By Debra Heine
Lawyer: January 6 Clients Are Being Tortured
"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 . . . torturing them in jail."
A lawyer for several of the January 6 political prisoners says his clients are being “tortured” by a system of “anarcho-tyranny” that considers them to be a “subhuman, sub-constitutional class of people.” In an interview this week, Joseph D. McBride said he is building a case to sue the federal government for millions of dollars over the abuses his clients have suffered.
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.”
McBride posited that the left-wing
agitators got a pass in 2020 because of new and expanded definitions of
“civil disobedience, and political protest” which allowed government
entities to view even
violent riots “as grounded in the First Amendment, not criminality.”
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]
“Right now, he is locked away in a
cell with no windows—no way to reach out to the world simply because his
lawyer and his family are speaking out on his behalf. This is a life or
death situation,” he said.
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.
“He has been in custody since January
18, 2021,” McBride said. He spent most of the first nine months or so in
solitary confinement “until we started screaming about it,” he added.
McBride said they were using COVID-19 as “a pretext to lock people in
solitary confinement.”
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 reaction to this, according to
McBride, was more abuse and ridicule, with prison guards appearing to
take sadistic glee in Nichols’ pain.
“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]
Read more
