Let’s cut to the chase: The DOJ/FBI response to the events of January 6, 2021, represents the single greatest mass injustice against American citizens since Japanese internment. As I suggest in my new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, if the GOP does nut run towards this issue, they’re fools.
To date, the GOP has been AWOL in the fight against this massive injustice.
What makes the government’s perverse overreaction easy to substantiate is that the Biden Department of Justice is still bragging about the body count: more than 1,424 defendants have been charged, 1,334 with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building, 355 with obstructing an official proceeding, 510 with assault, 133 with using a deadly or dangerous weapon, 57 with conspiracy. More than 500 protestors have been incarcerated. Some are still in the DC gulag awaiting trial. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cops)
Given that Donald Trump netted only 5 percent of the DC vote in 2020, and that all change of venue requests were denied, the DOJ has a near perfect record in securing convictions in court or punitive plea deals. They brag about that too. They shouldn’t. The Scottsboro Boys had a better chance of finding an unbiased jury in Jim Crow Alabama than the J6ers do in today’s Washington DC.
The Scottsboro Boys at least had the ACLU on their side. No such luck for the J6ers. On the first anniversary, all fifty-one ACLU chapters signed on to the kind of letter the ACLU chapter of ancient Rome might have written about the Vandals or the Visigoths.
The ACLU propagandists wrote: “On January 6 of last year, the residents of D.C. were traumatized as an insurrectionist mob roamed our streets, harassed our neighbors, and violently broke into the Capitol Building, killing at least five people — all in an attempt to overthrow the counting of American citizens’ votes.”
The only thing the ACLU got right in this letter was the date. Of course, the J6ers killed no one. All the killing was done by the police, all the lying done by the Left. With the ACLU cheering the oppressors and the GOP cowed into silence, Biden’s DOJ was free to inflict an unprecedented reign of terror on American citizens.
The case of Lisa Eisenhart and her son Eric Munchel is a testament to that terror. The DOJ knew precisely what the pair did not do. The reason is simple. Munchel wore an iPhone on his tactical vest and recorded non-stop the pair’s patient 40-minute queue into the Capitol and their 11 minutes within.
Eisenhart wore a tactical vest as well. Wearing such vests was not illegal nor irrational. After a self-organized, self-declared “Million MAGA March” in Washington on November 14, 2020, leftist agitators openly attacked stragglers as they were walking to their hotels, knocking one man unconscious. Eisenhart and her son feared more of the same.
Munchel started recording shortly before 2 p.m. The mood outside was largely festive, the air punctuated with frequent chants of “USA, USA.” As the pair entered the Capitol through an open door at 2:37 p.m., several police stood passively along the corridor. The court later acknowledged that Eisenhart “was not a member of any suspect group, did not do any advance planning, nor did she use force to enter the Capitol on January 6.” (READ MORE: After Three Days of Deliberation, Jan. 6 Jury Convicts Great-Grandmother Rebecca Lavrenz)
With Eisenhart in the lead, the two mounted the stairway to the Rotunda. The protestors milling about inside seemed excited to be there and, like Eisenhart and Munchel, confused about what to do next. As they wandered, Eisenhart grabbed a pile of zip ties sitting exposed on the side of a corridor. She claims she did not want them falling into the wrong hands. The behavior of her and her son makes the claim credible.
For a few minutes, the pair followed a group of rowdy young men whom Munchel repeatedly cautioned, “Don’t vandalize anything, we aren’t Antifa,” and then, more forcefully, “You break shit. I break you.” The viewer sees what Eisenhart saw, and that was a total absence of violence and vandalism. What the pair did not see or hear was the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt, which took place while they were in the vast building.
Looking for an exit, Eisenhart and her son found their way to the gallery of the Senate chamber. There was little police presence in the chamber and none in the gallery. A photographer made Munchel infamous when he took a picture of him holding the zip ties. This photo earned him the media designation “zip-tie guy” and went viral quickly. On the following morning, he was contacted by the London Times.
Unaware of any possible consequences, Eisenhart did the interview. “If they’re going to take every legitimate means from us, and we can’t even express ourselves on the internet, we won’t even be able to speak freely, what is America for?” said Lisa defiantly. “I’d rather die as a 57-year-old woman than live under oppression.” The DOJ took issue with this quote and included it in its charging document. Implied was that her stirring defense of free speech was seditious.
Just two years earlier in that same Senate gallery, screaming women repeatedly interrupted an “official proceeding,” the Senate vote to confirm Bret Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. More than once, Vice President Pence had to stop the vote and call for order. Hundreds would be arrested during the DC protests, but no big deal. As NPR reported, “Most of those charged this week with disorderly conduct, crowding or obstructing paid fines of $35 or $50.”
Eisenhart and Munchel did not get off so easy. On the morning of January 8, a swarm of FBI agents descended on Munchel’s home. His brother answered the door, only to be clapped in handcuffs while still in his underwear. At the time, the FBI did not know that Eisenhart was at the Capitol. It was she who would volunteer that information.
Munchel was booked on January 9, Eisenhart on January 12, both at the federal courthouse in Nashville. “I was floored when I read my charges,” said Eisenhart. Having accused her of trying to overthrow the government, the feds deemed the 57-year-old nurse worthy of pre-trial detention. For the next eleven weeks, Lisa was shuttled among jails in Tennessee, Kentucky, and DC.
Like other J6ers, Eisenhart was kept in maximum security. She spent those final six weeks in the notorious DC gulag — “hungry, tired, and lonely.” For clothing, the jailers gave her the equivalent of hospital scrubs. For warmth, they gave her a single thin blanket in a unit so cold in the morning she could see her breath. Before showers, they chained her hand and foot. Unable to sleep at night or eat food always served cold, Eisenhart lost 35 pounds and a goodly chunk of hair.
If Eisenhart had followed the case of attorney Urooj Rahman, she would have had some reason to be hopeful about her sentencing. During the George Floyd riots in May 2020, Rahman threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of an empty NYPD patrol car, setting it on fire. She was arrested and spent a few days in jail before being released to home confinement.
In November 2022, Federal judge Brian Cogan sentenced Rahman to 15 months in prison. “You are a remarkable person who did a terrible thing on one night,” Cogan told her. Praising her lifetime of work as a social justice warrior, he explained that hers was one of the most difficult sentences he ever had to impose.
Unfortunately for Eisenhart and Munchel, Rahman’s sentencing had no predictive value. At a stipulated bench trial in April 2023, both were convicted on the felony charges of conspiracy to commit obstruction and obstruction of an official proceeding. Munchel was sentenced to 57 months in prison, Eisenhart to 30 months. (READ MORE: George Floyd Revisited: Derek Chauvin Was Wrongfully Convicted)
The New York Times summarized their offense as follows, “A Tennessee man and his mother were sentenced to prison on Friday for seeking to intimidate lawmakers by marching with matching tactical vests and carrying zip tie-style handcuffs.” That’s about it. Eisenhart got twice what Urooj Rahman got for firebombing a police car. Munchel got nearly twice that.
Like hundreds of other January 6 defendants, Eisenhart and her son were charged with a felony for obstructing an official proceeding, a law spun out of the Enron debacle and creatively adapted to imprison J6ers. The Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of that adaptation before the end of June. In the interim, Eisenhart waits in Limbo. Munchel waits in prison.
To date, the GOP has been AWOL in the fight against this massive injustice. The Supreme Court ruling will force them to the front lines. The only way they can win this battle is to take the offensive. They’ve got the ammunition. They just need the will to use it.
Some of this material has been adapted from Jack Cashill’s new book, ASHLI: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, now available for purchase.