “[t]he judiciary, of all people, must make it clear that it is not patriotism, it is not standing up for America” for the defendant to stand up for Trump.
Obama-appointed Judge Tanya Chutkan blasted defense suggestions that January 6 defendants were treated unfairly compared to BLM rioters. She stated that it was false equivalence “to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights” to the rioters “trying to overthrow the government.” She said the riot posed a very real danger to “the foundation of our democracy.”
Obama-appointed Judge Amit Mehta rebuked a defense attorney for arguing that January 6 defendants could not get a fair trial in D.C. because many of its residents “despise…traditional values…,” Mehta said, adding “This brief … reads less like a legal brief than something you might read on a blog…. And that’s not acceptable.”
The D.C. jail even repeatedly refused to allow a congressional visit to a constituent of then-Congressman Louie Gohmert, who reported that a jail supervisor “said she won’t talk anymore and that we’re trespassers.” Calling it like he sees it, Rep. Gohmert added, “We’re in totalitarian, Marxist territory here.”
For the leftwing leaders at the DOJ of what reporter Julie Kelly calls “a war on terror against the political right,” third-world treatment of their political opponents appears to be a premeditated strategy — and the constitutional concepts of due process of law and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment are the latest casualties in that war.
Now that the Republicans have assumed control over the House of Representatives, with the constitutional “power of the purse,” the only question is how long it will take for them to use that power to end the Department of Justice’s abusive treatment of the political opponents of the Biden regime.
