The Gateway Pundit has obtained hours of footage filed as evidence in federal court during J6 defendant Kenneth Joseph Thomas’ trial that was presented to jurors in a case heralded by defense attorneys as “the best J6 verdict so far.”
Thomas was charged with 12 felony offenses, including Civil disorder, Obstruction of an Official proceeding, Assaulting, Resisting, or Impeding Certain Officers, Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds, Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds, Engaging in Physical Violence on Capitol Grounds, Disorderly Conduct in a Capitol Building, and committing an Act of Physical Violence in the Capitol Grounds or Building for his role during the Capitol riot. If found guilty, Thomas could have been sentenced 30 years in prison.
The U.S. Department of Justice claimed Thomas was captured on Metropolitan Police Department body-worn camera punching and striking officers with his fist and forearm. Law enforcement officers claimed Thomas “was one of the first to come in and start hitting [and] pushing officers on the line.”
On June 1, a DC jury exonerated Thomas of all violent offenses.
He was found not guilty of obstruction, not guilty of Assault, Not guilty of physical violence on restricted grounds, not guilty of disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and not guilty of committing physical violence on Capitol Grounds.
Defense attorney John Pierce, the founder of the National Constitutional Law Union who represents Thomas and over 30 other J6 for defendants, vows to “knock out” the other charges on appeal.
(1/2) JUST WON BEST JANUARY 6TH VERDICT SO FAR!!!! Congratulations Kenneth Joseph Thomas @J6Sing4Freedom!!! Count 2 (1512 Obstruction) — NOT GUILTY; Count 5 (Assault) — MISTRIAL; Count 10 (Physical Violence on Restricted Grounds) — NOT GUILTY…
— John Pierce (@CaliKidJMP) June 1, 2023
(2/2) Count 11 (Disorderly Conduct on Capitol Grounds) — Mistrial; Count 12 (Physical Violence on Capitol Grounds) — NOT GUILTY!!! We will knock the rest out on appeal. Great job Team JPL and @NCLU_ORG!!! 🇺🇸👊✅https://t.co/xjaZG1Egxn
— John M. Pierce (@CaliKidJMP) June 1, 2023
Footage recorded on multiple cameras unearthed during Thomas’ discovery confirms the war veteran was trying to de-escalate violence on January 6 and tried to fend off cops to stop them from violently beating elderly unarmed demonstrators to the ground.
Thomas described using his body to shield others from getting beat in the head with batons and sprayed in the face with lethal chemical agents as police escalated the protest into a terror attack on Upper West Terrace on Capitol grounds, in an exclusive interview with The Gateway Pundit.
“On the upper west terrace, I saw a lot of pushback between the crowd and the police. I tried to create a gap between the police and the protesters,” he explained. ” I saw a police officer on the ground and an elderly man on the ground. A police officer rushed that elderly man as he was laying on the ground and started hitting him in the head with a nightstick as well. That’s when I stepped in between them and put my forearm against the cops’ shields and started screaming, ‘Let him up! Let him up!”Let him up! Let him up!”
“The old man was able to get up and out of the area and pushed the gap between the protesters and the police — I was pushing protesters away and trying to create a gap between the two,” he continued. “I screamed, ‘Hold the line!’ which means stop advancing, stop clashing. We need to keep the space, to keep the peace, to try to de-escalate, which didn’t help, honestly. They just kept going at it.
“At one point, I watched a protester knock a police officer down and then the protesters jumped back and fell into me. I admonished [the protester], ‘We are not here for that! What are you doing?’ Then I got hit with a nightstick. I started yelling at the cops, ‘Why are you swinging at me? I didn’t do anything?’
Thomas’ account of the events is corroborated in footage that was presented to the jury.
After Prince George’s County Officer Ainsworth was knocked down by a protestor wearing a blue shirt, Ainsworth attacked a man lying on the ground.
“I stepped in and used my forearm to push Ainsworth back while saying “Let him up!” This is my alleged assault on Ainsworth that led to a mistrial, dismissal. I claimed self-defense and defense of others,” Thomas continued.”After a couple of minutes, I turned my back to the police as I was told the crowd, “Hold the line” to stop them from advancing toward the police line. A protester locks arms with me and the police began pushing from behind, causing a scuffle. They hit and pushed us away.
Thomas recalled when a man shielded him from getting shot in the back by police as he walked away. The man who tried to protect Thomas was identified in discovery as J6 defendant Jeremy Brown.
