Free · 26,102 words · 166 images · 12 charts
They called us liars.
Then their own footage
told a different story.
I put this together in solitary confinement with almost nothing. A court issued laptop. An evidence thumb drive. Three books. No internet at all. And what was left of my sanity.
They handed me their own evidence because they had to. I think they expected it to bury me.
- 26,102
- Words written in a cell
- 166
- Images from the record
- 44,000+
- Hours that turned out to exist
- 0
- Minutes of internet access
The whole inventory
What I had to work with.
This is not a humble brag. It is the reason you should read it carefully. Every single thing in this report had to survive being produced under these conditions.
- 01One laptopCourt issued. Locked down. Loaded with the government's own discovery.
- 02One evidence thumb driveWhat I was told was 14,000+ hours of bodycam, CCTV and crowd video. Everything I could prove came off of it. The real number turned out to be far larger.
- 03Three booksWhatever made it through the mail. Every outside source in this report is something I could hold in my hands.
- 04No internetNot restricted. None. I could not look anything up, check a date, or read the news.
- 05What was left of my sanitySolitary confinement. That is the honest fifth item and I am not going to dress it up.
Where this came from.
2021 to 2022
Written inside
D.C. Department of Corrections. Pod C2B, and then solitary. Written on the court issued laptop while I worked through discovery.
Through March 2023
Revised inside
Still in custody. Still no internet. Every outside source in it is a book I could hold or a file I could open on that drive.
July 2026
Recovered
Pulled off the old evidence drive, laid out with the images and the charts, and published free. Four and a half years after the first word.
This part is verifiable
I did not write this after the fact, with hindsight, from a comfortable chair. I wrote it in a cell. The men who were in C2B with me can tell you so, because they watched me do it.
That matters more than anything else on this page, because everything in the next section was written before it was public.
The number moved
They told us 14,000 hours. It was not 14,000 hours.
Every time I say 14,000 hours in this report, that is the number I had. It is what the government said existed, and I wrote the whole thing believing it.
It was not the whole picture. The 14,000 hours covered noon to eight PM on one single day, and only what the Capitol Police handed the FBI. Out of that, the government produced half and withheld the other half as not relevant to the case. What actually reached defendants was 4,800 hours from 515 cameras.
In February 2023 my own motion put 41,000 hours on the record. In November 2023 the House began releasing what it put at 44,000.
So what I was handed in that cell, and built this entire report out of, was somewhere around a tenth of what existed. And 44,000 is only what has been tracked and recovered.
I did not change the report
The 14,000 figure stays exactly where it is on every page of the report, because that is what I knew when I wrote it. I am telling you here what the number turned out to be instead of quietly going back and editing myself. That is the same rule I follow everywhere else in this thing.
Their witness. Their oath. Their numbers.
41,057 hours, sworn under penalty of perjury.
I do not need anybody to take my word for the real number. The Capitol Police General Counsel swore to it himself, in March 2023, in a declaration that was filed into my own case file.
12,671 hours for the window they kept talking about. Then another 28,386 hours for January 3, 4 and 5, and the morning of January 6 before any of it started. Add them up.
The footnote that ends the argument
“In response to later requests from both committees, the Department provided footage from the entire 24-hour period for January 6, 2021.”
Sworn in November 2022. Fifteen months before the House began releasing forty thousand hours. While the government spent 2023 defending 14,000 as the universe, its own declarant had already testified that the committees held the whole day.
And the clock that decided what survived
“Without affirmative preservation, all Department footage is automatically purged within 30 days.”
Follow the dates
28,386 hours that should not have survived.
This is not a theory. It is a calendar, and the calendar does not work.
Capitol Police footage deletes itself after 30 days. The only preservation anybody ever swore to was eight hours, noon to eight PM on January 6.
So every hour from January 3, 4 and 5, and the morning of January 6, should have deleted itself by around February 5, 2021.
The Select Committee that later received 28,386 hours of exactly that footage did not exist until June 30, 2021.
Five months after it should have been gone.
Which means somebody preserved it, in January of 2021, before the clock ran out. There is no preservation order in the public record. No litigation hold. No directive. The only transfer documents in evidence are two Information Sharing Agreements dated January 10 and 11, and they govern who controls the footage, not what gets saved. They name no date range at all.
The question nobody has answered
Who gave the instruction to preserve those days, and on what date?
Sixty nine percent of everything the Select Committee received sits outside the only preservation window anyone has ever sworn to. Per camera that is 51 hours. Somebody made that call in January 2021 and there is no document in the public record that says who.
