The devout Catholic told the Blaze‘s Daniel Horowitz on his “Conservative Review” podcast Monday that he has witnessed the “deepest part of evil” while representing the political prisoners.
“They are gaslighting the entire American public,” McBride said. “They are calling these people extremists and terrorists, but the extremism and the terrorism lies with them!”
“January 6 did not happen in a
vacuum,” he continued. “In the year or so that preceded January 6, you
had all the BLM and Antifa riots all over the United States of America.
We saw the burning down of cities, the attacking of police officers.
Members of antifa out there in black bloc covered head to toe in full
riot gear going at it with police, the looting of stores—you name it, we
saw it.”
In the wake of this, he explained, the pro-Trump protesters showed up in Washington, D.C. on January 6 with the impression there was this “new and modern definition of political protest.” Of course, most of the January 6 rioters came nowhere near the levels of violence the nation saw during the George Floyd riots, McBride was careful to point out.
Because of who they were, however, (that is, mainly white, middle-class, patriotic, pro-Trump Americans) they were targeted, persecuted, and not given the constitutional protections the much more violent and destructive left-wing rioters were routinely given, he argued.
“For the first time in U.S. history, the political party in power is hunting down and jailing members of the opposition party for political dissidence, and not only that, they’re torturing them in jail,” McBride said. “This is the stuff of dictatorships.”
He said he has two clients who are both currently being tortured in jail: Ryan Taylor Nichols of Longview, Texas, and Christopher Quaglin of New Jersey.
The attorney explained that both of these men are routinely thrown in solitary confinement for long periods of time, which violates international norms, and when their advocates on the outside speak out against the abuse, they get treated even worse.
“Legally, a pre-trial detainee in America is not allowed to be punished, never mind tortured,” he told Horowitz.
In the United States of America, we only punish convicted persons, meaning you had your day in court, and you either were convicted guilty, or you took a plea and you admitted guilt. Then and only then you can be punished and jailed. And even in those sets of circumstances, the punishment for your crime is the deprivation of your freedom.
The standard for a convicted person is no cruel and unusual punishment. The standard for a pre-trial detainee—because that person has not been convicted of any crime, and is still presumed innocent—is that no punishment of any kind is acceptable. Meaning, if you punish somebody, and they’re a pretrial detainee, you have violated their constitutional rights.
Quaglin is an electrician who was out of work in 2020 due to government policies surrounding COVID. “He has neither been in serious trouble before nor arrested prior to this incident,” friends and family of Christopher Quaglin said in a GiveSendGo plea for help. “He has always been an ardent supporter of the police and some months prior to his arrest led a local demonstration in support of the men and women in blue serving his hometown.”
In dozens of letters to the federal court judge, friends and family have testified that Quaglin is not the violent Capitol insurrectionist federal authorities have portrayed him to be, but “an extraordinary neighbor who’d help you work on your home if needed.”
McBride told Horowitz that during the riot, he got into some “shoving matches” with police, picked up a shield at some point, and picked up a can of mace. Government prosecutors allege that he was part of the crowd that attacked Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, who was seen on video trapped between protesters and a set of doors to the building.
Horowitz quipped that if BLM and Antifa were prosecuted for merely pushing and shoving, new prisons would have to be constructed “to hold hundreds of thousands of people.”“If this were under normal circumstances, this would be done already. Taken care of a long time ago,” McBride agreed.
Quaglin, who is being held in one of the satellites of the DC Gulag, Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, has Celiac disease, a chronic digestive and immune disorder that damages the small intestine.
“This is a serious underlying condition,” McBride told Horowitz. “He’s highly allergic to wheat and gluten. When he eats it, he has a severe adverse reaction. It’s very bad, he loses weight, he vomits, he has diarrhea, he has intestinal cramps, he breaks out in lesions on his back. It is so bad that he would choose to not eat and starve over the pain of eating these foods,” the lawyer explained. “This is not a lifestyle choice.”McBride said Quaglin has lost 45 pounds because prison officials refuse to provide a diet that won’t make him sick.
McBride said Quaglin has been
transferred to six different facilities since his arrest in April of
2021, and his mistreatment grows worse with each transfer. The prisoner
has been at Northern Neck Regional Jail since December 20, 2021. [These corrections officers are monsters every bit as mecenary as any evil takmaster serving in the Nazi Reich - ED]
At one point, prison officials took him out of solitary confinement and put him in a block with COVID positive inmates, McBride told American Greatness, so naturally, Quaglin, who was already weak from food deprivation, got COVID.
The attorney noted that Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), and about 14 other members of Congress have all spoken out on his behalf.Ryan Taylor Nichols is a decorated military veteran who served his country honorably in the Marine Corps, and who has no prior contact with the criminal justice system.” After his military service, he was diagnosed with PTSD, which has been left untreated throughout his incarceration. Nichols is currently being held in the D.C. Gulag.
Only a few years ago Nichols was hailed as a hero because of his charity “Rescue the Universe,“ which rescues people and animals stranded during natural disasters.Nichols “went viral” in 2018 after he rescued puppies during Hurricane Michael. He was invited on to the “Ellen Degeneres Show,” where the host donated $25,000 to the Humane Society in his name. When DeGeneres found out that Nichols couldn’t afford to go on a honeymoon with his wife Bonnie, she gifted him with $10,000, which he used to buy a boat for more rescue operations.
Ryan Nichols chats with Ellen Degeneres.(Warner Bros.)
“This guy is the best of what America has to offer,” McBride told Horowitz. “He’s a small business owner, he’s a father to two beautiful young boys, a husband, a son—just a good man who loves his country.”
McBride said Nichols went to the protest on January 6 and ended up having to “defend himself and defend some other people during some really difficult acts of police brutality.”
Prosecutors say Nichols assaulted law enforcement officers during the riot and incited other people to violence. Last December, Judge Thomas F. Hogan denied Nichols’ request to be released pending trial because he allegedly called for “an actual war” after the riot. “It’s clear to me that there is an identifiable threat,” Hogan said.
Horowitz pointed out that while the COVID pandemic was used as a pretext for solitary confinement, it was also used as a pretext to let other, violent career criminals out of jail.
McBride said the jail stopped doing it after several lawyers made a fuss, but prison officials continue sporadically to put Nichols in solitary confinement anyway “to torture him.”
“On April 20, they put him in solitary
confinement for reasons that made no sense,” McBride told Horowitz.
“They left him there for about three weeks. After three weeks, he needed
to be put on suicide watch,” the lawyer continued, because “they had
broken him down—he wanted to check out and give up.”[Let this simmer in your mind for a while. Perhaps the DC Gulag is conducting psychological experiments on its unwilling participants.. the kind you would employ during wartime. - ED]
“The remedy for suicide watch was to put him in a plastic tie back suit, put him on a table in a room with lights that didn’t go off for three days, to make fun of him, and to say, ‘look, if you’re really gonna kill yourself, just get it over with because we all want to go to lunch,'” he said. “They have psychologically tortured him for a very long time.”
What makes these violations of basic
human rights particularly galling, is that liberals historically have
championed the rights of prisoners, yet, by and large, have ignored the
plight of the J6ers. [This is sadism at its worst. Never thought we would see it in America and for the court to be ignorant of it infers that they share the blame. Washington needs to be totally wiped clean this Novermber. - ED]