“They were using rubber bullets. They were also shooting pepper balls. I saw people getting hit with rubber bullets. I also saw a gentleman get hit in the side with a bean bag. I think I got shot with a bean bag later on in the day. As I was walking away, I had my back to the police line. It was actually Jeremy Brown who stepped between me and the police as they were hitting me,” Thomas said. “I just held my head as I was trying to walk away, but I can’t see because I was blinded by pepper spray. When I looked back at my video, after learning who Jeremy Brown was, I was like that’s Jeremy Brown, he stepped between the police and myself and stopped me from getting hit.”
Thomas attended the Stop the Steal protest on January 6 with his wife and then-16-year-old daughter.
“When we got there the rally itself was great. It was peaceful and everybody was happy and cheering and very charitable and loving. It didn’t matter what side of the aisle you were on, what walk of life you came from. We all stood there in a giant sea of red, white and blue as Americans all under the same banner of freedom. It was beautiful,” he explained.
But then everything took a mysterious turn.
First, Thomas and his family were warned by other protesters about an individual who was at large intent on stabbing Trump supporters. Then he found a bag of knives.
“At the rally itself by the White House ellipse, some people and myself found some knives that were stashed and heard somebody was trying to stab Trump supporters. We took those knives and turned them over to Secret Service,” Thomas explained. “We also found a rogue backpack hanging at like eight feet in a tree. And, you know, ‘see something say something,’ so we took that and turned that in as well, which actually ended up being nothing. We kind of had the idea that we needed to keep our heads on a swivel because there’s a history of Trump supporters being attacked at rallies and different events.
“When the rally was over a lot of people started heading to the Capitol. I hung out a little bit before I went.”
Suddenly, the scent of tear gas, a fragrance distinct to Thomas only from Navy combat training and war, fumigated the air.
“As we approached the Capitol, I started to smell tear gas which I recognized from my time in the military. That’s when I looked at my wife and told her to get my daughter out of there because something is not right and I was going to go forward and assist if I could,” Thomas said. “I have some medical training in the past and I’m a Red Cross instructor for CPR and First Aid.
“And so, I went towards the danger, as the military taught me to. As I approached, I saw a mass of people. There were a lot of people directing the crowd with bullhorns and — things seemed a little odd. I eventually made it up to the Upper West Terrace. When I got up there, I started seeing police attacking unarmed Americans.
“It was my understanding that I was allowed to be there because it was a First Amendment demonstration, there were no ‘Restricted Area’ signs — I didn’t see anything telling us that we couldn’t be there. No police made any announcements that we were not allowed to be there or that it was illegal to be there.”
Witnessing police use deadly force against women, children and the elderly ignited primal fight or flight instincts to protect among Thomas and other bystanders who are now in jail for attempting to thwart the unjustified deadly attacks from cops.
“When I got up there, the first thing that I saw was one of the Metro Police officers launch a tear gas canister into that confined space, right next to an elderly woman and a small child, that I could only assume was her granddaughter.” Thomas recollected. “At that point I became inflamed.
“I started yelling at [the police], like, ‘You are going to tear gas our own Americans? Does that make you feel good? Is that what you do to people?’I started yelling, ‘No violence! That’s not why we’re here.’ I started screaming at them to honor their oath because it’s unconstitutional for them to be interrupting a First Amendment demonstration, especially with violence against non-violent protesters. We had some minor verbal exchanges.”
Police are seen in another clip pushing protesters off a concrete planter head first.
“I attempt to catch one of them but got sprayed with [Oleoresin capsicum] spray. Other protesters caught him instead. I saw two or three people getting beat with nightsticks, and thrown down the stairs — that was completely uncalled for. They were talking to police, and next thing you know they’re getting thrown down the steps.”
“A few agitators in the tried crowd tried to persuade people to use pipes against MPDC. I start yelling, ‘No! Put that sh!t back. No violence!” Another agitator then argued with me, calling for violence.
A man is seen in the footage using a power saw to cut the zip ties to remove a tarp.
When Thomas returned home, he had no idea “January 6ers” would become public enemy number one or that Americans who tried to stop the violence that day would find themselves on the FBI Most Wanted list.
In fact, he contacted the FBI to report on the malfeasance.
“I actually posted all of my videos online and tagged the FBI in my videos saying, ‘Please use these videos to find the people that were causing the problems,’ because I truly believe the agitators that I saw were infiltrated in the crowd by other organizations — NGOs, possibly undercover police or FBI agents or other three letter agencies,” he said.
Not only did members of Antifa admittedly conspire against Trump supporters on January 6, but federal agencies embedded hundreds of Confidential Human Sources, government spies, in pro-freedom groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on January 6 and weeks and months leading up to the protests. Government plants like Ray Epps cajoled the herd of protesters to go inside the Capitol building.