What I am not saying
I am not saying anything was destroyed on purpose. I have no document that says that and I will not pretend I do. What I have is an accounting gap. Somebody made a preservation decision that saved two thirds of what Congress later worked from, and no sworn statement in three years has explained it. That is a fair question to ask out loud, and it is the kind of question that gets answered only when somebody asks it.
The part nobody talks about
The footage deletes itself.
This is the line I cannot get out of my head, and it is sworn, in the same declaration as everything else on this page.
USCP General Counsel Thomas DiBiase · ECF 71-1, footnote 1
“Without affirmative preservation, all Department footage is automatically purged within 30 days.”
Nobody has to decide to destroy anything. Nobody signs an order. The clock does it.
What got preserved immediately was eight hours. Noon to eight PM on January 6. That was the entire first decision. Everything else that exists today, the full 24 hours of January 6, and January 3, 4 and 5, survived only because a committee came back later and asked for it, and every one of those requests was running against a deadline nobody set on purpose.
Whatever nobody thought to ask for in time is gone. No order, no log, and no way to ever know what it was.
Where the honest edge is
I am not telling you footage was destroyed to hide something. I have no evidence of that and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I am telling you is that a 30 day automatic purge means the record of the most examined day in modern American history was decided by what somebody remembered to ask for inside one month. That is a fact about the system, sworn by the government’s own lawyer, and it should bother everybody regardless of what they think about January 6.
Simple division
About 1,800 cameras existed. They produced 650.
You do not need a theory for this one. You need a calculator. If 14,000 hours were recorded in an eight hour window, that takes at least 1,750 cameras running. The sworn 12,671 hours works out to 1,584. The Capitol Police’s own press release says the command center has access to roughly 1,800.
Three numbers, none of them mine, all landing in the same place. The government produced 650 cameras in discovery.
What I will not overstate
No court has ever ruled that footage was wrongly withheld, and my own motions on this were denied. A judge called my camera argument speculation. What I can tell you is that the government was given two chances in open filings to dispute the camera count and never did, and that nobody has ever produced an inventory. That is where the record actually stands.
July 21, 2022 · on the record
I said it in open court. A year later the number tripled.
The number did not just quietly grow. We tracked it ourselves from inside the jail, on the same evidence platform the government used to serve us, and we said so to the judges. This is the transcript.
“The government said a couple status hearings ago that all the evidence was uploaded. But we got a new download of evidence on Evidence.com on May 31st, a ton of new videos. And so all the evidence wasn’t on Evidence.com like the government told us.”
And a page later: “If the January 6th hearing committee is getting discovery that we don’t have access to, what more do they have that we don’t have access to that could possibly exonerate me? Because I’ve already found exculpatory evidence on body cam video.”
The court’s answer
“There’s a lot of conspiracy theories and a lot of theories you have, and we’ll see what evidence is produced.”
Sixteen months after that hearing, the House began releasing 44,000 hours. I was not theorizing. I was reading the file counts on the screen they gave me.
Pull it yourself
United States v. Nichols & Harkrider, No. 1:21-cr-00117 (D.D.C.), ECF 113, transcript of the July 21, 2022 status conference. It is free and public. I am not asking anybody to take my word for it.
The part that still gets me
I wrote it in a cell. Then it started coming out.
I was not following the news. I had no news. I wrote what I could see in that footage and what I could reason from it, and then I sat in there while the record caught up.
What I wrote, in the cell
I wrote that federal informants were embedded in that crowd, and that the government would not want to say how many.
Came out after I wrote it
December 2024: the Justice Department Inspector General reported 26 confidential human sources were present in Washington on January 6, none of them authorized to enter the building or to encourage anyone else to.
What I wrote, in the cell
I wrote that the Proud Boys had been infiltrated, and that the informants inside that group would surface eventually.
Came out after I wrote it
2023: at the seditious conspiracy trial, defense filings and open court testimony referenced as many as eight or nine informants in that orbit. One marched in with the Kansas City chapter, texted his handler while it was happening, and rode home with Billy Chrestman. He was never charged. Chrestman got 55 months.
What I wrote, in the cell
I wrote that Ray Epps needed to be explained, and that the silence around him was itself the story.
Happened after I wrote it
September 2023: Epps was charged with a single misdemeanor. January 2024: sentenced to probation, no custody. What he did on camera is still on the record for anyone to weigh.
What I wrote, in the cell
I wrote that law enforcement used markers to identify their own people inside that crowd.
