It was happening. Curtis, the guard, was leading me from my cell to the common room, where there was a T.V. I was going to witness Ianna’s press conference in L.A., announcing she was taking my case and talking about the plight of other incarcerated victims from January 6 at the Capitol.
I sat down, worrying if the other inmates knew that their socializing in the common room had been cut short so I could watch my lawyer. A man could get beaten for that. It was hard to even think of Ianna as my lawyer. She is…my life.
> Read the previous Chronicles at the bottom of this post.
Curtis sat a few respectful feet away, and I pulled up a chair close to the T.V. and found the channel. All the networks refused to cover it, and she was on an alternative freedom network on Roku. We were a few minutes early. Ads were playing.
A few weeks ago, I was utterly alone and abandoned with an unknown fate in jail—one more soul with an interminable incarceration since January 6 — with no hope of a fair trial or even release in the foreseeable future. I reminded myself that now I have an incredible lawyer who wants to marry me and who is raising our infant son.
The press conference could be tough. The government had spun such a web of lies about its being an insurrection. I saw some rowdy behavior, but I also saw police attacking peaceful groups, including the one that Ianna and I were in. I didn’t even see damage to the interior of the building, and the only verified death was that of the young Air Force veteran, Ashli Babbitt, unarmed, who was climbing up to see through a window from the corridor into the House chambers. Not having access to newspapers or any uncensored materials, I did not even know her name until Ianna’s “visitation,” and since she is my lawyer, we’ve been able to be in touch almost every day, and her mail gets through to me.
My head is so much clearer now. It’s as if someone lifted the Elon-12 right out of my head like it never existed. You can see my memory of January 6 is gradually coming back to me, although some of it I’ve learned from Ianna.
I feel in present time — and that’s a miracle.
Ianna keeps sending me photographs of our son, now eight months old. She is right; he does look like me. It remains incomprehensible that this woman loves me and that we had a child together, all from those four days together before January 6, 2021.
The ads end, and the news cameras come alive on the scene of the press conference. It’s outdoors on the steps of the gleaming white, mountainous Federal Courthouse of Los Angeles. A sweep of the camera shows incredibly cloudless deep blue skies beyond the towering building. It’s as if I’m seeing this kind of glorious day for the first time in my life.
The camera scans the considerable crowd, more than I expected for a press conference. Maybe hundreds of people. The press are cordoned off in front of the steps that Ianna is standing on, and they are jostling for position.
Ianna is alone, which surprises me. Where are the attorneys who work for her firm?
I find myself wishing there was a barrier between her and the press corps. Or even better, I wish with all my heart I were at her side.
The camera comes up close to her. Auburn hair to match her family name, McCormick. Flashing, fierce eyes that I know are glinting green in the sunlight. Chiseled nose. No broad smile today. She is dressed for business, standing so straight on the stairs, unwavering in high heels. No notes in her hands.
I already know what she is planning to say about the history of January 6, but it’s amazing to see her demeanor and to hear the authority in her voice. She is intimidating, and the press corps stands silently, listening and jotting notes.
Ianna tells the press and the crowd about the numbers of people incarcerated since January 6 who still could not be counted or accounted for. She speaks of the destruction of due process by the federal government so that people, youths, and older ones alike, are being held, now going on toward the second year, with no official charges yet put before the court. Nearly all, like me, her client, have no criminal history and had no criminal intent in the Capitol. Some, again like me, were invited into the building by the Capitol police as if we were welcome visitors and even escorted up a set of stairs further into the building. She has videos from Capitol surveillance cameras — found without explanation online — to prove it.
As for the unruly ones at the demonstration, there were FBI provocateurs in the crowds, and Antifa agitators looking nothing like Trump supporters were breaking windows. It was a setup, she declares, and the government lawyers and federal judges are behaving as badly as in any third-world dictatorship.
“I am not going to talk much about my new client, Dr. Jake Larkin, today, except to say he is an honorable physician, a single parent of two children, a doctor who came to D.C. to protest against the government’s interference in the doctor-patient relationship and in overall medical care during COVID, especially the suppression of safe, effective, and highly therapeutic treatments for SARS-CoV-2. Today, I am here mainly to encourage more of a national dialogue and an inquiry into what is being done to all the January 6 victims of the regime’s lawlessness. Even those who are allowed to stay home know no future and cannot get an adequate defense.”
