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A federal judge has ruled on a January 6 defendant who is suspected of being a member of the Proud Boys organization after lawyers filed a motion to have him released from custody ahead of a trial.
Christopher Quaglin – a New Jersey electrician the Justice Department says is a member of the Proud Boys – filed a renewed motion for release after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave thousands of hours of surveillance video footage from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to Fox News host Tucker Carlson that was not released when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats controlled the lower chamber.
In recent days, Carlson has been airing portions of the footage on his primetime show. In the wake of the unseen footage, Quadlin and several other Jan. 6 defendants have attempted to file new motions in court that they believe could help their cases.
However, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden denied Quaglin’s motion for release from pretrial custody this week, ruling he found no violations of constitutional rights at the D.C. Jail that would warrant his release.
“Quaglin was one of nine men in a multi-defendant indictment field in 2021 stemming from an hours-long assault on police defending the U.S. Capitol Building’s Lower West Terrace Tunnel on Jan. 6, 2021. Quaglin faces felony charges of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon and inflicting bodily injury on officers for allegedly attacking police with a stolen riot shield and pepper spray,” local outlet WUSA9 reported.
“As Gross noted during Tuesday’s hearing, three Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability sent a letter to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser last week announcing their plan to investigate the D.C. Jail’s handling of Jan. 6 detainees. The letter included the claim that Jan. 6 detainees have received ‘disparate treatment,’ including lack of access to legal resources,” the outlet added.
In another case, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, rejected a request from Sara Carpenter to delay her trial over her role in the Capital riot.
The request for a delay was made in the context of first allowing the 44,000 hours of footage to be reviewed, but so far, federal courts are not buying into that legal argument.
Last week, as Carlson prepared to show the first clips, he made reference to those Americans still jailed years after they were arrested — and are still awaiting trial: “If there’s one takeaway from the corpus of footage that we spent three weeks looking at, it’s that the January 6th committee lied.
“Its members are liars, and as the result of those lies, core civil liberties in this country were eroded, people went to prison. They’re in prison as of right now, unjustly. So those lies had consequences,” he said.
“So you have to ask yourself, whatever happened to the members of the January 6th committee, these liars who hurt people and the country?” he added. “Well, let’s see, Adam Schiff is running for Senate. Adam Kinzinger got a job at CNN. Liz Cheney somehow wound up a professor at the University of Virginia, the august University of Virginia. They’re all still there. Benny Thompson. Ooh, listen to his wisdom. But they’re liars, and above all, this video proves it. Here’s another installment.
“One of the enduring mysteries of January 6th is the role that intelligence and law enforcement agencies played in the events of that day,” Tucker continued. “We know there was some number of undercover federal agents in the crowd at the Capitol. Officials have since admitted that under oath. But what exactly were they doing there? The January 6th committee worked hard to hide the answer to that question.”
Many other defendants facing charges related to the riot have expressed concerns about how the extensive footage will impact their cases.
In response to these concerns, Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who serves as the chairman of the House Administration Committee’s oversight subcommittee, has said that the footage released by Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s office will be made available to defendants on a case-by-case basis to ensure that they receive due process.
