Authored by Steve Cortes via RealClearPolitics,
January 6 has become a date of hallowed pagan sacredness to the ruling class – a supposed talisman marking chaos, a shorthand for “threats to democracy.” But the media, predictably, has focused on the wrong January. And the wrong threat.
Because the real January 6 – the one that changed everything – wasn’t in 2021. It happened four years earlier, in 2017. Not at the Capitol, but rather in a glass-walled conference room on the 26th floor of Trump Tower.
That morning, President-elect Donald J. Trump received a classified briefing from top intelligence officials – a routine, transitional step for any incoming commander in chief.
But what he got wasn’t intelligence. It was a malicious setup, a trap.
FBI Director James Comey entered the room alone and handed Trump the political equivalent of a political grenade: the now-debunked Steele dossier. A document so flimsy, partisan, and salacious, it wouldn’t pass editorial review at Mother Jones, let alone FBI verification. And yet, veracity wasn’t the point.
The objective wasn’t to actually inform the incoming president, but instead, Comey arrived at the behest of President Obama and CIA Director Brennan with two missions. First, he sought to bait Trump into some sort of dubious false confession. Second, once the briefing was made, the even bigger trap was set.
How?
Because once the FBI told Trump about the dossier – even informally, even off the record – that fact became the news hook, it became the poisoned seed to grow the entire Russian collusion hoax. The contents of the briefing were leaked to legacy, Trump-hating media, likely by Brennan himself.
Within hours, BuzzFeed and CNN were live. The chyron wrote itself: “President-elect Trump briefed on Russian kompromat.” Boom. Mission accomplished. The fuse was lit.
These actions weren’t national security protections of legitimate law enforcement operations. Instead, Obama and his top security officials engaged in secret information warfare – waged not by foreign actors but by our very own intelligence community.
Comey’s maneuver gave the press permission to launder partisan opposition research into a years-long national scandal that had the veneer of respectability because of the alleged imprimatur of the U.S. intelligence community. Even though they all knew that the story was false, from Hillary Clinton to James Clapper, in these propaganda ops, truth is not the coin of the realm. What matters is what can be effectively sold to the compliant media and a divided electorate, regardless of the absurdity of the allegations.
The story did not need to be verified, only mentioned to Trump. Then media charlatans like Jake Tapper and Joe Scarborough took their effective marching orders.
Let’s call this plot what it was: a soft coup in slow motion. A preemptive strike against a duly elected president.
For all the talk about “resistance,” this scheme wasn’t legitimate political opposition. It was preemption … and a crime.
Permanent Washington was not about to try to wait for Trump to fail. Instead, they conspired to ensure he would never get the chance to succeed. Before he signed a single order. Before he picked his cabinet. Before he took the oath of office.
January 6, 2021, made for dramatic images of chaos in Washington. While the violence vs. the police that day will always be inexcusable, the affront to our republic did not unfold on that cold January day on the Mall, but rather four years earlier, as the White House concocted a hoax, using the full powers of a weaponized federal government.
The January 6, 2017, plot does not lend itself to compelling images, but it was nonetheless a wicked, coordinated institutional betrayal carried out by insiders who simply refused to accept the will of the American people in the 2016 election.
They feared Trump not because he was reckless, but because he was serious. Serious about pulling back the curtain. Serious about cutting off the Beltway lifelines. Serious about cleaning house.
And for the permanent class – that’s the real threat. Not tweets. Not tone. But independence. So they acted. Quietly. Strategically. And with the full knowledge that the supplicant media would play its part.
What followed was years of sabotage dressed as journalism. Leaks. Investigations. Impeachments. Perjury traps. All seeded from that original sin – the January 6 meeting that gave the Steele dossier a phony legitimacy.
If the goal was to erode trust in American institutions, it worked. The public watched as once-respected agencies turned into tools of narrative warfare. They saw a sitting president hunted for crimes that didn’t exist – while his accusers were lionized for their lies.
So yes – let’s talk about January 6.
But let’s talk about the one that set the whole thing in motion. The day unelected elites turned a routine briefing into a headline ambush. The day narrative replaced truth as the driving principle of the federal bureaucracy. The day the media, intelligence community, and political class all quietly agreed: Elections only matter when the “correct” side wins.
That’s the real January 6 … and we’re still living in its aftermath.
Steve Cortes is president of the League of American Workers, a populist right pro-laborer advocacy group, and senior political advisor to Catholic Vote. He is a former senior advisor to President Trump and JD Vance, and a former commentator for Fox News and CNN.