A secret Jan. 6 case against a Mastriano ally | Will Bunch Newsletter

Tens of thousands of Americans clogged the streets of Midtown Manhattan on Sunday to march for an end to fossil fuels, ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change. They protested in the “right way” that talk-radio callers demand of them, peacefully and without civil disobedience. Their reward: Very little publicity. You just can’t win.

📮 Record response to last week’s question about mask mandates in the face of a COVID-19 resurgence, and there was a common theme in a lot of the answers: That masks are surely a good idea, but government mandates are an invitation to political backlash, maybe disaster. “Flaunting mask mandates made heroes out of jerks,” wrote Kristina Austlid. “Let’s not give them that opportunity again.” Michael Vario agreed that masking should be strongly recommended, but not required, adding, “We just have too many crazies with guns now.” How sad that public health policy can be ruled by political intimidation.

This week’s question: After controversy over Donald Trump’s appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, should the media keep doing interviews with a candidate who lies so frequently? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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This July, in the bucolic Lancaster County town of Ephrata, the family of 39-year-old Samuel Lazar was ecstatic. They just learned that — after spending almost exactly two years locked up for his role in the violent Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol — he was walking out of the federal prison at New Jersey’s Fort Dix on his way to the relative freedom of a halfway house.

Older brother Adorian Lazar said he was texted by his sister that morning in July to be at a McDonald’s in Philadelphia at 7 a.m. to talk with him. The sister, Rebeca Lazar, posted photos of Lazar leaving the lockup, wearing a white T-shirt and proudly waving an American flag.

“What an emotional/amazing day it was!” Lazar’s sister wrote on Facebook. “I finally got to pick up my little brother. The smile on his face ... the gratitude in his heart melted all of our suffering away over these last 2 years. My brother is overwhelmed and overjoyed.”

It’s not surprising that a man who was captured on camera and by video at the Capitol during the assault — dressed in tactical gear and covered in dark face paint, seen spraying a chemical agent on police officers and later boasting about it on social media — would spend just under 24 months in federal custody for his well-documented crimes.

Here’s what is extremely unusual, however.

There is no public record of any hearing where at which Lazar was convicted of a federal crime, or sentenced. Reporters for news organizations like Lancaster Online, which reported his release this summer, or the Associated Press, which this weekend published its own investigation, were told by federal authorities that any records pertaining to Lazar’s case are under seal, and appeals to have those files opened up were rebuffed.

The federal Bureau of Prisons did confirm to the AP that Lazar was released from its custody, and the basics that he’d been convicted on a charge of assaulting or resisting a police officer and had been sentenced in March to 30 months — at a hearing in Washington, D.C. that was not made public and for which there is no transcript.

Randall Eliason, a George Washington University law professor who worked in the Justice Department for 12 years, told the AP that he cannot recall a federal case ever handled in this fashion, adding that “either there’s some kind of security concern about him personally, or maybe more likely that he’s cooperating in some respect that they don’t want the people he’s cooperating against to know about.”

The confirmation of a secret case against Lazar — who emerged from the hothouse of right-wing political extremism in east-central Pennsylvania to become a key figure on Jan. 6 and a source of intense speculation from the online sleuths who dubbed him the “#facepaintblowhard” — is both troubling and intriguing at the same time.

Troubling because the U.S. justice system must be as open and transparent to the American people as possible, and it strains credulity that the government would keep the case against Lazar secret for so long, especially after his release. Yes, holding the Jan. 6 insurrectionists to account is vital for saving democracy, but you’re not saving democracy when its participants are tried in a star chamber.

Intriguing because of the people that Samuel Lazar knew. In the time prior to his July 2021 arrest — even in the weeks after the violence of Jan. 6 — Lazar was often seen at Republican Party events and right-wing political rallies, sometimes with the man who would become the GOP’s 2022 gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

In May 2021, a smiling Mastriano was photographed with his arm around Lazar at a political fundraiser at which the featured speaker was Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Two years later, Giuliani is facing felony charges in Georgia for his own role in trying to overturn his client’s 2020 election defeat, the same project that Lazar promoted by more violent means.

