Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Nick Searcy, veteran actor of the show Justified and producer of the new documentary, Capitol Punishment, to the newsmaker line to discuss the perspective of the film and previously unseen footage of Ashli Babbitt, the crowd, and FBI operatives.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line right now, actor and producer Nick Searcy is here to talk with us about his new movie Capitol Punishment. Welcome, Nick. Thanks for joining us.
Searcy: Oh, thanks for having me. Hi, guys.
Leahy: We’re delighted to have you here. Here’s a description of your movie: “Told through the eyes of the people who were there on the ground, Capitol Punishment shows the world the true story of January 6, 2021. Everything that we’re being told is a lie, and Americans are being persecuted to support that lie. January 6 was years in the making, and the threat to the survival of America as we know it has never been greater.”
That’s pretty much a punch in the mouth to the legacy media. Tell me what more we’ll learn in your documentary.
Searcy: I think the most shocking thing in the documentary is that we talked to many people who have had their houses raided by the FBI. And the way these people are being treated, people who never went inside the building, people who did nothing violent on that day, their doors are being broken down at 6:00 a.m.
Their families are being dragged out into the street. In one instance, a 13-year-old daughter of a man was handcuffed. And they’re just treating these people like serial killers and drug dealers, instead of, if they wanted to talk to these people, they should just call them on the phone.
These are law-abiding citizens that have never broken the law before. And the reason they’re doing this, of course, is to send a message. It’s a message of intimidation. And don’t ever speak out against the government ever again, or this will happen to you.
Leahy: So that’s what’s happening after the event. Does your documentary focus on the activities of the FBI and intimidating people after the event or do you cover the event itself?
Searcy: We cover both. Another thing that the media lied about is that every time you see it on television, you only see the small sliver of people that were doing vandalism and wrong things. There were 2 million people there.
There’s a shot at the beginning of the movie that’s just breathtaking of how many people were actually there. And the media never shows you that. They never show you the people that were waving flags and singing hymns and doing nothing violent whatsoever.
They focus only on the people that were doing violent things. And they also don’t tell you the truth about who a lot of those people were. A lot of those people were not crazed Trump supporters trying to break into the building.
A lot of them were either FBI operatives or Antifa, BLM activists who were dressed up as Trump supporters. We have footage of them in the bushes changing clothes. So the truth is not being told by the media. And that’s why we felt like we had to make this film.
Leahy: Do you at all address the illusory character Ray Epps, who has been characterized by some as an undercover FBI operative? He hasn’t really been questioned by the J6 committee. He’s an elusive character. Do you at all talk about the role Ray Epps may or may not have played?
I don’t know, the allegation would be he helped instigate the folks that went into the Capitol on J6 as an agent of the government. That would be the allegation. It’s been denied by Ray Epps and his people. Do you look at that at all?
Searcy: Yes, we have Ray Epps in the movie. We don’t go into a lot of depth about him because at the time we released this film last Thanksgiving – it’s been out for almost a year, so at the time, Ray Epps was someone that was suspicious. A lot more has come out about him in the past few months.
And a lot of our film focuses on the death of Ashli Babbitt. And there’s been a lot of things that have come out about that death since we finished the film that I wish was in there. But we do talk to Ashli Babbitt’s husband, Aaron, in the film and talk about why she was killed on that day.
Leahy: What do you show in the film, and what new information have you discovered subsequent to that?
Searcy: We released a short video a couple of weeks ago that we found: a different angle of the hallway footage of Ashli Babbitt before she was shot. And she was actually in that hallway talking to the police, telling them that they needed more reinforcements. And she was also trying to stop the vandalism.
She was trying to stop the people from breaking down the door. She was yelling at people. She actually had a physical altercation with one person, a man named Zachary Alam, who has subsequently been found to be an Antifa activist who was paid to be there.
And right before she was shot, she was trying to stop people from breaking the doors down. And they never tell you that. She’s been portrayed as some crazy right-wing, Trump-supporting nut. And nothing could be farther from the truth. She was actually trying to stop what was going on that day.
Leahy: And she was shot and killed by a D.C. police officer or Capitol police officer?
Searcy: Capital police officer named Michael Byrd. And there was no warning. She appeared at the window and he shot her. There was no attempt to restrain her in any other way. It was just an immediate shooting. And that’s not procedure. It should have been classified as murder and it was covered up.
Leahy: And is there any expectation that that will be revisited?
Searcy: I don’t think the present government as constituted will revisit it. There would have to be some sort of a shake-up in order for that to happen. They’re never going to admit it.
That’s the thing about the day. They have lied about this day from the beginning. And even when you confront them with the truth, they will never admit that they lied. So it’s going to be an uphill battle, that’s for sure.
Leahy: What’s the new information that you’ve discovered?
Searcy: More and more FBI whistleblowers are coming forward. Some of this stuff has not come out in the news yet. But there was a huge presence of government operatives in the crowd that day that were blending in.
They were instigating violence and orchestrating people walking into the Capitol building. One thing that has come out is on one side of the building, they were firing tear gas canisters into the middle of the crowd, driving them forward. If you were trying to push them away from the Capitol, you wouldn’t fire into the middle.
Leahy: You would have done the exact opposite.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “January 6” by TapTheForwardAssist. CC BY-SA 4.0.
