The US Department of Justice has charged over 1,200 people with federal crimes related to the January 6, 2021 riot. In order to convict those individuals, the DOJ has relied heavily on 14,000 hours of surveillance video as well as cell phone data, some of which somebody leaked to the New York Times.

“The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day,” wrote Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson in 2021 in the New York Times. “It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones…While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance.”

Whoever had given the data to the New York Times had broken the law, whereas what the FBI had available to it was far more data, given that it could obtain warrants for the data, as part of its investigation. Indeed, the Times’ authors emphasized how much available data was available to them.

“While the power and scope of this commercial surveillance come into sharp focus when we look at the specific time of the attack on the Capitol, it’s important to remember that it is recording the movements of millions of Americans all day, all night, all year, wherever they are,” they wrote.

And yet, amazingly, there is no cell data to track the person who committed the worst crime, by far, on January 6, which, according to the FBI, was the attempted assassination of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and the attempted bombing of the Republican National Committee.

Then, last year, the person who was in charge of the FBI investigation, the head of the Washington Field Office, admitted to Rep. Thomas Massie that the Vice President’s life was never at risk…