Save America Ministries

Chuck Crismier: It was one of the most horrific days in American history. Ominous black clouds covering the nation. Indeed, they continued to cover the nation and hover over our country and its justice system unmercifully. In fact, dealing unmercifully with everyone who got caught in the vice grip of that particular ominous day.

It was a day in which our nation was in deep trouble. It is in deep trouble today. Our nation was in deep trouble, perceived to be in very deep trouble. Our then President of the United States, who currently is President of the United States, was giving an address to the nation and to the people. Very concerned people, people who had come from all over the country because of their great concern for the country and what was happening to the country as a result of our abandoning the very foundations of freedom.

It occurred on January 6th, a day that has gone down in infamy and always will. Today on Viewpoint, we actually have one of the descendants of January 6th, still alive, barely still alive and willing to tell the story of what happened on January 6th from the inside out. Sometimes it is good to have an insider tell a story because when outsiders try to tell the story, it gets very confused.

That is why, as a good trial lawyer, I always wanted to make sure that I had witnesses who were eyewitnesses. People who were actually there, not people who talked about others being there or what it must have been like to be there, but those who actually were at a particular site. Those who actually dealt with the internals of that situation and could see it from the inside out. Those would be able to give us an accurate understanding of what actually took place.

Whether it had to do with an auto accident, whether it had to do with a slip and fall case, whatever the case might have been, you want to make sure you have an eyewitness. We have such an eyewitness here today on Viewpoint. Thomas Caldwell joining us with his book, Mouths of the Wicked: A True January 6th Story of Corruption, Persecution, Survival, and Victory.

That is a mouthful, and he is joining us here from the northern parts of Virginia that is in deep trouble this very day through corrupted politics which caused people to go to Washington, D.C. on January 6th, that infamous day. Today, we talk about the horror of January 6th and a survivor, Thomas Caldwell, joining us live. Tom, good to have you on the program.

Thomas Caldwell: Thank you for having me, Chuck. It is a pleasure, sir.

Chuck Crismier: I'll tell you, when I go back and I remember the actual nuances, it was as if the entire nation had become corrupt in our ears, in our ability to hear, our ability to understand. Then indeed, it seemed like there were just openly nefarious, intentional decisions that were made with regard to actually setting up the horrors of that particular day for nefarious political purposes. That was my recollection, having not been there on January 6th, but I could well have been since I only live a hundred miles away from our nation's capital. What was it like to be there on January 6th, Tom?

Thomas Caldwell: My wife, Sharon, and I went to the Ellipse, which is for the uninitiated, the southern part of the edge of the White House grounds, to hear President Trump make his final address. I had never been to a Trump rally, neither had my wife. We went there basically because it was an historic occasion to say goodbye to a sitting president at his last address.

It was a party atmosphere. I have called it a lovefest. We met thousands of people from all across the country. There was no violence there. There was no anger there. It was a celebration. There was a huge Jumbotron screen to see the various speakers. The sound system was blaring out Christian music and patriotic music and what we now call classic rock. It was a wonderful time.

Many of your listeners may not know that the reason that people went to the US Capitol was not to try to overthrow the government. The mayor of D.C. had issued permits for conservative speakers to speak on the grounds of the Capitol that day after the president's remarks. In fact, there were multiple small movable stages that had been set up for that very purpose.

D.C. was a wonderful time. My wife and I were together every minute that day. We saw no violence, we committed no violence. We left later on in the afternoon. It was a bitterly cold day in D.C. You can imagine our amazement, shock, and horror when two weeks later, in the early morning darkness of the 19th of January, an FBI SWAT team attacked our farm in Virginia.

Chuck Crismier: Wow. They just showed up? There was no hint of anything, and in the early morning dawn hours, a SWAT team shows up at your farm.

Thomas Caldwell: Exactly so. There had been no investigation into my situation at all. If there had been, they would have known that I didn't do anything wrong. The government's own CC television showed that Sharon and I were together. It was exactly as I just described it. We have the most exhausted pictorial history in our phones of what we did that day, videos and screen captures. It was just a fun day, and yet they attacked our farm. They nearly shot and killed my wife on the front steps of our humble home. They dragged me away to prison, to solitary confinement, but not before a three-hour interrogation. Some people would call it a Gestapo-like interrogation, trying to get me to admit to things that I never did.

