Capitol Police chief ducks Blaze Media’s investigation

Capitol Hill Police Chief J. Thomas Manger has rebuffed a request from the House Subcommittee on Oversight for documents pertaining to the investigation of a key witness in the 2022 Oath Keepers trial.

Manger replied last month to a letter from U.S. Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight, asking for two disciplinary reports on Special Agent David Lazarus. A Blaze Media investigation in October revealed that Lazarus appeared to lie to the FBI and again on the witness stand about his whereabouts during a confrontation between members of the Oath Keepers and Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn.

Federal prosecutors never provided the Oath Keepers’ defense teams with the Capitol CCTV videos of Lazarus’ whereabouts.

The Capitol Police Department’s internal affairs division, called the Office of Professional Responsibility, opened an investigation into Lazarus’ Oath Keepers trial testimony in November in response to Blaze Media’s reporting. In a letter addressed to Manger dated March 1, Loudermilk requested the documents from that investigation, along with an earlier OPR investigation of Lazarus in 2016. Loudermilk also asked for information concerning Dunn, who also appeared to perjure himself during the 2022 seditious conspiracy trial.

Proof of Perjury | The Truth About January 6www.youtube.com

Two senior congressional aides who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information told Blaze Media that Capitol Police leadership refuses to provide Loudermilk’s subcommittee with the 2016 internal affairs report probing Lazarus’ alleged on-the-job alcohol use. One of those aides, however, has seen the report and described its contents as damning.

The chief’s evasive response

Manger’s reply to Loudermilk’s subcommittee, dated March 21, is rife with factual errors and lawyerly obfuscations.

Notably, Manger denied that Lazarus lied under oath when he testified that he witnessed Dunn confronting several Oath Keepers inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Office of Professional Responsibility, Manger wrote, “investigated this allegation and was unable to sustain the allegation based on the evidence that Special Agent Lazarus perjured himself during his testimony. (In order to sustain an allegation, OPR must be able to prove that an allegation is more likely than not to be true.)”

Investigators cleared Lazarus of the perjury allegation despite the special agent’s explicitly detailed trial testimony and statements to the FBI on August 24, 2021, which are demonstrably proven false by the Capitol video evidence examined by Blaze Media analysts.

Manger then quotes Loudermilk: “As you noted in your letter, ‘Special Agent Lazarus never testified that he was in a certain place at a certain time… Special Agent Lazarus [also] testified he did not know what time he passed by Officer Dunn.”

In fact, Lazarus testified that he was in a Senate office building, across the street from the Capitol Building, when he heard reports over his radio of “shots fired.” That report was transmitted on the Capitol Police’s “Main Ops 1” radio channel at 2:44 p.m., after Lt. Michael Byrd shot and fatally wounded Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt in the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.

Here is what Lazarus said at the Oath Keepers’ trial in 2022:

We evacuate the entire Senate down the back stairs into the tunnels. And those tunnels go across Constitution Avenue back into the Senate buildings, where we had an area that was specifically set up to secure the Senate. … And so once I heard the shots were fired, I saw that the senators were doing OK, we had enough agents with them to get them to safety, so I turned around and I started going back towards where I heard the shots were being fired.

The specificity of his testimony demonstrates where Lazarus was and at exactly what time. Harry Dunn’s encounter with four Oath Keepers also began at 2:44. Based on a close analysis of Capitol closed-circuit TV video, Blaze Media was able to show to the hundredth of a second when Lazarus entered the tunnels to the Senate office buildings and when he returned. Lazarus did not arrive at the scene of Dunn’s encounter with the four Oath Keepers until several minutes after the Oath Keepers had left.

Yet in his reply to Loudermilk, Manger states: “Notably, when asked about the individuals in a particular clip, Special Agent Lazarus responded that those were the individuals he saw interacting with Officer Dunn, not that he saw any particular exchange.”