There were also foreign influencers arbitrating the agitation, Thomas discovered when probed by the FBI.
“I suspected there was probably foreign influence, which I found out is true. There were Ukrainian intelligence officials involved in the crowd,” he said.”The FBI has questioned January 6 defendants about their time there and wanted to know if they knew a particular person. The reason they were asking is that they knew that the particular person was a Ukrainian spy. So, Ukranian spies were among the Antifa agitators, confidential human sources, and government plants.
“It’s dizzying how multi-faceted the set-up truly was. Unfortunately, some of the people there fell for the trap and got mixed in with some of the activities on their own because emotions became heightened and they started listening to what the other people in the crowd were doing.”
***Please donate to Joseph Thomas’ defense HERE. ***
Asked how many people he saw police brutally assault on January 6, Thomas exclaimed, “Oh I can’t even keep count.”
“I can think of three [people] that I watched them hit with their nightstick multiple times in the head, a couple of them as they were on the ground,” he said. “I, myself, got hit a few times. I was shot with rubber bullets, pepper spray,” he said. “I actually feared for the lives of protesters as well as the police. I didn’t fear for my life because I’m arrogant and still have the military mentality that I’m Superman. But I do understand that there’s a possibility that I could get hurt. But I wasn’t doing anything that I saw as a severe potential for me getting harmed. I was there to be a peacekeeper.”
Thomas said he is surprised more people were not killed from the strikes to the head with batons, rubber bullets and flash grenades when “some people in positions of power” wanted a “bloodbath”:
I am sorry to know that there were four people that lost their lives, Kevin Greason, Benjamin Phillips, Roseanne Boyland and Ashli Babbitt. But, I am thankful that God protected those that were there, both police and protesters to make sure there wasn’t more because I believe that some people in higher positions of power, and this is just my opinion, but some people in higher positions of power, they wanted a blood bath.
People’s emotions ran high. The police might not have attended to want to kill people, but I think that they could have unintentionally because they were striking people in the head with metal batons and using crowd munitions at close range.” Some people in the crowd were talking others into trying to rush the police lines. The police, at the same time, threw crowd suppression ordinances into the back of the crowd, which would force people forward. Then when people would go forward, the police line would start swinging indiscriminately with batons — typically, striking people in the head, which by definition is the use of lethal force. So, that makes people more enflamed, plus, they are constantly getting sprayed with pepper spray and other chemical agents. It was a combination of both sides.
I saw a Metro Police officer, by the name of Capinelli, point a 40-milliliter gas cannon at somebody’s face on numerous occasions in extremely close range, and if that gas cannon comes out of there at those speeds, it could kill somebody.
We heard Nancy Pelosi put out orders for lethal force to be used if anybody tried to enter the Senate chambers. That’s extremely wrong, in my opinion, because you don’t use that type of force against unarmed civilians, citizens
I showed up at the Capitol between 3 and 3:30. I left roughly around nine, ten o’clock at night. After leaving the Capitol grounds itself I was actually trying to help somebody find their vehicle. I walked around the streets of DC for a couple of extra hours to try to help him find his vehicle because he couldn’t remember where he parked. We actually ended up having to call him an ambulance. He was an elderly man and he was — he was having a lot of issues, respiratory problems, because of all the tear gas and OC spray that was sprayed that day.
I did have a bruise and a goose egg. It did hurt quite a bit. My adrenaline was pumping pretty significanlty that day. There were points where I knew I got hit and I felt it but I didn’t feel any pain at the time. The next day, though, I felt like I got hit by a truck, out of of every thing from the whole day combined, it hurt.
Thomas accredits his attorneys for winning a considerably “miraculous” verdict in the hyper-partisan District of Columbia, where 92 percent of potential jurors voted for Joe Biden, support Antifa and Black Lives Matter and attended the vehemently anti-Trump Women’s March.
Like other judges presiding over J6 cases, U.S. District Court Judge Dabney L. Friedrich initially demonstrated she had her mind made up about the defendant deemed a domestic terrorist by the DOJ and was incessantly partial to the government.
But the tables turned as Pierce and Roots dismantled the prosecution’s J6 narrative, Thomas said:
“I have to actually give credit to my judge, Ms. Dabney Friedrich. Even though the first couple of days of the trial were rather hostile — she was threatening to throw [my lawyers] in jail, she was taking away my First Amendment right, she basically, I feel had made up her mind already. But once we started moving in with the trial, her entire tone changed. She became a lot more friendly to my defense team, and started to be a lot more fair and balanced to the point where she would admonish the prosecution on numerous occasions.
