Steve Baker, a current opinion contributor for Blaze News and an investigative journalist, said he is being treated as a “terrorist” by the weaponized Department of Justice (DOJ) for covering the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, as an independent journalist.
Baker has been charged with four misdemeanors for being present at the Capitol on January 6.
Earlier this month, on March 1 – over three years after the Capitol riot – Baker self-surrendered to an FBI field office in Texas, where he was processed, handcuffed, and then transported to the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas.
Baker (pictured above) said he was then handed over to the U.S. Marshals, who proceeded to put him in a belly chain, box cuffs, and leg shackles before placing him in a cell with a meth dealer and then marching him in front of a magistrate judge.
Baker said how he has been treated – especially since his charges are misdemeanors – is a “clear abuse of power.”
“I’ve been following the January 6 cases for three years, and I’ve known that they have done this to many of the misdemeanor defendants,” Baker added on Tuesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Despite only being charged as of this month, Baker said the criminal process against him has been engaged since 2021.
“We knew that the process was engaged all the way back in mid 2021. I received my first call from the FBI in July of 2021,” Baker said.
Baker said after participating in a sit-down interview with the FBI in October 2021, his attorneys were notified on November 17, 2021, by an attorney assigned to his case that he would be charged with interstate racketeering, among other charges.
Those charges have since been dropped after Baker went on a “press offensive” against them.
“What ended up happening is then on Monday of Thanksgiving week, my attorney and I released a press release; sent it out to about 200 news organizations. I went on a press offensive against this persecution threat that I’d received from the DOJ and we were able to successfully fight it back,” Baker said.
“Now, I have to conjecture because I don’t know what was happening at the round table at the Department of Justice in D.C., but for some reason, they took my file and put it under a pile somewhere because we did not hear from them again for 20 months. They went away. So I woke up every single morning at 6 a.m. for 20 months without an alarm clock, thinking that today’s my day. Today’s the day. Today’s the day that I’m going to see the red dots through my bedroom window,” Baker added.
The next time Baker and his attorneys heard from the DOJ was in August 2023, when Baker received a grand jury subpoena for his videos taken from the Capitol on January 6.
Four months later, in December of 2023, Baker received an order to self-surrender in Raleigh the week before Christmas on unidentified charges.
Baker said he went on another press offensive in order to fight the order, which worked in his favor.
“Now I’m working for the Blaze, so my bullhorn is quite a bit larger and louder. Blaze went into high gear, other media, and within 24 hours, we got another message from the FBI, got a phone call my attorney did, and said that they were going to put that off now until sometime after Christmas,” Baker said.
Two months later, in February, Baker was told to self-resend to the FBI in Dallas as soon as possible, which he did on March 1.
Baker said he and other January 6 defendants have been branded as “terrorists” by the Department of Justice.
“Let your audience know how differently the Department of Justice is handling January 6 defendants as compared to similar type cases in other riots, other events, other crimes nationwide. We basically now have a new legal doctrine, standard, whatever, that I’m a terrorist. I’m a misdemeanor nonviolent terrorist,” Baker said.
“Evil is what it is. It is absolute darkness coming out of the very bowels of Washington, D.C.,” Baker added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Steve Baker” by Steve Baker.