This is deliberate obfuscation of the known facts and Lazarus’ testimony. Lazarus on the witness stand testified he saw Dunn’s interaction with the Oath Keepers “three or four times” and that each interaction was “very antagonistic.” That’s impossible. Lazarus did not arrive until well over three minutes after the Oath Keepers had departed.

In his letter, Manger brushed off Lazarus’ contradictory statement, noting that “neither the prosecutor nor the judge in this matter has ever indicated any concerns with Special Agent Lazarus’ testimony.” Parenthetically, Manger added, “Indeed, the judge thanked Special Agent Lazarus for his heroism on January 6th during the sentencing of several Oathkeepers, including [Stewart] Rhodes.”

It’s far more noteworthy that federal prosecutors never provided the Oath Keepers’ defense teams with the Capitol CCTV videos of Lazarus’ whereabouts during Dunn’s interaction with the defendants so they could impeach his testimony during cross-examination.

And while it’s true that Judge Amit Mehta praised Lazarus, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the full scope of Lazarus’ lies on the witness stand.

Manger’s letter also fails to address the overt contradiction between Dunn’s and Lazarus’ back-to-back trial testimonies.

Manger claims the prosecutor and the judge “certainly had an opportunity to evaluate Special Agent Lazarus’ testimony for perjury since the defense called an investigator who tried to prove Special Agent Lazarus’ testimony regarding seeing Officer Dunn and the Oathkeepers was untrue.”

That isn’t the whole story, either. In the final days of the trial, the Oath Keepers' defense called Marissa Wallace, a Texas-based private investigator who had seen video of Lazarus’ arrival at the bottom of the stairs to the Speaker’s Lobby at precisely 2:56:45 p.m.

The trouble is that neither Wallace nor the Oath Keepers’ attorneys had access to the CCTV videos showing where Lazarus was during Dunn’s encounter, making her testimony irrelevant under government cross-examination.

Without the CCTV videos that Blaze Media accessed almost a year after the Oath Keepers’ trial, Wallace was unable to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Lazarus could not have seen what he claimed he saw.

Manger’s letter also fails to address the overt contradiction between Dunn’s and Lazarus’ back-to-back trial testimonies.

Dunn claimed to have seen Lazarus “being hassled by protesters” at the top of the Speaker’s Lobby stairs when he arrived. In fact, Lazarus was across the street at the time. And Lazarus testified that when he arrived at the top of the stairs, Dunn was already in an “antagonistic” encounter with the Oath Keepers. Lazarus claimed to identify some of these Oath Keepers from photos he was shown during an interview with the FBI. He also claimed to recognize them in the courtroom.

Capitol CCTV video proves conclusively that Lazarus couldn’t have seen them anywhere inside the Capitol Building at any time. By identifying one or more of those Oath Keepers from a photo, or present in trial, he lied to both the FBI and the court.

Allegations of drinking on the job

When Lazarus took the stand in October 2022, the Oath Keepers’ defense attorneys were also unaware of his strange disciplinary history.

In 2016, Lazarus was a member of a dignitary protection detail on assignment at a Republican Party campaign fundraising event in Florida when two colleagues reported they had seen him drinking on the job with a congressman. Lazarus was reportedly “unsteady on his feet and his speech was slurred,” the witnesses said.

Manger in his response to Loudermilk said the 2016 OPR investigation “initially sustained an allegation against Special Agent Lazarus for a violation of the Department’s alcohol policy.” The policy states that special agents assigned to a dignitary protection detail are prohibited from drinking alcohol “less than 12 hours before a [congressional delegation] officially begins.”

But after first finding Lazarus violated department policy, the OPR reversed course. “Upon further review,” Manger wrote, “the [disciplinary review officer] ultimately concluded the Department could not defend the sustained finding because of several significant issues which undercut the investigation’s findings.”

And what were those “significant issues”?

According to the disciplinary review officer’s report, Lazarus “never admitted to having alcoholic drinks. He consistently denied doing so, including the next day to his supervisor, who confirmed that Special Agent Lazarus told him he had ‘mixed drinks.’ Special Agent Lazarus clarified that by ‘mixed drinks,’ he meant a cranberry and soda …”

When in the history of human alcohol consumption has anyone ever referred to a non-alcoholic beverage as a “mixed drink”?

