Commentary: My January 6 legal saga, continued — but not concluded

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series on the legal travails of Blaze Media contributor Steve Baker and his reporting on the events of January 6, 2021. Read part one here.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Anita Eve went silent after the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in 2021. Her emailed vow the previous Wednesday informing my attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina, that I would “be charged within the week” for my journalistic activities on January 6 was now pressing against the holiday deadline.

The day before Thanksgiving, I received a call from Bradford Geyer, a former federal prosecutor of more than 20 years who was representing Oath Keeper Ken Harrelson. Geyer had seen the press release about the Justice Department’s interest in me and wanted to discuss my case. We spoke for three hours that morning, and I immediately decided to engage him. Although my Raleigh attorney, Matthew Ceradini, had been of great help to me, Geyer had the advantage of practicing in Washington, D.C., where all of the January 6 cases were being tried.

I happened to be traveling that holiday week. Although I was well aware of how other January 6 defendants had been treated, I didn’t expect the FBI to show up at my hotel or at a family member’s residence with a SWAT team. I didn’t expect it, though it’s happened to many January 6 defendants charged with misdemeanor offenses and having no prior criminal histories.

At the conclusion of my October 2021 interview with the FBI, Special Agent Craig Noyes informed me that if the Department of Justice decided to proceed with the threatened charges, in light of my ongoing cooperation they would contact my attorney and we would work out a mutually agreeable time to present myself to U.S. Marshals at the Wake County, North Carolina, courthouse.

Of course, Noyes’ assurance came before my attorney received notice that one of those charges would be felony interstate racketeering. For the next 20 months, I woke at 6:00 a.m. sharp, wondering if I’d hear the pounding on my front door and looking for those red laser dots coming through my bedroom window.

I’d been working with a co-author for months on a book about COVID lockdowns, mandates, and related tyrannies. Part of what I had been doing in my travels to 28 different states during the lockdowns was interviewing people affected by severe government mandates. Once the Justice Department informed me I was likely to face prosecution, that book project was officially set aside. I threw myself into the ongoing media offensive against my potential prosecution.

I also began reviewing hundreds of January 6 cases.

Ken Harrelson’s case captured my attention the most. His original charging documents, as prepared by an FBI affiant, were full of exaggerations and false accusations about his conduct on January 6. Some of the video links included in the Justice Department’s “ statement of facts” flatly contradicted the government’s allegations. I called Geyer and asked him if the FBI was “making up facts” or was just “that sloppy?”

“That’s just how they do it,” Geyer told me. “Overcharge and exaggerate to justify pretrial detention.”

In Harrelson’s case, the Justice Department falsely claimed to Judge Amit Mehta that he’d been convicted of an assault charge when he was 20. But the government withheld vital information from Geyer and Judge Mehta — for more than a year and a half of Harrelson’s pretrial imprisonment — that the assault charge had been dismissed 21 years prior. (Harrelson was 41 years old when his January 6 trial began.)

Even though Judge Mehta specifically referred to that phony assault conviction to justify Harrelson’s detention, upon learning that the government’s prosecutors had withheld the truth, Mehta then pivoted to say Harrelson remained a “flight risk” because the FBI had discovered “survival” manuals when they raided his home in March 2021. Harrelson, a disabled U.S. Army veteran, purchased those books for his son, who was about to begin a career in the Army.

In my case, none of these up-close-and-personal observations of the Justice Department’s tactics against others were especially comforting during the 20 months of the DOJ's silence.

***

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) planned a week of commemorative events leading up to the first anniversary of the January 6 events. As part of my continued media offensive, I went back to D.C. to cover these events and give requested interviews — at the Capitol — to ITV’s “Good Morning Britain,” France’s TF1 Television Network, Russian TV and Radio News Service, and Newsmax. CNN had requested an appearance, but after about 30 minutes of prescreening by a producer, the outlet apparently didn’t approve of my January 6-related observations and passed on the interview.

On January 8, 2022 — two days after the first anniversary of January 6 — the government announced the seditious conspiracy indictments of Stewart Rhodes and 10 other Oath Keepers, superseding all previous indictments. This included a total of 17 different charges — six of those against Ken Harrelson. Because of our mutual legal relationship with attorney Brad Geyer, I would have a front-row seat to what was to follow in Harrelson’s case.

