Veteran use of force expert Steven Hill, a former SWAT team supervisor with the Albuquerque Police Department, warns police waged a “terror attack” against the crowd of peaceful demonstrators during the J6 Stop the Steal rally when they launched a concussion grenade that set at least one man on fire.
Hill, an investigator with J6Truth, has examined over 1000 hours of J6 footage over the past two years and taken the stand in three J6 trials as an expert witness while assisting defense attorneys including those representing the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys with gathering exculpatory evidence.
J6 Truth’s team of investigators, including Hill and this reporter, have identified at least a dozen of instances of police flagrantly breaking the law during the January 6 protests.
In footage captured from a demonstrator’s camera on the West Plaza of the US Capitol at 1:24 pm, cops are seen firing a “sting ball grenade” into a peaceful crowd that set at least one man on fire, an illegal aberration of standard operating procedures and violation of all District of Columbia ordinances.
“You see a sting ball grenade that has been hand-thrown by officers into a crowd of peaceful oblivious demonstrators who are at least 30 to 50 feet behind the frontline of demonstrators,” Hill highlights in a 2-minute video of the explosion.
“As you watch where the grenade lands, you see that this group of people — some of them are praying, talking with others, shooting cell phone video facing away from the officers and unaware as to what the Capitol officers are doing,” he continues. “The riot control weapon is a rubber ball grenade that uses a small charge that will split the ball in half and eject tear gases, rubber balls or both.”
District of Columbia law and standard operating procedures mandate police to issue dispersal orders and a clear warning, at least three times, to the crowd asking them to leave before attempting an arrest, using force, or deploying munitions.
“The US Capitol Police used less lethal munitions against a crowd who was not advised that their actions were considered unlawful and they were not told to leave the area. When the Metropolitan Police arrived minutes later, they also started deploying munitions into a crowd that had not been warned,” Hill explains. “Both police agencies’ standard operating procedures and the Washington DC ordinances mandate the First Amendment demonstrators be warned at least three times using a public address system that is heard by the crowd.
“The US Capitol has a massive public address system that communicates directions over the entire area of the Capitol grounds, but they chose not to use it. This is only one of many unlawfully deployed grenades sent into the middle of peaceful crowds that day without any warning, injuring a number of protesters, [including] setting one man on fire. This is an unlawful and excessive use of force.”
The police deployed hand grenades — you pull a pin and you throw them down into the crowd —and it was an absolutely peaceful crowd. There was no reason for them to have done that,” Hill told TGP in an exclusive interview. “They were thrown into the most peaceful part of that crowd. And that’s criminal.”
A majority of the American public believes the government and the mainstream narrative about the January 6 “insurrection.”
According to a recent survey conducted in December by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, 55 percent of voters said the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten. Forty-three 43 percent said “too much has been made of it and believe it’s time to move on.” A whopping 86 percent of Democrat voters, the same plurality that supported an effort to defund the police, said the attack should never be forgotten, while 72 percent of Republican voters said it’s time to turn the page.
But an examination of the footage revealing what really happened that fateful day irrefutably shows law enforcement officials themselves escalated the protest into an insurrection, while the trumped up charges and over prosecutions of J6 defendants is a continued “terror attack” against the American people,” Hill contends.
“Most of these charges the Justice Department has leveled against January 6 defendants would be, at the most, misdemeanors in the real world. but not in the world of DC, where they’re where they’re trying to go after Trump. So, this has to be ‘worse than 911 and Pearl Harbor’ put together,” he said. “The government claims January 6 was an ‘insurrection,’ yet, 99 percent of the demonstrators were unarmed. They came to demonstrate, and that’s a First Amendment right. And many of these people were pushed into their actions because of the actions of the police.
“It was it was a horrific event. There was so much misuse of force and unlawful use of force by officers that started the beginning of a terror event. But the real terrorist event started when our government started going after these people and charging them with crimes they could not commit or charging them with crimes that were so far above and beyond the simple misdemeanors they would have been charged with.
“Instead, they charged them with 10 felony counts, and I know the purpose behind it is to put people like you and me on notice that the government could come out of at us at any moment, that we need to ‘keep our mouths shut and go sit in our corner and not question what our government’s doing.’ And it’s it’s an absolute travesty that we’ve allowed our government to be so corrupt.”
J6 political prisoner Jake Lang founded J6 Truth and SponsorJ6 while incarcerated. Lang also hosts a weekly podcast on TGP in which he unabashedly calls attention to the Justice Department’s malfeasance.
Around 4 am on Tuesday, jail guards abruptly dragged Lang and J6 prisoner Ryan Samsel out of their cells and informed them they would be transferred to a non-disclosed location.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Prisons confirmed Lang and Samsel are currently detained in US Penitentiary Lewisburg. Lang’s family members told TGP the two inmates are still in transit and are barred from communication until they are housed in another facility which could take “days, weeks or months.”
“I’m very concerned about Ryan and Jake’s safety,” Hill said. “For them to just be ripped out of their jail cell and disappear like that sounds like an old Soviet ploy where they would they would get rid of the people that were a thorn in the sides of the administration. That’s what’s what worries me the most is that they end up disappearing and getting injured or just we’ve lost them off the face of the earth.
“If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I said that would never happen in this country. But nowadays, I don’t know. It makes you wonder.”
