Tim Hale Has a Question About Justin Stoll. I Have the Same One.

A man I know from the January 6 world just said something out loud that I have been saying for years.

Tim Hale is a January 6 defendant. He is not an anonymous account chasing clout. He lived this. So when he raises a question like this, I read it twice, and you should too.

Read it for yourself. He is talking about Justin Stoll. He says Stoll is "former" military and law enforcement, that he was a provocateur during the initial breaches of the Capitol perimeter, that he was only charged with "interstate threats," the same charge Troy Smocks got, and that he never did any time. He also says that when he asked about it, Stoll blocked him.

Let me be careful and clear about what this is and what it is not.

This is an allegation and a question. It is not a verdict. I am not telling you Justin Stoll is a federal agent. I am telling you that another January 6 defendant, a man who was inside the same machine I was, is publicly raising the same pattern I watched play out over and over, and that the pattern deserves an answer instead of a block button.

The pattern I learned the hard way

Here is what years in this fight taught me. The people who were at the very front of the breaches, the ones pushing hardest at the moments that mattered most, were not always who the crowd assumed they were. Some of them walked. Some of them caught charges that did not match what the government swore everyone else deserved life in prison for. Some of them faded out of the story like they were never there.

I am not speaking from the cheap seats. In my own case, under my own name, I have said that a man who called himself 1% Watchdog pushed weapons talk and Insurrection Act talk in the Zello channels before January 6, and I have raised hard questions about a media figure I trusted and whether he was working as a source. I asked those questions because I lived them, not because they were trending.

So when Tim Hale asks why a "former" military and law enforcement man who was at the front of the breach walked away with a charge like Troy Smocks and no prison time, I do not roll my eyes. I have stood in that exact spot, asking the exact same thing, and getting told to be quiet.

What would actually settle it

I am not going to convict Justin Stoll in a post, and neither should you. That is not the point. The point is that there is a clean way to answer this, and it is the same demand I make in every one of these cases.

Release the file.

If Justin Stoll was a defendant like the rest of us, the charging records, the discovery, and the docket will show it, and the question dies on its own. If there is more to the story, the same records will show that too. The reason these questions never go away is that the one institution that could end them is the one sitting on the paperwork.

Why I am posting this

I am posting this because Tim Hale should not have to ask it by himself, and because I am tired of watching the men who got crushed get told to stop talking while the men at the front of the line get to block anyone who asks them a simple question.

Ask the question. Demand the records. Let the documents talk.