Now that House Speaker Mike Johnson has more or less released the complete tapes of the J6 footage to the public, we discover that the J6 protests really were -- to borrow the notorious phrase from CNN – “mostly peaceful,” to the surprise of no AT readers.  No surprise either why the J6 committee kept all but selectively edited footage under wraps all this time, which has Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, calling for an investigation of the J6 committee.

One piece of the footage shows a team of five early in the morning of J6 erecting a gallows in view of the National Mall at the foot of the Capitol building.  This gallows was highlighted in J6 committee proceedings and by the media as a symbol of the “insurrection.”  The FBI has managed to identify and arrest over a thousand J6 participants for what was essentially unintentional trespassing, but for some reason has so far failed to identify any of these five.

The leader of the team was wearing a trench coat and fedora hat and carrying what looks like a rather unique walking stick.  Recall the Riddle of the Sphinx:  “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?”  The answer is a human being, who crawls on all fours as an infant in the morning of life, walks on two legs in the noon of life, and two legs and a cane in the evening of life.  During gallows assembly the team leader (referred to as “Mr. Coffee”) walked to and entered the café directly across from FBI headquarters, then returned to the site of the gallows to admire the handiwork.  I’ll call him the three-legged man, à la the one-armed man in the movie The Fugitive.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-GA, has already asked the obvious: Why hasn’t the FBI identified these insurrectionists, and why was the blatantly offensive gallows, constructed early in the morning before the crowds came, allowed to remain up all day?  Ed Martin, an attorney for some J6 defendants, asks: Why didn’t the Capitol Police come running out to stop them during construction, especially in such a conspicuous and provocative location?

If the FBI was behind this, the Capitol Police would have been told to let the gallows stand, so more than just a few FBI agents and their superiors would know about the plot.  If the gallows was indeed a government-sponsored abetment of J6 and is exposed as such, even the MSM would have trouble keeping this huge dent in the narrative under wraps, because this is just not defensible in the same way as the supposed need for (an apparently ever-growing number of) undercover FBI informants and agents in the J6 crowd.  It could even be the impetus for bringing the whole J6 insurrection narrative down.

Perhaps the additional footage or more eyes looking at the existing footage will result in the distinctly-dressed three-legged man being identified.  Given Georgetown Law School is also near the café, he could be one of those eccentric tweed-wearing throwback professors, but this action seems a bit out of character (well, maybe not for Georgetown these days).  Maybe he’s one of those faux-eccentric spies or else disguised that way for the day.  If he is FBI, I hope whoever uncovers him is not charged with outing a federal agent.

W.A. Eliot is a pseudonym

Image: Tyler Merbler