Legal Scholar Raises Concerns Over DOJ Hiding FBI Informants At Jan. 6

Authored by Luis Cornelio via Headline USA,

Renowned legal scholar and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley sounded the alarm about the DOJ’s failure to disclose to Jan. 6 defendants that FBI informants were present in the U.S. Capitol that day in 2021, as detailed in a DOJ Inspector General report.

In a Thursday interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum, Turley said the report raised “more questions than answers” about the FBI’s rumored role in inciting violence at the Capitol.  

The law professor specifically such information would have been critical to defendants of the Jan. 6 protests who fell victim to the Biden DOJ’s aggressive prosecutions.

“In some ways, it raises more questions than answers. It does support Wray’s testimony that there were no undercover agents in the crowd,” Turley said, referring to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

“I think that for others, there is going to be a lot of concern as to what the sources were doing there,” he said, as reported first by the Daily Caller. 

DOJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz revealed that at least 26 FBI confidential human sources (CHSs) were present among the crowd protesting the contentious 2020 presidential election results. 

“Our review determined that none of these FBI CHSs was authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol or a restricted area or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6,” Horowitz found. 

Of the 26 agents, only three were summoned to the U.S. Capitol that day, Turley noted, before highlighting that FBI informants had previously been accused of inciting crimes. 

“We’ve had cases in the past where the defense has argued that sources and agents have been extremely active in pushing people towards criminal conduct,” Turley said. “We saw those allegations raised in the Michigan case involving the governor there.” 

…Moreover, there is a question of why the three sources who entered the Capitol were not charged as part of an operation that the Justice Department described as an effort to “shock and awe” targeting everyone involved on that day…

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) December 12, 2024

The FBI’s potential role in inciting violence was highlighted in the “kidnapping” plot of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Two men indicted in the alleged plot were acquitted by a jury, while two others faced hung juries. The latter two were convicted in a retrial. 

Turley argued that Jan. 6 defense attorneys would have used the FBI informants’ presence during the protests if they had known about it. 

“I think that some defense attorneys may raise the question as [to] why they weren’t told, if they weren’t told about the confidential sources that might have been involved tangentially with their own cases, because usually defense counsel says we want to know what asset, what personnel the government had there. So there is going to be questions of that kind, that arise,” Turley said.