She finishes, declaring, “I’ll take questions from the press now, but I also want to thank all of you who have come out today for this event.”
Ianna is magnificent, both lawyerly and sympathetic.
I wait for the usual burst of activity from reporters wanting to be first with their questions, but there is an eerie silence.
Without identifying herself, a woman in the press section asks, “Did Mr. Larkin have a lawyer already before you took over?”
Ianna replies, “Doctor Larkin. He had a public defender. Many of those P.D.s are acting as if they are supposed to be defending the public, like prosecutors, instead of defending the defendant. Jake… Dr. Larkin… hardly ever saw his lawyer, and his lawyer seemed more concerned with the needs of the prosecution or maybe even flat out intimidated by them. I’ll give just two examples. Dr. Larkin’s public defender refused to use the videos in his defense, showing that three policemen invited his group into the Capitol building and led them up a flight of stairs on their way further into the building. His lawyer also failed to petition for habeas corpus even though Dr. Larkin is being held indefinitely for no lawful reason. But today, I want to reemphasize that this is happening to a very large number of victims since January 6. Our best estimate is that there are more than 700 citizens still locked up without due process or constitutional protections — and that the purpose of it is to threaten all of us and to stifle freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in America. You’ll notice that it seems to be working and that there have been few if any large demonstrations for freedom since then.”
“Are you planning to take any action against his public defender?” the woman follows up.
Ianna shakes her head, “No, I’m here about the victims and not the Public Defenders who are relatively powerless compared to the larger, widespread injustice led by the administration — the people at the top.”
A reporter calls out, announcing he is from the L.A. Times, “Is it true you went into the Capitol with Mr. Larkin on January 6?”
“I won’t get into that now,” Ianna replies.
She is calm, but this press conference is turning into a kangaroo court against Ianna.
The reporter follows up, “I understand there’s a video of the two of you going in together….”
“Invited by the police,” she finishes for him, “like we were a holiday tour group, but all of that will come out with our submission to the court.”
“I understand you are pregnant by him,” another man says loudly, pointedly adding, “I’m from the New York Times.”
I turn to Curtis to share my distress at this awful turn of events, but the guard is gone. I’m never supposed to be left alone in an open space like this, but Curtis is nowhere to be seen. It’s like I’m also going through something preplanned. Do they want me to try to escape so they can bring real charges against me or even gun me down?
“Of course, I’m not pregnant,” Ianna says with a flourish at her flat stomach, “but we have a son together, and I will not answer another question about that. I am here on behalf of all the victims of prosecutorial and judicial abuse following January 6.”
From the middle of the crowd, a man snarls aloud, “I can’t wait to see the movie, Sex on the Prison Floor.”
That’s met with considerable laughter and applause.
From way back in the crowd, a female voice cries out, “God bless you and your baby. God bless America!”
A moment of silence and then scattered applause and a small chorus of “amen.”
Ianna manages a smile and a restrained wave to acknowledge the thoughtfulness. She is keeping her dignity and poise — and I don’t know how — and I’m distressed for what must be going on inside her. They are trying to strip her of her identity. And all she can do is stand there like a lion amid jackals, refusing to let herself be taken down.
The New York Times reporter gets his voice above the crowd again. “Are you alone up there on the steps by choice without your staff?”
Ianna now looks angry for the first time. I don’t at first know why, but this is getting really bad.
Ianna says with deliberation and a touch of menace in her tone, “I am discovering how afraid everyone is about speaking out freely in America, especially about the so-called insurrection. Professionals in medicine, in the law, in the media—everywhere — they are all afraid to speak out against the government. Never in my career have I seen anything like the current environment of government censorship and abuse. They even set up a Ministry of Truth until the ridicule and outrage shut it down, and I’m sure it’s not the last we ever hear about it. ”
The New York Times reporter holds up a paper, “Did you know that this morning your entire staff of seven lawyers has quit you and your firm over your public comments and actions surrounding the insurrection — indeed, your actual participation in the insurrection -— and this morning sent a letter-to-the-editor with their signatures for publication in the New York Times?”
