On March 19, 2021, UCLA student Christian Secor learned that the Department of Justice planned to keep him in jail.  A month earlier a federal judge had denied Secor bond after a D.C. grand jury indicted him on ten counts of nonviolent January 6 mischief.

Secor’s alleged offenses, argued Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall, “from him pushing on a crowd of people to breach the Rotunda door to sitting atop the Senate dais in the chair occupied minutes before by Vice President Mike Pence,” merited pre-trial detention.

What neither Secor nor his attorney knew was that the DoJ filing on March 19 contained one huge and highly prejudicial error. That error involved Kamala Harris, the vice president designee on January 6, 2021. That Harris, President Joe Biden, and Attorney General Merrick Garland allowed the error to go uncorrected for nearly a year was no accident. In fact, the failure to correct it suggests that January 6 was, in no small part, an inside job. 

As a Secret Service “protectee,” Harris enjoyed a special status. To have breached the “restricted” area where Harris was visiting, as Secor was accused of doing, strengthened the case against him.

“On January 6, 2021, at approximately 1:00 p.m., Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his constitutional duty as President of the Senate, presided over the Joint Session,” said Paschall. “Vice-President-Elect Kamala D. Harris, in her role as a Senator representing the State of California, was also present.”

In D.C., where Donald Trump got only 5 percent of the vote in his best year, no juror really cared about Pence’s fate. Besides, as the DoJ knew, Pence was never at risk. He was taken to a secure location in the tunnels under the Capitol grounds that, only by a stretch, could be construed as being in the Capitol “building.”

Harris was another story.  At roughly 2:20 p.m., twenty minutes after protestors first entered the building, Harris was “evacuated” from her chamber. Where she went Paschall did not specify, but, she claimed, Harris “remained within the Capitol building” until the certification process resumed at 8 p.m.

Secor’s case was not unique. Harris’s presence at the Capitol remained part of the judicial boilerplate for nearly a year. Countless other J6 defendants had their sentences affected for having breached Harris’s space.

Not until November 4, 2021, did Politico reveal that Harris was never “evacuated.” In fact, she was not in the Capitol or on the Capitol grounds on January 6 at any time during the protest.

The consequences of Harris’s silence on this issue were far reaching. According to Politico, “Many of the 650-plus defendants” arrested to that point faced charges that they, like Secor, had threatened her space.

“DOJ is now moving to correct the record,” Politico continued, “acknowledging in court that Harris was in fact away from the Capitol during the riot and only returned later.” At that late date, Harris and Biden remained mum as to Harris’s whereabouts during those crucial hours.

It was not until January 6, 2022, that Politico broke the media silence and finally revealed where Harris was on January 6, 2021. The headline suggests the reason for her reticence, “Harris was inside DNC on Jan. 6 when pipe bomb was discovered outside.”

The bomb at the DNC was discovered just about 1 p.m., minutes after the ubiquitous Ray Epps and his crew first breached the Capitol perimeter and about the same time a still unidentified man and his crew hung the noose on a gallows constructed on Capitol grounds hours earlier.

An apparent plot was underway to instigate a riot and frame Trump as the provocateur. A year later, for instance, Politico was still blaming Trump supporters for the bomb, claiming “that the riots could have been far more destructive than they already were, with the incoming vice president’s life directly endangered.”

Given her penchant for contrived drama, however, Harris has remained curiously silent about having her life “directly endangered” by these terrorist bombs. Biden remained silent as well.

“The violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago,” he said in October 2021, “it was about white supremacy, in my opinion.” And yet neither he nor his vice president said word one about how some subset of these white supremacist mobs very nearly killed Kamala Harris. There was obviously something about this little drama they did not like.

Harris, it seems, stumbled into a plot about which she knew nothing. According to the FBI, a single suspect had planted bombs at both the RNC and DNC on the night of January 5. Harris, however, arrived at the DNC office late in the morning of January 6 accompanied by her Secret Service detail.

The Secret Service did a sweep of the building exterior with a bomb-sniffing dog. Yet somehow they missed a conspicuous bomb that had allegedly been planted the previous night? No, nothing about the official FBI narrative rings true.

Of course, the bomb maker has not been apprehended. Nor have the gallows builders. Nor have several of the window breakers. Yes, Ray Epps was finally charged but only then because he had become too obvious to ignore. He was given probation for crimes that netted other men prison sentences of up to 20 years.

Harris would not have known who planted the bombs, but she knew enough not to call attention to them, even if it meant allowing guys like Christian Secor to rot in jail. In October 2022, the 24-year-old was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.

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