For a criminal defense attorney, the scariest moment in any trial is when his client unwittingly opens the door to otherwise inadmissible evidence.

On Thursday, during her acceptance speech, Vice-President Kamala Harris opened that door. The Trump people would have preferred that no one at the DNC talk about January 6, but Rep. Jamie Raskin shattered that hope on the convention’s opening night in a speech so laden with lies Satan was envious.

Harris was much more careful, too careful. So crafted were her words that they revealed a signature speech pattern. As shall be seen, this pattern was evident in her first -- and last -- interview about her role on January 6, which she gave in January 2021. The silence then and since screams out for an explanation.

Here, for instance, is an example of Harris’s duplicitousness excerpted from her convention speech. “[Trump] sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.” For starters, the mob was conspicuously unarmed. Of course, too, Trump encouraged the crowd at his speech to march “over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” And finally, the crowd at the Ellipse where Trump spoke did not reach the Capitol until at least an hour after the Capitol was breached.

In her defense, Harris might say Trump did tell his crowd to go to the Capitol. If not with guns, some were armed with flag poles and the like, and a few probably did mix it up with the police. Together, however, these half-truths amount to a conscious misrepresentation of Trump’s role on January 6.

In a similar pattern, the half-truths Harris shared with Jane Pauley, on the January 17, 2021, edition of CBS Sunday Morning, amount to a conscious deception about her whereabouts on January 6.

After showing a series of riot images, Pauley asked Harris, “January 6 was something seismic. Something seismic happened that day. May I ask, was the TV on? Did someone say, 'Madam Vice President-Elect, you gotta see this, come.’ How did that unfold?"

Responded Harris cautiously, "I was at the Capitol that morning, and then I was in a meeting, and I was told that I should leave. And then I was taken to a secure location, with my husband.” Yes, Harris was at the Capitol that morning. Yes, she was in a meeting. Yes, she was taken to a secure location.

Together, however, these carefully crafted half-truths amount to a lie. Here, Harris left the impression that she had to leave the Capitol because of the riot. In fact, she was at the DNC and had to leave that location at about 1:15 p.m. because of the pipe bomb found outside the building ten minutes earlier. The Capitol would not be evacuated for another hour.

This deception had consequences. As I detailed in an earlier piece in American Thinker, for nearly a year prosecutors were telling J6 judges and juries that Harris “remained within the Capitol building” throughout the riot. As a Secret Service protectee, any site Harris visited was considered “restricted.” The scores of defendants who violated this restricted space had their charges amplified.

The question remains: why did Harris deceive not only the public but also the courts about her presence at the DNC? For those who prefer video to print as an explanatory medium, Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert and I compressed the whole of “Kamalagate” into a three-minute video.

Whatever Harris’s role, the evidence continues to mount that there was a plot underway on January 6 to incite enough chaos to shut down the certification process. The launch hour seems to have been 1 p.m, the time when the certification process began at the Capitol.

In brief, Ray Epps and his crew breached the Capitol perimeter just before 1 p.m. A still unidentified man put the noose on a pre-constructed gallows at 1 p.m. The still unidentified “scaffold commander” mounted the media scaffolding and began barking orders to the protestors shortly after 1 p.m. And, most relevant for Harris, pipe bombs planted by an unidentified bomber were found near the DNC shortly before and shortly after 1 p.m. respectively.

There has been an obviousness to the plot most evident in the failure of the FBI to identify key January 6 provocateurs and in their kid gloves handling of Ray Epps. Not only did Epps encourage the initial breach and a secondary breach, but he also provided hands-on help to those pushing a large metal Trump sign into a line of police officers. At 2:12, Epps texted his nephew boasting that he had “orchestrated” events at the Capitol. He wasn’t kidding.

Perversely, the more evidence that surfaced against Epps, the more the media embraced him. Not until September 23, 2023, did Epps plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge with no jail time and only then because his preferential treatment embarrassed the keepers of the narrative. As to the scaffold commander, the faux hangman, and a few other window breakers, they somehow baffled the facial recognition tools of the FBI.

Even more damning is the pipe bomb story. As intrepid reporter Julie Kelly pointed out in a detailed account last week, “Newly discovered video appears to justify the belief that the DNC ‘pipe bomb’ scare was part of an inside job perhaps orchestrated by law enforcement or others to initiate panic in Washington on January 6.”

At 12:51 p.m. the video shows a Metropolitan D.C. officer leave his vehicle in front of the DNC with bag in hand, walk towards the area where the bomb was found, and return with the bag moments later. For some inexplicable reason, the security camera never shows the bench where the bomb was found, nor, unfortunately, the officer’s action at that bench. The bomb would be “found” 15 minutes later by a Capitol Police officer.

Adding to the mystery around the pipe bomb is the convenient deletion of January 6 text messages from at least two dozen Secret Service officials and agents, including former director Kim Cheatle.

For all the circumstantial evidence, any indictment of Harris calls for a theory of the case. Here’s mine. I do not believe Harris was an original participant in the plot. I believe she stumbled into it. Her silence, however, has made her complicit. By January 17, 2021, as politically useful as it would have been for her to recount her near assassination by way of a terrorist bomb, she had learned to keep her mouth shut.

As she surely knows by now, the bomb plot bears no scrutiny. The FBI continues to insist the RNC and DNC bombs were viable and planted the night before, but the presence of the Secret Service at the DNC for several hours on the morning of January 6 makes that contention hard to believe. Agents swept the exterior of the building more than once.

I do not believe the conspirators expected Harris to be at the DNC. The recently released video evidence suggests a last-minute adjustment to the plot so awkward and obvious no one wanted to be held responsible for it. No one wanted it even mentioned. Harris got the word.

In a real campaign, a real media would be hounding Harris with questions. But the Harris campaign is about as authentic as the pipe bombs. Although they won’t get an answer, Republicans are going to have to ask the questions, starting with, “So, Kamala, what did you know and when did you know it?”

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

Image: Gage Skidmore