Ryan J. Reilly “paints a vivid and urgent portrait of… disarray”
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ryanjreilly.com
Ryan J. Reilly “paints a vivid and urgent portrait of… disarray”
@ryanjreilly.com
160K followers 1.5K following 2.1K posts
@nbcnews.com Senior Justice reporter, ebike guy.

Read my stuff: http://ryanjreilly.com/

Order my book: https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/ryan-j-reilly/sedition-hunters/9781541701809/

Message me on Signal: @ryanjreilly.62

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ryanjreilly.com
FBI freezes out state investigators www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
January 8, 2026 at 5:43 PM
ryanjreilly.com
ICE doesn’t understand the constitution and “clearly can’t even drive in the snow that well,” says Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

“I’ve got two eyes, all of you do too, and you can see for yourself what happened was reckless.”

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
January 8, 2026 at 2:38 AM
ryanjreilly.com
A reminder of how the newly updated White House website describes the death of Ashli Babbitt:
January 8, 2026 at 2:06 AM
ryanjreilly.com
Five years ago, this great moment was captured on video:
January 7, 2026 at 5:17 AM
ryanjreilly.com
“To grapple with these truths would, in a very real way, unmake them.” —@semperwry.bsky.social

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
Recently, I told Hodges that I’d been interviewing Tom Webster about January 6. Hodges vaguely remembered the story about the former NYPD cop who’d assaulted one of his colleagues. When I told him that Webster still believed that the 2020 election may have been stolen, Hodges was not surprised. He doesn’t think people like Webster will stop lying to themselves anytime soon. “They can’t,” Hodges said; the cognitive dissonance and moral pain would be too great. Accepting reality would mean reevaluating everything they thought they knew—that their actions were ethical and justified, that they are great patriots. Accepting the truth of January 6 would require coming to grips with the fact that they supported a con man and participated in a violent plot to subvert democracy. The immediate reward for undertaking this kind of hard self-examination would mainly be shame and regret. “To grapple with these truths would, in a very real way, unmake them,” Hodges said.
January 6, 2026 at 10:27 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Jan. 6ers make their way to the Capitol on the fifth anniversary of the Capitol attack:
January 6, 2026 at 6:43 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Some news: Along with a Jan. 6 rioter, here are some of the other activists now embedded within the DOJ/FBI who are helping out with Ed Martin's J6 'weaponization' report. www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...
Along with Wise, other Trump Justice Department employees working on Jan. 6 matters include: Vance Day, who faced a series of ethical issues as an Oregon judge and was suspended from the bench; Jonathan Gross, a former Jan. 6 defense attorney who compared Capitol siege prosecutions to the Holocaust and helped spread conspiracy theories about the attack, including that it was instigated by the FBI; and Marshall Yates, the head of the FBI’s congressional affairs section, who was former Rep. Mo Brooks' chief of staff when Brooks, R-Ala., spoke at the Jan. 6 rally. Yates also worked for the Election Integrity Network, which is headed by a key figure in efforts to overturn the 2020, and he has said the “election objection did not go as we wanted” on Jan. 6.
January 6, 2026 at 2:56 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Snagged a copy of @frankthorp.bsky.social’s book! Get one while you still can. Frankthorp.com
January 6, 2026 at 12:45 AM
ryanjreilly.com
No sitting federal grand juries between “Will Be Wild” day and the eve of J6.
January 2, 2026 at 10:47 PM
ryanjreilly.com
We love you. You’re very special.
CBS EVENING NEWS WITH TONY DOKOUPIL 3. We respect you. We believe that our fellow Americans are smart and discerning. It's our job to present you with the fullest picture -and the strongest voices on all sides of an issue. We trust you to make up your own minds, and to make the decisions that are best for you, your families and your communities.
January 2, 2026 at 9:49 PM
ryanjreilly.com
They had to go Obama era just to find a crowd shot that wasn’t just a sea of phones. But if you zoom in you can see the Obama sign to the left of “with.”
January 2, 2026 at 9:41 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Jim Jordan was really scared on Jan. 6 after being in contact with the White House, Mark Meadows told Jack Smith’s team.

This comes out in testimony before Jordan’s own committee, which Jordan initially chose not to make public and then decided to release in the final hours of 2025.
December 31, 2025 at 10:42 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Top comment on the House Judiciary Committee GOP YouTube video of Jack Smith's testimony: "Some people still have balls in this country."
December 31, 2025 at 10:32 PM
ryanjreilly.com
“Would you be surprised if President Trump directs the DOJ to indict you?”

