ANALYSIS – Federal and local law enforcement reportedly had at least 40 confidential informants, or CIs, (also known by federal agencies as Confidential Human Source – CHS) embedded with protestors and rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This, according to the attorney for one of the Jan 6 defendants, Dominic Pezzola.

A member of the nationalist Proud Boys group, Pezzola is facing charges in federal court for allegedly conspiring to oppose the Jan. 2021 transfer of presidential power and related charges by interfering with Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote.

His attorney says federal prosecutors kept this critical evidence secret and belatedly admitted this bombshell just recently.

I wrote about this issue in March when a video was released that showed undercover DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers inciting the rioters to storm the Capitol. Many more videos are still sealed by the courts and kept from the public.

As the attorney’s filing noted:

Some of these undercover Metro officers marched with the Proud Boy[s] march. And some appear to have played roles of instigators, in that they are seen on body-worn videos chanting “Go! Go!,” “Stop the Steal!,” and “Whose house? Our house!” on Jan. 6.  Others generally followed demonstrators toward the Capitol.

 
While that video, part of which was posted on Rumble, shows three members of the MPD’s Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU) acting as protesters and inciting the crowd, new information reveals that MPD and the feds may have had dozens of undercover informants there that day.

The Daily Caller reports that Pezzola’s lawyer, Roger Roots, said that federal prosecutors admitted Tuesday that eight FBI confidential human sources were embedded among the Proud Boys on Jan. 6. In his Wednesday court filing, Root said that Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) , part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), appears to have had some 19 informants active at the time.

That means that the largest number of federal CHSs on Jan. 6 didn’t even belong to the FBI, but instead were from DHS.

Roots added that, in addition to all these federal CIs, at least 13 undercover plain-clothes DC Metro Police agents worked among Jan. 6 defendants that day (one more than originally revealed). 

That’s a lot of local police undercover officers and federal confidential informants for one protest. And who knows how many more there may have been in other capacities.

In his filing, Roots argues that:

Pezzola submits that the entire defense in this trial, including opening,cross, and defense cases, would have been different, and much more aggressive, if defense counsel had known of the scope and scale of undercover government operations on Jan. 6. Prosecutors made arguments contrary to information they possessed and withheld; and defense counsel could have lodged different cross-examination and direct examination questions if they had known of these materials.

Roots concludes by noting that the “United States is refusing to provide information which obviously has a high likelihood of being exculpatory.”

He adds that defendants are entitled to this information. “ACCORDINGLY, Pezzola asks for an order compelling the United States to provide the names, identities, and reports of all HSI confidential informants operating at or near the Capitol or around the Proud Boys on January 6, 2021.”

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.