Lawyer: January 6 Clients Are Being Tortured "For the first time in U.S. history, the political party in power is hunting down and jailing members of the opposition party for political dissidence, and . . . torturing them in jail."

A lawyer for several of the January 6 political prisoners says his clients are being “tortured” by a system of “anarcho-tyranny” that considers them to be a “subhuman, sub-constitutional class of people.” In an interview this week, Joseph D. McBride said he is building a case to sue the federal government for millions of dollars over the abuses his clients have suffered.

The devout Catholic told the Blaze‘s Daniel Horowitz on his “Conservative Review” podcast Monday that he has witnessed the “deepest part of evil” while representing the political prisoners.

“They are gaslighting the entire American public,” McBride said. “They are calling these people extremists and terrorists, but the extremism and the terrorism lies with them!”

“January 6 did not happen in a vacuum,” he continued. “In the year or so that preceded January 6, you had all the BLM and Antifa riots all over the United States of America. We saw the burning down of cities, the attacking of police officers. Members of antifa out there in black bloc covered head to toe in full riot gear going at it with police, the looting of stores—you name it, we saw it.”

McBride posited that the left-wing agitators got a pass in 2020 because of new and expanded definitions of “civil disobedience, and political protest” which allowed government entities to view even violent riots “as grounded in the First Amendment, not criminality.”

In the wake of this, he explained, the pro-Trump protesters showed up in Washington, D.C. on January 6 with the impression there was this “new and modern definition of political protest.” Of course, most of the January 6 rioters came nowhere near the levels of violence the nation saw during the George Floyd riots, McBride was careful to point out.

Because of who they were, however, (that is, mainly white, middle-class, patriotic, pro-Trump Americans) they were targeted, persecuted, and not given the constitutional protections the much more violent and destructive left-wing rioters were routinely given, he argued.

“For the first time in U.S. history, the political party in power is hunting down and jailing members of the opposition party for political dissidence, and not only that, they’re torturing them in jail,” McBride said. “This is the stuff of dictatorships.”

He said he has two clients who are both currently being tortured in jail: Ryan Taylor Nichols of Longview, Texas, and Christopher Quaglin of New Jersey.

The attorney explained that both of these men are routinely thrown in solitary confinement for long periods of time, which violates international norms, and when their advocates on the outside speak out against the abuse, they get treated even worse.

“Legally, a pre-trial detainee in America is not allowed to be punished, never mind tortured,” he told Horowitz.

In the United States of America, we only punish convicted persons, meaning you had your day in court, and you either were convicted guilty, or you took a plea and you admitted guilt. Then and only then you can be punished and jailed. And even in those sets of circumstances, the punishment for your crime is the deprivation of your freedom.

The standard for a convicted person is no cruel and unusual punishment. The standard for a pre-trial detainee—because that person has not been convicted of any crime, and is still presumed innocent—is that no punishment of any kind is acceptable. Meaning, if you punish somebody, and they’re a pretrial detainee, you have violated their constitutional rights.

Quaglin is an electrician who was out of work in 2020 due to government policies surrounding COVID. “He has neither been in serious trouble before nor arrested prior to this incident,” friends and family of Christopher Quaglin said in a GiveSendGo plea for help. “He has always been an ardent supporter of the police and some months prior to his arrest led a local demonstration in support of the men and women in blue serving his...

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