A growing number of people charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol are requesting trial delays so they can review newly disclosed footage.
Shane Jenkins became one of the latest defendants when he filed a motion through an attorney to delay the trial due to the disclosure of some 41,000 hours of security footage from Jan. 6.
“Mr. Jenkins requests that his trial currently set to begin on March 21, 2023, be moved so defense counsel can review the additional discovery,” Dennis Boyle, the attorney, wrote in the motion.
Republicans, having taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives in January, have disclosed the footage to Fox News and have said they were granting access to any defendants who want to view the video.
The tranche includes some 25,000 hours of footage that Jenkins has not been able to review, according to the new filing.
“The request for additional time is necessary in order to adequately and diligently review all discovery pertaining to Mr. Jenkins and to determine whether any video contains relevant and material information that would pertain to Mr. Jenkins’ defense. Video evidence depicting Mr. Jenkins would constitute both exculpatory and material evidence, which would require disclosure from the government,” Boyle said. “Due to the large amount of video being released, and because Mr. Jenkins is currently incarcerated, we request additional time to review the information and prepare for trial.”
Government prosecutors oppose the request.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, the Obama appointee overseeing the case, has not yet ruled on the motion.
Jenkins has been charged with physical violence in the Capitol grounds or building and disorderly conduct, among other charges.
William Pope, another defendant, told the court in a separate filing that he lacks access to “more than 99 percent of discovery” even though more than two years have elapsed since he was arrested.
Prosecutors have opposed making much of the footage available because the Legislative Branch was the original owner of the evidence, Pope said. “However, now that the Legislative Branch has given defendants their blessing to have due process access to legislative files, the government’s already weak argument to deny due process has collapsed. This court should immediately grant me full access to discovery,” he said.
If the government continues to deny Pope access to discovery necessary for his defense, the case should be dismissed, Pope argued. He has been charged with civil disorder and other charges.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, another Obama appointee, is overseeing the Pope case. During a status hearing after the filing was lodged, Contreras delayed a trial in order to give the government time to respond to a different motion, which asks the judge to unseal footage from three undercover officers on Jan. 6.
Ryan Nichols, a third defendant, recently asked the court to delay his trial until his attorneys, and crowdsourced helpers, review the newly disclosed footage.
“Defendant’s position is simple and straightforward: there is no justifiable reason why this newly available evidence had not been made available before today—thus, any possible prejudice to the prosecution from a continuance is dwarfed by Defendant’s constitutional right to defend himself,” Nichols said through his lawyers. He’s been charged with physical violence, obstruction, and other charges.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee overseeing the case, has not yet ruled on the matter.
Request Denied
Another defendant, Sara Carpenter, saw her request to delay her trial in light of the recent developments denied.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the Obama appointee overseeing the case, rejected the motion during a March 3 hearing.
Carpenter’s lawyers had argued that the surveillance disclosed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) “is far in excess of what was previously disclosed by the government and known to exist” and that, while the government had disclosed some footage, “there remain temporal gaps in the footage thus far provided between the moments Ms. Carpenter is shown entering and exiting the Capitol.”
The government asserted that trial extensions should not be granted “on the unsupported allegation that pertinent information may exist somewhere, but is not currently known to either the prosecution or the defense.”
Boasberg said Carpenter failed to show that the previously undisclosed footage would prove exculpatory, Politico reported. He said that allowing a delay for defendants could “derail dozens of trials that are set in the next few months.”
Carpenter has been indicted on three counts, including knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority.
‘Not Gotten My Evidence’
Rachel Powell, another Jan. 6 defendant, who is facing more than half a dozen charges, said that she has not received evidence crucial to her case.
McCarthy had told reporters that defendants had access to footage before.
“I am a J6 defendant and have not gotten my evidence even though it has been over two years,” Powell told The Epoch Times via email. “So when McCarthy says January 6 defendants have had access to the evidence he is wrong and possibly lying.”
She was preparing a motion to delay her trial.
William Shipley, a lawyer representing multiple defendants, said on Twitter that attorneys have access to thousands of hours of footage but that the Department of Justice (DOJ) database did not include footage Congress did not give to the agency.
“If Congress … held back video then DOJ would not have it to put in the database,” he said. “It is not possible to say definitively right now that defense attorneys did — in fact — have all the videos that Tucker/Fox is showing. McCarthy says he gave Fox everything. That might include videos not given to DOJ.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.