Ianna simply glares back. I think she is hiding the shock she feels, betrayed behind her back by all her attorneys.
“Did you know?” the New York Times reporter tries to show how he has trapped her.
I am witnessing the press conference from hell — and it’s about the woman I love, and me, and even our infant son.
Ianna says, “This press conference — this organized public lynching is over. Consider what it means when two of the nation’s best-known newspapers, The LA Times and The New York Times, and a bunch of collaborators, organize with each other, and with the lawyers employed in her private firm, to take down an attorney and her client who are standing up for the most basic constitutional rights of hundreds of politically incarcerated citizens.”
Ianna is strong again, even defiant. She glares at the press corps as if daring them to continue haranguing her. But she shouldn’t have to face this all by herself.
Curtis is still gone, and I could try to escape. But even if I could get out of the common room and get down the hall or even down a staircase, there is nowhere to go — no way out of this place. I cannot do anything to be with her, to protect her, to comfort her.
“One other thing,” an unidentified female reporter shouts out, and the mob grows silent. “Ms. McCormick, I’ve been officially informed that your Jake Larkin is being released from prison, right now, so maybe you’ve achieved something today. You guys can be together again,” she smirks amid nervous laughter from the group.
I leap to my feet and scream, “Liar! You should all be killed!”
But they’re all gone in a flash — and the camera now is focused on someone reporting from the southern border.
“Jake,” someone quietly calls my name, and I turn to find that Curtis has come back. He is standing there.
Crap, the guard must have heard me shout about people needing to be killed. He could write me up for that. Cut my rations. Shorten how long the light bulb in my cell will be turned on. The warden can have security go over me. They might even cut me off somehow from Ianna.
“Jake,” Curtis says, “That woman on the T.V., she wasn’t lying. That’s why I left. I got a call. You are being released. Today. ASAP. I’m to take you to your cell to get your personal belongings and then down to processing.”
I realize Curtis is staring at me as if waiting for me to say, “That’s great!” or “That’s wonderful!”
I suppose I should feel good to hear that news, but instead, I still see my Ianna being tortured in public.
And I’m shaken and dismayed by the coordination of the attack on Ianna—and really on all of us and our rights. The obviously elaborate preplanning: At her own press conference releasing the news of her lawyers quitting her firm and then breaking the news of my release from prison without her or me knowing a thing about it. And orchestrating it by announcing that her lawyers were turning against her to publish an attack on her.
How many people must have been in on this scheme to shame and destroy Ianna? Someone really high up in the government who decided not only to humiliate Ianna but to take away her cause by releasing me? And announcing my release at her press conference to add to her humiliation. The prosecuting attorneys who requested my release from the judge? The newspapers and maybe their editors-in-chief who put together their dirt and organized their questions? Her own lawyers conspiring with the New York Times and God knows who else? The snoops or sleuths who found out about me and Ianna, thought she was pregnant, and got together with whoever planned the overall attack at the press conference?
It’s like these people can do anything to anybody, even to a respected, previously influential attorney, even on television for all to see during her own press conference. The orders just have to come down from high enough up.
I look at Curtis in bewilderment, maybe still expecting him to write me up for “threatening to kill people.”
With his accustomed kindness, so out of place in this hell hole, Curtis asks me, “Jake, do you have any place to go? Any money to get there?”
I want to ask him, “Do you think my Ianna can survive this? Do you think me and her can survive this?”
Then I realize that Ianna must already be trying to get in touch with me. I feel a glimmer of hope — and then I hear and feel the enormous swoosh of something overpowering me and Ianna, sucking the life out of us.
To be continued.
Read the previous Chronicles:
1 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 1: “Good Job, X-i-41520-Y10”
2 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 2: Threads of Truth
3 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 3: First Images of a Pixilated Woman
4 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 4: Yes, Fear This “Thing”
5 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 5: I Disappeared Myself Into Madness
6 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 6: Breaking Through The Shackles
7 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 7: A Political Prisoner in the Land of the Free!
8 – The Elon-12 Chronicles, No. 8: Not a Single Sign of Him After January 6