Jack Smith: “No.”
December 31, 2025 at 8:44 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Jack Smith on the reliability of his witnesses:

"when people are willing to pay those costs because they believe in something, because they're going to tell the truth, I think people get that."

judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...
December 31, 2025 at 7:37 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Important when reading the Jack Smith transcript to remember what powerful videos these would have been, had Jim Jordan followed precedent and done this publicly instead of hiding the ball and failing to commit to a public hearing.

judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...
There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate Federal law and use knowing -- knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function. That he was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past history.
December 31, 2025 at 7:18 PM
ryanjreilly.com
“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do.”

Five years ago today, in the lead up to Jan. 6:

www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ryan-...
Donoghue, the acting no. 2 at DOJ, was back in New York for Christmas and was at his home in Long Island when he got the call on his government cell phone on Dec. 27 about another conspiracy theorist who had reached a breaking point and was lashing out. Rosen was calling, and Trump was on the other line. "We've been on for about thirty minutes. He's talking about some of this election stuff," Rosen said. They joined a conference call. The country was up in arms over corruption, Trump bellowed. The president tossed around some nonsense he'd been told, like there were 205,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania. The president thought it was clear fraud. "We're like a Third World country," Trump said. "He had this stream of allegations, which were clearly being fed to him by a number of people, that he would keep referring our way," Donoghue said. The president referred to Ruby Freeman, a Black poll worker in Georgia receiv ing death threats because of misinformation, as a "huckster" and "election scammer" "You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Trump said. "Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressman," Trump told them. He wanted them to hold a press conference; Donoghue and Rosen shut that down. Trump kept at it. Dead people are voting, he said. "Indians are getting paid to vote," Trump said, which Donoghue interpreted as a reference to Native American reservations. Most of the stories Trump was telling Justice Department officials were just things that "people are telling him and/or he's seeing on TV or whatever," Rosen said. "There's not new information there," Rosen said. "News flash: President Trump doesn't, accept the election result" Donoghue told Trump flat out that the information he was getting was false and not supported by the evidence. The facts didn't matter.
December 27, 2025 at 8:48 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Merry Christmas, hope your dreams come 100 percent true!
December 25, 2025 at 11:22 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Truly think "it was the holidays!" deserves more credit than it gets as a partial explanation for how the federal government failured so badly pre-J6. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
The year 2020 wasn’t great for anyone, including FBI employees. Even in a good year, nobody in D.C. (journalists included) is firing on all cylinders during the weeks at the end of December. At the tail end of 2020, the event the intelligence analysts at the FBI were chiefly focused on after the holiday break was Inauguration Day, which, like other inaugurations, had been designated as a National Special Security Event and required coordination between numerous government entities.
December 23, 2025 at 3:43 PM
ryanjreilly.com
Happy “WILL BE WILD” Day to all who celebrate. www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ryan-...
A week after his Supreme Court loss, Trump welcomed guests to the White House for what was later described as the "craziest meeting of the Trump presidency." Sidney Powell was thére. So was the disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, by that time a publicly avowed adherent to the QAnon conspiracy theory. There was talk of smart thermostats being hooked up to the internet, communicating IP addresses all over the world, international interference Dominion voting machines, crazy shit. "What they were proposing, I thought was nuts," said Eric Herschmann, an attorney who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial in 2019 before joining the Trump White House as a senior adviser. "The theory was also completely nuts, right? It was a combination of the Italians and the Germans. I mean, it had different things that had been floating around as to who was involved. I remember Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, and she had an affidavit from somebody that says they wrote a software in, and something with the Philippines. Just all over the radar." Giuliani eventually arrived, and Herschmann let slip that Powell had been shit-talking him.
December 19, 2025 at 5:02 AM
ryanjreilly.com
Not for the first time, the signature block for Self-Proclaimed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan spelled it “Virgina.”
December 19, 2025 at 2:31 AM
ryanjreilly.com
When America is going great: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...
The daylong session on Wednesday began with a stone-faced Mr. Smith walking silently past a phalanx of reporters, and later past a bellowing protester who had to be restrained from following Mr. Smith and his lawyers into the bathroom during a break in the questioning.
December 18, 2025 at 4:50 PM
ryanjreilly.com
An unintentionally hilarious headline:
Nothing in Jack Smith's deposition made me change my belief that this was political: Rep Jim Jordan
December 18, 2025 at 3:21 PM
ryanjreilly.com
A very amusing thing is that they never gave him the title downgrade even though — by virtue of having a co-deputy — he is definitionally a co-deputy as well.
December 17, 2025 at 11:05 PM
ryanjreilly.com
“I didn’t choose those Members," Smith added, “President Trump did.”

www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...
December 17, 2025 at 5:56 PM