This is the best verdict I could have gotten in DC, where everybody works for the government or knows somebody that works in the government, everybody lives close to the Capitol, and everybody feels like a victim One of the potential jurors said that he would convict me just because I was white.
There was another that said, ‘All Trump supporters, at best, are disgusting and at worse are fascists and racists.’ There are a lot of people that said they could not be impartial because of their close proximity to the Capitol. In each and every one of those instances, my legal team stepped in and they were like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can’t have them on here because they obviously show bias.’ We ended up going through an entire day’s worth of jurors, they ran out of potential jury members. And had to go into a second day of jury selection just to be able to fill the jury box with the required 14 for the 12 jurors and the 2 alternates.
In one instance, Pierce and Roots discovered a government prosecutor who currently litigates J6 cases was in the pool of potential jurors and may have been selected to sit on the jury had they not intervened.
They tried to sneak in all kinds of craziness. They even tried to sneak a January 6 prosecutor into the jury pool,” Thomas said.” My legal team at the defense table pulled up this person’s profile and they were like, ‘Wait. This person is a January 6 prosecutor — he is an AUSA prosecutor for January 6 cases. He would have been cleared to sit on the jury if they didn’t catch him. The judge struck the individual once my attorneys brought it to her attention.
“One great win we had is that one of the members of the jury was a chapter president of the Federalist Society and a conservative appeals attorney. And so, I knew that we had a lot greater chance of having at least one member of the jury see the facts for what they were and not be biased — that was a miracle!“And then the verdict, in itself is miraculous.”
Unlike the irrational Covid restrictions that judges allowed to prevail during Proud Boys and Oath Keepers’ trials, neither jurors nor prosecutors wore masks in the courtroom during Thomas’s trial. But at one point Judge Fredrich rebuked a government prosecutor for attempting to influence the jury.
“I had two prosecutors and two FBI case agents attached to my case. She admonished one of the prosecutors, Samantha Miller, because she kept making faces at the jury. Anytime we would do anything or say anything she would role her eyes or squinch her face together to try to influence the jury. The judge admonished her about it a couple of times. On the third time, she was like, ‘That’s it. You need to move to the other side of the table.’ Ms Miller, the prosecutor was like, ‘You’re right, I’m sorry, your honor.’ She told her, ‘You’re not going to have any more chances,'” Thomas said.
After year of legal representation by a public defender that Thomas suspected was “trying to sabotage his case,” Condemned USA President Trennis Evans helped Thomas obtain private legal counsel from Pierce, the founder of the National Constitutional Law Union.
Pierce has represented the most J6 defendants in the country and previously provided counsel for high-profile defendants including Rudy Giuliani, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos during the Russia probe, Kyle Rittenhouse and former congressional candidate Laura Loomer in her lawsuits against big tech. His other attorney, Roger Roots represents several J6ers including Proud Boy member Dominic Pezzola who was acquitted of seditious conspiracy charges.
“Pierce told me ‘I would be more than happy to take your case and help you out.’ I did some research on who he was. I was very honored to have him take my cases. He was in the midst of a couple of other trials at the time. After Chris Alberts’ trial finished they called me up and said, ‘We are going to hit the ground running and start building your defense as much as possible.’
Despite the judge and the government shutting down every motion we tried to put forward, we went into DC and gave ’em hell. It was a remarkable thing to see some of the stuff they had done in court. They really didn’t enter much evidence on my behalf, they just used all of the government’s evidence against them. They would put up videos and body cam footage and we would point out whatever they’re claiming is patently false.
Pierce and Roots litigated Thomas; cases out of their own pocket.
“I still owe them $100,000. That pays them up through the trial. That does not include what I am going to end up owing them for the appeals process. I’ve been raising money through Givesendgo to try to pay for that,” Thomas said. Pierce is handling over 30 January 6 defendants’ cases and doing it all out of his own pocket because many of the January 6 defendants and their families are all broke. But we are doing everything that we possibly can to try to raise money to not only take care of our families and ourselves because we are completely ostracized from society.
My wife and I can’t get jobs. And I have three months to wait until I’m sentenced. And then also, to be able to pay the legal fees. John and his team are doing it at the bare minimum cost. I can’t thank them enough for that.”
U.S. District Court Judge Dabney L. Friedrich scheduled a sentencing hearing for Thomas on September 6, 2023.
***Please donate to Joseph Thomas’ defense HERE. ***
