Julie Kelly. If you haven’t followed her work, then it’s likely you don’t know the truth — or anything resembling the truth — about the events of January 6, 2021. Fortunately, she’s written a book: January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.

In an interview with The Daily Signal’s Rob Bluey, she begins by noting that the word “insurrection” was both contrived and inaccurate. This wasn’t an armed, planned attempt to overthrow the government, and yet the word stuck: “That word was planted,” she says, “seeded very early that day and then it just kept rolling. So you had lawmakers referring to it as an insurrection while it was going on. Joe Biden gave his speech at like 4 o'clock that day, he called it an insurrection. George W. Bush called it an insurrection.”

And yet, to this day, not a single J6 protester has been charged with insurrection, with trying to violently overthrow the U.S. government.

One of the first questions Kelly asks is: Why did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser keep the Capitol intentionally unsecured that day? Why, when Donald Trump authorized deployment of the National Guard, did they refuse to act on it?

Kelly says: “I’ve spoken with a DC National Guardsman. They were stationed at the Armory at 6 a.m. that day. They were waiting there, about 1,200 of them, and they were not activated and deployed until 4 o'clock that day. Now, why?”

Kelly also notes how out-of-character the Capitol riot was for supporters of Donald Trump. He’d held huge events all over the country in the months leading up to the election, and none of them resulted in violence like we saw on January 6. Why did things turn on this particular day?

The Capitol violence had already begun before Trump’s speech had ended. How could that be? Weren’t these rabble-rousers supposed to be Trump supporters? Weren’t they supposed to be heeding the president’s call to march to the Capitol and “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard? Instead, by the time those who had listened to Trump’s speech had made the walk to the Capitol, “a lot of whoever the instigators were, the provocateurs, the undercover agents, the informants, the rabble-rousers, they had already started a lot of the chaos that we saw,” Kelly said. “So people who were coming from Trump’s speech really didn’t know what was going on.”

For the whole story of January 6 to be told, we need to know what agent provocateur Ray Epps was doing there. We need an answer to the question Senator Ted Cruz asked of Executive Assistant Director of the FBI’s National Security branch Jill Sanborn: “On January 6, Mr. Epps is seen whispering to a person, and five seconds later … that same person begins to forcibly tear down the barricades. Did Mr. Epps urge them to tear down the barricades?”

Sanborn refused to answer that question.

Most striking about the violence we saw were the confrontations between cops and protesters. Of this, Kelly notes that DC Metro and Capitol Police were actually the provocateurs that day, and she says that there’s video proof. That video was sent to her by a man who’s still in jail in Washington, DC:

I was shocked. … He sent me a video that he had taken that showed police throwing flash bangs into the crowd. And I was shocked. Now, this was four months after I had started reporting it. I had never seen anything like this.

So you see him saying, “Look at this, they’re throwing flash bangs into the crowd. They’re exploding in people’s faces.” And then they were throwing something called sting balls, which, when it hits the ground, deploys these rubber bullets. So you see people bleeding from these rubber bullets.

And I thought, “Well, why were they doing this?” These people were basically outside on the grounds. They had flags, they were singing. Then all of a sudden, DC and Capitol Police started attacking them. Again, I think that’s why there were not National Guardsmen there, because if you had had the thousand or so National Guardsmen, they would say, “Well, you can’t do this to people. Why are you provoking them?”

More than 14,000 hours of surveillance video was taken on January 6. Why, more than a year later, are we only seeing cherry-picked snippets of that video?

Kelly focuses not just on the events of January 6, but also the unreported events that have taken place since, including the deplorable treatment of those involved:

So shockingly, we have a political prison in Washington, DC. Right now, there are about three dozen men who have been detained there. This DC jail opened one year ago this week. But a lot of men were incarcerated in other jails before they got to DC, so over a year they’ve been behind bars.

Most of them face some sort of attacking, assaulting, or interfering with law enforcement, but there are also nonviolent offenders, including at the DC jail, members of the Oath Keepers who are not accused of any violent crime, a couple of others who face no violent charges. But nonetheless, [the Justice Department] continues to ask for their continued, indefinite incarceration, because some of them don’t even have trial dates yet.

You could have one man in particular who will be in jail for 18 months before his trial even starts at the end of May, no violent charges, he walked in peacefully, did nothing wrong. He’s been dubbed a white supremacist. He’ll be in jail for 18 months. And you know what’s really upsetting about that case is the man who’s kept him behind bars is a Trump-appointed DC District Court judge, Trevor McFadden.

Kelly notes that many of those detained in the DC jail were kept in solitary confinement for the first several months. Covid was the excuse given. But, as she says: “They were separated from the general population, saying it was for their own protection because most of the people in the DC jail are convicted criminals and they wouldn’t be fans of Trump supporters. Neither are the guards. And so, there have been reports of physical assault, some very explicit strip searches that actually required one man to be transferred out of there to another jail, racial slurs. The only newspaper that’s distributed there is the Nation of Islam newspaper.”

Plenty has been written about the events of January 6, and, thanks to the intrepid work of Julie Kelly, we know much of it to be false or incomplete. Some of the most inaccurate and troubling reporting concerned the death of Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, at the hands of a Capitol cop, Michael Byrd, who was given extraordinarily deferential treatment. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say that Byrd’s unwarranted shooting of Babbitt has been whitewashed. And then there was the grotesquely propagandized death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick — an event which our Mark Alexander has written about extensively.

According to The New York Times, Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher. That, as it turned out, was a despicable lie — one of many that Kelly exposes.

All of which ultimately prompts her to ask: “If January 6 was so bad, why do they have to lie about it?”