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J6 reporter not mentally or emotionally prepared for how FBI treated him during arrest

March 7, 2024 | | Print Article

Steve Baker, the Blaze Media reporter recently arrested by the Biden administration for covering the Jan. 6th riot, described this week his immediate response to being taken into custody.

Appearing on his boss Glenn Beck’s radio program, he said he was neither mentally nor emotionally prepared for it.

Listen:

“I thought I was mentally and emotionally prepared for this because I’ve followed too many of these cases to not have been,” he said. “I’ve seen too many of these guys, even misdemeanor defendants, even misdemeanor independent journalists, marched before a magistrate in leg chains and the orange jumpsuit, so I thought I was ready for it until they put the leg chains on.”

“And I’ve never even been fingerprinted in my life. And to actually, in the moment it’s happening, it was overwhelming. And then on top of being chained at your waist and your legs, then they put you in a cage with a meth dealer. And of course … the process of putting a non-violent misdemeanor defendant who has been utterly and totally cooperative since the very first phone call from the FBI over 2-1/2 years ago,” he added.

“It could have been just an order to appear. I could have walked in with [attorney James] Lee [Bright], both of us with our jackets and ties on. We could have sat in the gallery. They call us up. We stand before. Just as they did for a felony defendant that day, but I’m guarded by U.S. marshals with leg chains on,” he continued.

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Beck responded to Baker’s extraordinary tale by noting that he can’t recall any violent Black Lives Matter rioters being held in chains.

Baker concurred.

“In fact, most of those were just catch and release, if they bothered to catch at all. In fact, most of them had their cases dismissed, and then many of them have been awarded cash payments from the government because they were ‘unfairly’ arrested or prosecuted, because obviously, we had to understand their frustrations and what made them burn a building down,” he said.

Baker was, as previously reported, arrested late last week over his J6 reporting:

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The charges included knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a capitol building, and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building.

Baker has claimed he did nothing wrong and was in the Capitol as a journalist only, but the government has argued that he essentially took part in and rejoiced over the Jan. 6th riot.

For example, his affidavit said that he was happy about seeing then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office being vandalized.

“They got Pelosi’s office and, you know, it couldn’t happen to a better deserving b–ch,” he allegedly said.

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However, Baker has pushed back on this by arguing that he didn’t mean what he said in a partisan way — that he’d have been just as excited if a Republican’s office had been vandalized.

“In response to @FBI special agent Craig Noyes’s questioning of me about that, he asked why I said that. I responded, ‘Because it wasn’t McConnell’s office.’ If it had been, I’d have said, ‘It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bastard.’ What part of the fact that I’m a libertarian do you not understand? I hate both sides,” he explained in a tweet posted Tuesday.

Vivek Saxena
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