Government document
The Metropolitan Police Department's own January 6th preparation report lists Rainbow Colored Wristbands as the marker signaling undercover MPD officers. That is a government document, not a theory.
Every item on the right is a public record you can check yourself. The report cites all of it in the endnotes. I am not asking anybody to take my word for any of it.
I left it the way I wrote it.
There is a lot in here I would say differently today. I know more now. Some of it I would sharpen. Some of it I would soften. A few names I would think harder about.
I left it alone anyway.
What I fixed was spelling, formatting, and anything the public record has since corrected. Where the record now says something different than I did, I say so right on the page instead of quietly editing myself. Where an image belonged to somebody else, I took it out and left a card telling you exactly what was there.
You are reading what a man wrote in a cell in 2021, not what he wishes he had written in 2026.
That is the only version worth publishing. Anything else is just me marking my own homework.
Every claim is labeled.
You will always know exactly what you are reading and how much weight it carries. That is the difference between this report and a rumor.
It is in the record. Go pull it yourself.
I lived it. This is my word.
My conclusion, and I mark it as mine.
I believe it. I cannot prove it yet.
MPD’s own preparation report listed “Rainbow Colored Wristbands” as the marker signaling undercover MPD officers in the crowd.
Corroborated independently by researcher Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. This is what turns a theory into a documented question.
Inside the report
Eight parts. One afternoon.
The first half is the playbook, built from the three books I had in that cell. The second half is January 6 itself, matched against it frame by frame, and then what happened to me in the tunnel.
- 01Section 1Who Antifa actually isNot the cartoon, and not the denial either. The definitions, the history, and the sourcing, laid out from the three books I had.
- 02Section 1The Campaign PlanSix steps. Four of them covert. Recruiting, indoctrination, sorting recruits, organizing direct action, then the two that happen in the open.
- 03Section 1Red, Yellow, GreenHow people get sorted by what they are willing to do. The manuscript argues the least violent tier is the most dangerous one.
- 04Section 1The Battle PlanNine roles, five lessons, three objectives. Infiltrate. Agitate. Retaliate.
- 05Section 2The events of January 6Where the playbook stops being theory and starts matching what I watched on the footage, hour by hour.
- 06Section 2Nine roles, one afternoonEach role, and who filled it that day, with stills. One role is empty and I say so on the page.
- 07Section 2Group 1 and Group 2The people who show up at the Ellipse in the morning and in the tunnel hours later. The ones who were never named.
- 08Section 2What happened to meThe Lower West Terrace tunnel. 7,390 words and 92 images. What I saw, what I heard officers say to each other, and what happened to the people beside me.
Also inside
166 images pulled from the record. 12 charts. 25 endnotes so you can check me. And every claim carries a label telling you whether it is fact, my account, my inference, or something I believe and cannot prove yet.
Twelve charts I could never draw from in there.
I could describe this to a cellmate. I could not show it to anybody. Now you can look at it.
Chart 04
The Connection Web
Who informed, who was never identified, and who the hammer came down on. Every line labeled with what the relationship actually is.
Chart 05
The Sentencing Disparity
Same building, same afternoon, mostly the same tunnel. 78 months at the top. Never charged at the bottom.
Chart 10
Nine Roles, One Afternoon
The playbook's nine roles and who filled them that day. One row is honestly empty, and I say so.
Chart 11
Days Until Arrest
Eight days for one man. Two and a half years for another. Never, for two more.
Chart 09
140 Years
1881 to January 6, 2021 on one timeline. Where the playbook actually comes from.
Chart 12
What 14,000 Hours Looks Like
583 days of continuous video. One highlighted square for what the public was shown.
What is inside.
The tunnel
What I saw in there
My account of the Lower West Terrace tunnel. What I saw, what I heard officers say to each other, and what happened to the people beside me.
The battle plan
Infiltrate. Agitate. Retaliate.
The documented playbook, and how that afternoon maps onto it, role by role.
The roles
Nine jobs in that crowd
Medics. Scanner operators. Agitators. Suppliers. With stills from the footage and the question each one raises.
The unnamed
Still no name on a docket
People filmed working with police in the middle of a riot who were never identified or charged, even after we asked the government to name them in a motion.
Free. Always free. Share it.
I am not selling you the truth. I am handing it to you and asking you to pass it on to somebody who told you that you were crazy.
Send Me The ReportThis report is the front door.
The BIG Lie is what I could prove from a cell. The years in custody, the solitary, the due process violations a federal judge acknowledged on the record, the pardon and the rebuild are in my memoir, Fighting Shadows.