Journalist arrested, charged for Jan. 6 coverage

I don't know how many people have followed this guy's story or are even aware of it, but it's both fascinating and appalling.

Steve Baker now works for Glenn Beck's Blaze Media (they recently hired him in large part because of this saga), but on Jan. 6 he was an independent journalist covering events at the Capitol. He went inside and took pictures, filmed and chronicled the events. A lot of his footage has been used by other outlets and some of it was used by the J6 committee. He has shared his work with various congressional committees.
Over the past year, he has done a hell of a lot of good work diving into the CCTV footage. It's exposed some inconsistencies, curiosities, and possibly outright lies in the government's cases against Jan. 6 defendants. Things like people who testified they saw something in one part of the Capitol at a specific time, when they were in a completely different part of the building and couldn't possibly have seen it. Last week he reported on footage of the pipe bomb found near the DNC headquarters, and showed how the camera that was focused on that spot for weeks mysteriously shifted away right as that event was unfolding. All of this video was reviewed in Washington, with governmental approval. Several prominent Republican House members, including Speaker Mike Johnson, have worked with him on this.
Baker has been the driving force behind getting a lot of Jan. 6 footage released to the public. He's spoken at length on this process in several long podcasts and radio interview segments. I've heard several of them and he never once comes across as anything more than calm and rational. By all accounts he is not a loon.

Now the twist, and the reason for all of this.
In late 2021 or early 2022, Baker was notified that he was being investigated for committing crimes as part of the Jan. 6 riots. Eventually he was informed he would be arrested, but the DOJ postponed it several times. Finally, this week, he was informed that he would be asked to surrender himself for arrest. That happened this morning and he has been arraigned in Dallas. He'll have to appear in court in Washington in a couple of weeks.
What exactly was he arrested for?
No one really knows. They did not tell him the charges until today. One of the judges said they didn't want to reveal the charges "because he would tweet it."
After the arraignment, it is now known that it is four misdemeanor charges — entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a capitol building; and the ever-popular parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.
There is no evidence he did anything more than document the events of the day, the same as a number of other journalists who entered the Capitol during the riot.

Several of his supporters in the House have rallied to release the CCTV footage of his actions that day. The video tracks him as he moved around the Capitol. None of the footage shows him doing anything more than taking notes, photos and video.

So, the tl;dr version — you have the federal government making a showy display of charging a journalist who covered and investigated the Jan. 6 events, with misdemeanors three years after the fact and after delaying the arrest several times, when there is no evidence that he did anything more than dozens of other journalists did that day. Those others have not been charged.

Whatever your political leanings, this ought to be frightening that the government is obviously targeting a journalist who is doing the leg work, asking questions and poking the bear when things don't add up. Sure seems like the tactics of somebody trying to send a message.

 

Here are a couple of pieces Baker wrote in October detailing his legal saga. After these were published, the FBI twice told him his arrest would be happening soon but didn't act on it until now.
Among the first things he was threatened with was a racketeering charge for selling his work and property damage for standing on a bench in the Capitol to get a better camera angle.

Commentary: My January 6 legal saga | Blaze Media

Commentary: My January 6 legal saga, continued — but not concluded | Blaze Media

 

Was Steve Baker accredited to cover Congress on Jan. 6, 2021? If so, that would be a point in favor in his defense. If not, a point in favor of the prosecution.

 

Folks here know I'll always stick up for the rights of journalists to do their work in safety. Always.

That said, he's not the only January 6 journalist to have been arrested: https://pen.org/press-clip/6-journalists-arrested-washington-dc/

And journalists - even in this country - are arrested pretty routinely, then kicked loose by authorities. Even I have been kettled a time or two. It doesn't mean there's some sinister conspiracy at work. Part of the job.

But it's nice to see folks paying attention to what happened to the press that day. Three years on, little justice for press assaulted on Jan. 6

 

Have you been brought up on federal misdemeanor charges three years after the fact, though? I'm guessing your run-ins had to do with getting too close to a crime scene or something more immediate, not part of a long and dubious FBI investigation.
Stuff like that is unfortunate, overly aggressive even, but can often be somewhat rationally explained. Baker's case seems pretty egregious. Especially given his work over the past 18 months reviewing and reporting on the inconsistencies with the Capitol CCTV footage.

 

My default is always for freedom of the press. I'd certainly like to know a bit more than his side of the story.

If he wasn't working for an organization or credentialed, that makes it a bit murky. Half the jackasses in there were filming everything they did.

I know nothing about him, or how legit he is. Is he in the line of James O'Keefe, who is an activist and not a journalist?

 

I believe he was there to cover the events outside the Capitol and then simply followed the news where it took him, like a good journalist should. So no, he probably was not accredited.
One of the points he's tried to make is that only some journalists — almost all of them from conservative media outlets — have been charged, while those from more mainstream outlets have not. He's noted that someone from the New York Times went into the Capitol through a broken window and was one of the first people into the building, and that person has not been charged. Other journalists from places like NBC and CBS had footage similar to his and have not been charged. Something like 60 reporters were inside the Capitol at one time or another that day.
He's said that if those other reporters were charged it would still be egregious, but at least it would be fair and rational. The way it is, it seems he a few others are being singled out.

 

Lots of these January 6 prosecutions are taking a long time. I'd chalk it up to that, rather than some conspiratorial effort on the part of government to muzzle him. 4 misdemeanor charges are hardly a ticket to the gulag.

By his own admission, he's been loudly public about all this for several years. If the Feds are trying to shut him up, they've already failed.

There's also the problem of how many protestors that day also claimed to be journalists. Some Jan. 6 defendants try to use journalism as riot defense

 

Did he have the proper credentials to cover the events outside the Capitol?

We need to have a discussion about who is a journalist. Not everyone can say, "I'm a journalist" after the fact and expect to have the privileges of a journalist if you are not working for a legitimate organization.

 

If this guy wasn't credentialed, I'm curious why he was there. Was he there as a journalist or as a participant?
As to the angst that "60 media were in the Capitol that day," I'm guessing there were far more than that. Why? Perhaps because they were entitled to be there and because they had entered the building before the murder and mayhem began.

 

I guess another point to be made is, if you're spending three years to investigate and charge four misdemeanor charges is it really worth it? Especially when you've had a suspect who has been pretty cooperative? In this case it's not so much the charges that raise eyebrows, it's the process that it took to get there and that being the punishment as much as any actual penalties he might face.
The fact we've seen several other large protests inside the Capitol rotunda since then, to causes the Biden administration is presumably more sympathetic to, come and go without the same treatment also raises questions.

As for his status, near as I can tell he was either freelancing that day or writing for his own website. Here's a story he posted a week afterward:

Shared post - What I Saw on January 6th in Washington, DC

Having listened to several of his interviews on the subject, he has never come across as anything other than objective and rational. Here's an interview he did this week with one of the Blaze Media shows that gives an abbreviated version of the story. He's done full hours on a few radio shows over the past year and a half so it's hard to condense the whole thing down into a soundbite or two.

 

The other large protests at the Capitol were not an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power, caused deaths and an attempt to steal an election and disenfranchise 80 million voters.