The select U.S. House committee that investigated Jan. 6 described Mastriano as a key figure in Trump’s election denial efforts, noting that he hosted Giuliani in his senate district for a public hearing on non-existent election fraud before chartering buses to send protesters on Jan. 6 to D.C., where Mastriano himself was photographed on the Capitol grounds. Mastriano has said he didn’t cross police lines, has denied any other wrongdoing, and had said Lazar is just a guy he posed for a picture with. After not answering any questions, Mastriano left a virtual hearing with the House committee after 20 minutes, with his lawyer arguing the panel lacked jurisdiction.

There’s no sign that Mastriano is currently being criminally investigated, and the idea that Lazar has been secretly cooperating with investigators is just speculation, for now. Yet given Lazar’s tentacles that reached both into the Republican Party and an extremist underworld in the center of the Keystone State, some Pennsylvanians must surely be nervous. The unraveling of the Jan. 6 conspiracy has shown again and again that nothing remains secret forever.

Question: American here in the UK. How do I defend Biden here? Everyone goes directly at his age, his speech and do not have one idea of the good he has done and how he is trying to saving us. How do I explain Trump and his evil to the Brits? — Via Sad Sue (@SadSue59) on X/Twitter

Answer: Great question, Sue. Many of this week’s submissions were variations on the same theme: panic over President Joe Biden’s chances of winning next fall. I would tell your U.K. friends that sure, we all get nervous whenever the 80-year-old Biden steps to the podium — but at the end of the day he is leader of a government, a party, and a movement that is far bigger than just him. And this Biden-led movement is the only thing preventing a so-called political party that no longer believes in democracy from taking over the United States. Biden’s party believes climate change is real; the other does not. Biden’s party believes in voting; the other party suppresses votes. Were Biden to retire or, heaven forbid, expire before the end of a second term, Kamala Harris would step in and continue to defend democracy. The alternative options are unthinkable.

On The Inquirer homepage Sunday morning, the paper was promoting its “Area Woman Makes Good” feature story about veteran journalist and Philly native Kristen Welker, who was minutes away from her historic debut as the first woman of color to host NBC News’ flagship Meet the Press. But in the vicious online world, Welker’s honeymoon was over before it ever started. “#BoycottMeetThePress” was a top trending topic on X/Twitter, thanks to the advance clips that had leaked from Welker’s lengthy interview with Donald Trump. The controversial choice for her debut was sure to generate ratings, and controversy — and a debate over how and when, if ever, to interview a modern fascist.

The interview did make some actual news, with Trump — all over the map on abortion his entire life — criticizing his fellow Republicans on the topic and also admitting the push to overturn the 2020 election “was my decision.” And Welker — much like CNN’s Kaitlan Collins who moderated a Trump town hall earlier this year — tried at times to push back, but it was like trying to place your hand over a massive firehose of lies and political raw sewage. NBC’s tepid fact checks of Trump, in a few short on-air segments and a more detailed online article, were both too little and too late. The written fact check traced 11 areas where POTUS 45 was dishonest, including absurd lies that the price of bacon has risen five-fold or that the 2020 election was “rigged.” Those lies were halfway around the world before NBC’s fact check put on its pants.

The former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, now a top podcaster, said NBC News may have violated its own internal guidelines that no employee should air known falsehoods without “extensive disclaimers, fact checking, and caveats.” But Trump probably wouldn’t have agreed to the splashy Welker interview without a ban on real-time fact-checking. My personal belief is that tyrants should be interviewed, but only with absolutely zero preconditions, and with relentlessly tough questioning that might not be Welker’s best skill set. Her colleague, Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC and Peacock, raised in the adversarial British tradition, would have asked the right questions. At this point I’d vote for either a Hasan interview of Trump — or none at all. If the media truly cares about saving democracy, it won’t platform fascism.

On this date 11 years ago, the political world was talking about Mitt Romney’s infamous “47%” gaffe, which seemed likely to clinch the reelection of Barack Obama (which it did). So I began to lament all the things that neither Republican nor Democrat were talking about in the 2012 election, including the growing crisis of mass incarceration. In a typically short Attytood blog post, I quoted the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnick, who called “mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history … perhaps the fundamental fact [of American society], as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” Read the rest: “What Romney didn’t say in Boca (or anywhere, or Obama, too, for that matter).”