A number of news and opinion forums, including our own, picked up on this week's story by REVOLVER NEWS about the FBI’s role in the January 6 “insurrection” on Capitol Hill. We and a few others called for questions to be answered, but most in the mainstream media misreported the story in an effort to dismiss it.

(In case you didn’t see our first report, it’s in the June 16 Morning Edition, “Hard Questions Remain about January 6 and the FBI.”)

Some commentators were intrigued. Bestselling author and “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams, in his “Coffee With Scott Adams” podcast, saw Tucker Carlson’s segment with the reporter from REVOLVER NEWS on Tuesday and briefly summarized that. He called it “a weird coincidence” that a number of domestic terror attacks had involved FBI assets or informants. “The suggestion is,” he said, “maybe they were doing more than just watching ‘em, Maybe they’re participating a little bit too much. Maybe they’re even prodding people to do something that they wouldn’t necessarily have done, or maybe not done as soon.”

Adams addressed Carlson’s main point of contention; namely, that there were unindicted co-conspirators involved in the January 6 “insurrection” who, curiously, have not been indicted. One likely reason for this, of course, is that they are informants or have some previous relationship with law enforcement. Adams also mentioned what we’d reported about the over 10,000 hours of security video that is still being withheld from public view.

“Maybe one of the reasons is that we’d see something they don’t want us to see,” Adams said. I don’t know.”

He said he had a hard time believing that someone from the FBI could talk someone into doing an actual terror attack. At the same time, he’s amused by the characterization of this security breach as an “insurrection,” saying it might also be called “a demonstration of free speech that went a little too far.”

“Somewhere in between is probably the truth,” he said. And that seems right to me. It definitely was a demonstration of free speech, and it definitely went too far. But then this question arises: at the time the Trump supporters were organizing it –- with or without help from the FBI –- did they anticipate at all that it would go THAT far and be painted as an act of terror? Certainly they had no idea that an unarmed woman might end up dead. (We can’t say the same for the FBI, unfortunately, if indeed they were a driving force.)

“But I think you’d have to put that in the ‘speculation’ category,” Adams continued. Yes, and that’s exactly what REVOLVER did. Adams hasn’t bought into the FBI’s involvement at this point, but he acknowledged that “there are legitimate questions. And those questions do lean in that direction. There’s no doubt about that.” He allowed for the possibility of another explanation, and he noted that the “pattern” of bad FBI behavior might not be as consistent as it seems in the story. Just because we haven’t seen the answers, he said, doesn’t necessarily mean the hypothesis of FBI involvement is correct.

He said Tucker’s segment, and the REVOLVER story that inspired it, did a credible job of laying out the circumstantial evidence for this and is “good work.”

“Don’t get too far ahead of the fact,” Adams cautioned, “but this is a good frame [as in, a well-structured argument]. We should understand this. The fact that it looks so damning --- that’s all you need to look into it a little further. But I’m not quite on the conspiracy side of this yet.”

Tucker Carlson opened his Wednesday night show with a brief follow-up report on Tuesday’s “insurrection” story. He pointed out that no event in media history has ever been used to greater partisan political effect: “Because of January 6, our attorney general told us this week, we’ve got to change our country forever.” He commented that before REVOLVER NEWS published their report on Monday, “we had no idea that at least 20 organizers and participants in the events at the Capitol have not been indicted, despite the nationwide dragnet for people who were there.”

The government obviously knows who they are. Why aren’t they being charged with crimes? The suggestion made by REVOLVER, and supported by their detailed analysis of another act of domestic terrorism, the attempted kidnaping three months before of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, is that they had, in Tucker’s words, “some connection to the government.” It appears that they were in contact with the FBI beforehand.

We don’t have proof that the FBI spurred on the "insurrection," but, again, the circumstantial evidence is compelling, and we know the FBI is fully capable of creating a scandal themselves, with, gosh, nothing more than a flimsy, fictional Russian “dossier.” And as Tucker said on Tuesday, “It’s hard to think of a bigger potential scandal than this one.”

He noted that clips of his original report have circulated on social media --- “the Tech monopolies that helped get Joe Biden elected” --- which still work closely with the Biden administration to control the flow of information you’re allowed to see. “They tried to make me go away,” he said. In fact, Twitter actually inserted itself by pretending to be the arbiter of truth and “explaining” what was “wrong” with his report: “Federal law does not permit cooperating witnesses or informants to be charged with conspiracy,” Twitter lectured, “despite a baseless suggestion by Tucker Carlson that some co-conspirators of the January 5 attack on the U.S. Capitol were not charged because they were undercover FBI agents.”

“Baseless”? Well, Tucker pointed out that in trying to dismiss his report, they actually helped confirm it by suggesting that people who weren’t charged were cooperating witnesses or informants.

We’ll take Tucker’s refutation of Twitter even further: Cooperating witnesses who don’t get indicted are typically lower-level actors who are testifying to help the FBI bring down the “big fish.” In this case, from what we can tell, the unindicted co-conspirators ARE the “big fish,” while the little fish are the ones being aggressively prosecuted. In the Whitmer case, the REVOLVER report shows quite plainly that the people involved in the attempted kidnaping of Gov. Whitmer but who were not indicted were the ones in leadership roles. And that’s just not how “cooperation with the FBI” works within a normal investigation. It’s the little fish that get thrown back, not the big ones.

I know Twitter is just trying to help –- with the Democrats’ narrative, that is –- but they need to just stay out.

We scanned other media reports of the REVOLVER story and Tucker’s Tuesday night show and saw a pattern. They chose to inaccurately characterize this as an out-and-out accusation of the FBI and then go after that. Typical “straw man” argument. I’ll venture to speak for everyone who’s curious about the FBI’s role on January 6: All we want at this point is to be able to ask some questions, and, if we ask really, really nicely, maybe to see the security footage that’s still being withheld.