In late September 2022, the first of three Oath Keeper trials began. The trial included Oath Keeper founder Rhodes, Harrelson, Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins, and Thomas Caldwell. I was in the courthouse covering that trial every day for its nine-week duration. During that trial, I witnessed the events and clues that ultimately led to more than a year’s worth of my investigations into what we are now releasing through Blaze Media.

Some of those investigations resulted in my developing contacts and sources from within the U.S. Capitol Police. I published a three-part series titled, “ Capitol Police Were Sacrificial Pawns on Jan. 6,” which ultimately led to Tucker Carlson’s producers contacting me to ask about what they should be looking for when Tucker got access to the Capitol Police’s trove of 41,000 hours of January 6 footage.

Tucker’s team ran with one of my suggestions, culminating in his interview and video coverage of former Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Johnson.

Even before my threatened prosecution by the government for my independent journalism on January 6, I had always assumed my communications were being monitored.

At 6:30 a.m. on March 21 of this year, I received a phone call from a friendly journalist with a source inside the Justice Department who had called him to say, “Your journalist friend in Raleigh ... some folks here at DOJ are not happy about the story he’s working on.”

I immediately reached out to some of my own sources, and by mid-morning, I had been contacted by one of Tucker Carlson’s producers to appear on his Fox News show that evening to tell my story.

Undeterred by the implied threat, my investigations continued. Five more months passed with no contact from the Justice Department about my case or my potential charges. Meantime, I was granted access to the 41,000 hours of Capitol closed-circuit TV video from January 6. In those three days of the first week of July, I discovered what I’ve since called “the kill shot” on what I’d been seeking for nine months.

One month later, on Friday, August 4, I received a text from my Raleigh attorney, Matt Ceradini:

I need to talk with you. The FBI called me and wanted to know if I still represent you. Said it was for service of process. Looks like they’re finally getting around to charging you. Call me when you’re free.

Ceradini went to the FBI office in Cary, North Carolina, the next Monday to accept service of what turned out to be a grand jury subpoena — signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Anita Eve — for all of my January 6 videos. Not the videos I’d discovered from Capitol CCTV cameras, but my own videos that I’d taken on January 6.

After consulting with both of my attorneys and others, we determined that the subpoena of my videos had nothing to do with the Justice Department’s investigations into other January 6 participants, but rather my own work. Turns out, their investigation into me was ongoing.

More ominously, grand juries generally are not convened for misdemeanor offenses but rather for felony charges.

As it happened, the renewed interest from the Justice Department coincided perfectly with my discussions with Blaze Media to become a contributing investigative journalist and columnist.

Coincidence? Who knows?

My attorney accepted the Justice Department’s subpoena on August 7. Two days later, I received the following private message:

Just Wanted To Drop A Note & Tell You One Of My Sources At DOJ In DC Told Me They Are "TERRIFIED" Of Whatever Story You're Working On. Thought You Should Know.

I contacted my sources — four former FBI agents — all of whom assured me that the messenger was reliable.

A week later, my Raleigh attorney and I delivered a flash drive containing my videos to FBI Special Agent Noyes. For about 15 minutes, I grilled the agent about what they were up to. Why were they still investigating me after two and a half years? What could the charges possibly be?

Noyes shrugged, over and over, and told me he could not answer any of my questions.

On September 11 and 12, I was back in the video room at the Capitol, reviewing more CCTV videos. My next three days in D.C. were spent covering the trial of Stephen Horn, another North Carolina-based independent journalist. Agent Noyes was sitting at the prosecution’s table all three days.

I tried to contact Noyes during Horn’s trial, but he informed me that he couldn’t speak directly with me unless I was willing to waive representation. My attorney reached out to him, informing him that I would do no such thing. But he was able to confirm with Noyes that the Justice Department does, in fact, still have an open investigation on me.

Twenty-seven months after being contacted by the FBI and 23 months after being informed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Anita Eve that I could expect to be “charged within the week,” the waiting continues.

It’s been one hell of a long week.

As Tucker Carlson said to me during our interview — only 15 months after Eve’s initial threat — “It’s living limbo. Life destroying. Shocking. I apologize on behalf of the country.”

The truth is, my life hasn’t been destroyed. Yet. But many others have been. I intend to show through my investigations that many lives have been destroyed for no good reason — and that cannot stand.