A Capitol Police officer who was one of Lazarus’ supervisors in 2016 and who was “very familiar” with the investigation explained to Blaze Media what happened. Although that supervisor is no longer with the USCP, he nevertheless asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation from the department.

“That’s what we try to tell officers all the time, that lying about an offense is about the only thing you can get fired for.”

Against the claim that Lazarus never admitted to drinking on the job, the former supervisor said Lazarus in fact apologized for his behavior when confronted by an on-site superior. The senior congressional aide who has seen the OPR report also confirmed this detail.

According to two sources, the on-site supervisor immediately relieved Lazarus of his duty and put him on a flight back to Washington, D.C., that evening to await suspension and a pending investigation. Given the seriousness of the offense, Chief of Police Matthew R. Verderosa and House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving would also have been notified of why Lazarus was sent home.

Between apologizing to his supervisor and never admitting to having alcoholic drinks, Lazarus changed his story. Our anonymous source said that the disciplinary review officer at the time of the investigation was former USCP Assistant Chief Yogananda Pittman, who was responsible for the department’s intelligence failures on January 6. Pittman held the rank of inspector in 2016. She is the new chief of the University of California, Berkeley, police department.

As the superior who overruled the Office of Professional Responsibility’s findings, Pittman wrote:

No independent evidence supported that Special Agent Lazarus was drinking alcohol. The supervisor who reported the incident said he did not know what Special Agent Lazarus was drinking and there were no credit card receipts, video footage, or other evidence to support that the drink was an alcoholic beverage …

But the former supervisor who was familiar with the investigation flatly contradicted Pittman’s conclusion. “Ultimately, [investigators] ended up talking to the bartender and pulling the tab,” he said. “And that’s how they proved that he was lying during the investigation about drinking with the member.”

Drinking on the job can carry a range of penalties, from suspension up to termination. “Untruthful statements are, without a doubt, a terminable offense,” our anonymous source explained. “That’s what we try to tell officers all the time, that lying about an offense is about the only thing you can get fired for.”

Lazarus and the 'Lewis list'

If Lazarus lied to the Office of Professional Responsibility and if the disciplinary report was overruled or covered up by USCP management, that has serious implications for the 2022 Oath Keepers’ trial. Under Justice Department rules, any law enforcement officer who has made false statements to departmental investigators must have those events revealed to defense lawyers.

The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia maintains a list — known as the “Lewis list,” stemming from a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lewis v. United States — detailing law enforcement officers under investigation or who have been found liable for professional misconduct.

“[Lazarus] should have been put on the Lewis list,” the former Capitol Police supervisor said. “They will not put you on the stand if you’re on the Lewis list. You can’t testify.”

It’s unknown whether Lazarus is on the list, which, as Vice News reported in 2020, is “shrouded in secrecy.” But “one thing is absolutely clear: Under federal law, if a police officer who’s on the list testifies in a criminal case, information about their offenses has to be turned over to defense attorneys.”

Reports of Lazarus’ offenses were never turned over to the Oath Keepers’ defense attorneys before his trial testimony.

According to our source, Lazarus ultimately received no disciplinary action and immediately returned to the dignitary protection detail after USCP leadership overruled his “sustained” OPR report.

Other Blaze Media sources in the Capitol Police have revealed that Lazarus recently applied for transfer to at least three other federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture. His current employment status with the USCP is unknown.

As to the four Oath Keepers involved in the Small Rotunda encounter with Harry Dunn, which Lazarus falsely claimed to have witnessed, three are currently serving prison terms — the longest of which is Kelly Meggs of Florida, who received a 12-year sentence. The fourth, Caleb Berry, is still awaiting sentencing after taking a plea deal and becoming a cooperating government witness.

Blaze Media is conducting an ongoing investigation into Capitol Police leadership’s corruption and cover-ups related to January 6 and beyond.