Hello and welcome to another edition of the Byron New York show, The No-Chit-Chap Podcast.

Brought to you today by ExpressVPN, we'll talk about that later, but first I want to get

right into it.

What I want to talk about today is the capital riot and the capital riot investigation.

I don't know if you saw much of this Senate hearing into what the capital authorities knew about the threat of violence prior to January 6th was not hugely enlightening.

You did have a number of officials, capital police and others blaming the FBI for not giving it a prominent enough warning that there could be trouble.

A bit of finger pointing going on. If you were looking for some very basic questions about what the rioters did, whether they had firearms, if so, how many.

What was the cause of death for officers, Cycnic, that sort of stuff you were not going to hear it there.

So not really a surprise, a number of the committee members were reasonably concerned with how to make security better for the future.

But in terms of actually finding out some of the things that went on at the riot, especially since capital police have been so secretive about it, we just didn't really find much out.

But what I want to talk about was actually a little different from that.

I've been thinking about a very, very basic question about the riot, which is what were the rioters thinking.

I mean, it is really the most basic question of the whole investigation. What was the plan?

What did the rioters think was going to happen when they storm the capital, January 6th, as Congress certified the results of the Electoral College?

What did they think was going to happen? There's not a single answer to that. There are multiple answers to that.

Some rioters were physically violent. Others walked into the capital after its doors had been forced open by other people.

Others stayed outside, and there were still others who attended President Trump's rally, then President Trump's rally, on the ellipse, and they never went to the capital at all.

So people had different motives. They had different actions. They had different thoughts. So you can't just give one answer to the question.

What I decided to do was look at some of the papers, the documents, the court documents, in the cases of the rioters who are alleged to have committed serious criminal acts, the ones who are being charged by the Justice Department.

Now that's one, obviously, a subset of the much larger group of people involved in January 6th.

But there's a lot of court papers in these cases, and specifically there's a new indictment against nine people who are said to have been members or associates of the militia called the Oathkeepers.

It's a very revealing document.

...