The trend continues. You’re going to need to find some new conspiracy theories because all of your old ones are coming true. Today we are once again talking about the Capitol Hill riot on January 6, 2020. If Democrats have their way, we’ll be talking about it for the rest of our lives, but they may not care to mention this particular detail. Trump’s critics have long scoffed at claims that the crowd was full of FBI agents and informants that day, but Steven D’Antuono, a former head of the Bureau’s Washington field office told the House Judiciary Committee that they had so many paid informants in the mob that they “lost track” of them and later had to perform an audit to see how many of them were there. So were all of those people fighting to defend the Capitol? Nope. (NY Post)

The FBI had so many paid informants that they lost track of the number and had to perform a later audit to determine exactly how many “Confidential Human Sources” run by different FBI field offices were present that day, a former assistant director of the bureau has told lawmakers.

At least one informant was communicating with his FBI handler as he entered the Capitol, according to Steven D’Antuono, formerly in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office.

D’Antuono has testified behind closed doors to the House Judiciary Committee that his office was aware before the riot that some of their informants would attend a “Stop the Steal” rally thrown by former President Donald Trump but he only learned after the fact that informants run by other field offices also were present, along with others who had participated of their own accord.

We still don’t have an exact figure, but D’Antuono finally said “a handful” when pressed for an answer. (That could mean almost anything when talking about a crowd of that size.) The informants were working out of multiple offices, including the Kansas City field office. The witness was also unable to say how much they were being paid or how carefully they were vetted before being deployed.

The entire FBI CHS (confidential human source) program has come under scrutiny. The Bureau shells out a lot of money to people who have been found to fabricate evidence and misrepresent testimony in the interest of bringing in a case and earning their fee. On top of the CHSs, Capitol Hill Police Chief Steven Sund has stated that the FBI had at least 18 undercover agents in the crowd that went into the Capitol Building that day. The Department of Homeland Security also had an unspecified number of undercover officers there. We should be starting to wonder how many of those people were actual Trump supporters and not on the government’s payroll at this point.

It’s long been known that the FBI had more people inside of the Proud Boys than the Proud Boys did. That fact was brought up multiple times during the J6 trials of the Proud Boys’ members, though it didn’t prevent any of them from going to prison. (That includes Enrique Tarrio, who wasn’t even in Washington, DC that day and had been in touch with law enforcement for months prior to the riot.) It’s so odd how FBI CHSs can seemingly participate in crimes they are allegedly monitoring, yet they never wind up in front of a judge. Good work if you can get it, I suppose.

Paying people handsomely to act as informants is clearly a flawed strategy. It only provides an incentive for them to fabricate evidence or even push to further a potential crime in the interest of lining their pockets. Covering their travel expenses and such is understandable, but assisting law enforcement should be something that people do out of a sense of duty, not as a way to generate wealth. You need to look no further than the alleged “kidnapping plot” against Gretchen Whitmer to realize that much.

What seems to be increasingly clear is that a lot of people had planned in advance to travel to Washington to attend Trump’s “stop the steal” rally on January 6. Only a comparative handful of those people had any intention (in advance) of breaching the Capitol Building itself. And some of those people were government agents and/or informants. The rest simply got caught up in the madness of the moment. The riot still never should have happened, as I’ve said from the beginning, but it also didn’t happen in the way it’s been portrayed in the media.