Chuck Crismier: This is beyond the pale. As a lawyer and one who grew up in the fifties and sixties, I had a very high view of my country. America the Bold, for this is my country to have and to hold. This kind of thing would have been the farthest thing beyond any nightmare or dream I could possibly have ever entertained, but it happened, didn't it?

Thomas Caldwell: It sure did. Chuck, I served our country almost two decades here, afloat with the Navy, overseas, even in the jungles of the Far East. I was glad to do that. I had seen other governments, but I never saw this kind of tyranny like I just described. I knew I was in trouble when at my bail hearing that day, an Assistant US Attorney named Chris Kavanaugh lied to a federal magistrate and said that I was a fugitive from justice based upon an event that had nothing to do with January 6th. Therefore, I must be locked away. Chuck, I have never broken a law in my life.

Chuck Crismier: Again, I welcome you back to Viewpoint, friends. I'm Chuck Crismier. It is a conversation as always with ever-increasing conviction, talk that hopefully transforms. Today, as we talk about this horrific event that occurred on what is infamously known as January 6th, it will always stand out just like Pearl Harbor always stands out as a day in infamy. So will January 6th always stand out as a day of horror and infamy in the history of our country.

Today, we are introducing to you Thomas Caldwell, the author of Mouths of the Wicked. Why did you pick that title? It is an interesting title. I called the program The Horror of January 6th. Why Mouths of the Wicked?

Thomas Caldwell: It comes directly from Psalm 109. When I was in solitary confinement, Chuck, I had been thrown in there. I was tortured, I was beaten. We can talk as little or as much about that as you would like. Repeatedly over the weeks that I was kept incarcerated, many times in total darkness, I would ask for a Bible, and none was forthcoming.

Finally, in the middle of the night, I asked one kind guard through the solid steel door at the end of my 6x9 concrete freezing coffin that I was in for a Bible. He brought me a tattered soft copy of the New King James Version of the Bible. I sat down on that ice-cold concrete in this threadbare jumpsuit, which was the only thing I had to guard against the cold wind that was blowing on me all the time.

I just sat down what we used to call Indian fashion, and I opened up the book. I let the pages fall apart where they may in my dismay, saying, "God, no one knows what I'm going through. This is so horrible." It opened to Psalm 109: "The mouths of the wicked and the mouths of the deceitful are opened against me; they speak of me with a lying tongue." Those were words where I said, "Yes, the Lord has sent me a sign. He knows these are just lies." It was stuff spewed from the mouths of the wicked, just like that false comment at my bail hearing that I told you about and what would happen in trial almost two years later.

Chuck Crismier: Two years. We're promised very quick and rapid justice in this country according to the Constitution, but nothing was constitutional about what happened to you, was it?

Thomas Caldwell: That is true. One of the terrible things that I think that people need to know about is that, yes, I'm a veteran, I'm a disabled veteran. The government claimed that that wasn't true. I'm also a Christian, and I would pray with my wife, Sharon, over this janky little phone handset and a too-short cord that they would stick through a little hole in the door of my prison cell.

They would mock me as we prayed together, mock my faith. In fact, one time they came into the cell, a batch of these sadists, chained me up, threw me face down, broke my wrist by the way, held my legs apart, and repeatedly kicked me in the scrotum, saying, "Where is your Christ, boy? Why doesn't He save you now?"

Chuck Crismier: Are you kidding me? This sounds like the Romans and the high priests against Jesus as He was on the cross.

Thomas Caldwell: I don't think you need to hear anything more than that to know that we are in a spiritual war. By the way, one of the charges, one of the false charges they brought up against me, was sedition, one of the same things that they charged Jesus Christ with.

Chuck Crismier: It takes a lot to really cause my inner being and emotions to be stirred and riled up, but this really has me riled up because of the unrighteousness, the sheer wickedness of what took place there, not just with you, but with hundreds of other people who were wrongly accused and attempted to be convicted. Now, my understanding is that Donald J. Trump is looking to perhaps pardon a lot of people who yet remain in prison or under government control because of January 6th. What do you know of that?

Thomas Caldwell: I can give you the inside scoop on that. I was one of 14 people who were not pardoned when the president was inaugurated that day and did mass pardons. I was later pardoned about a month or so later once the president knew that what the DOJ had told him, which would have kept him from pardoning me, was totally false. That was taken care of.

Another guy was left off the pardon list even though he had falsified his testimony in order to get other people convicted so that he could lessen his own sentence. Now we're down to 12. The 12 that we are talking about now are members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. I know a little bit about the former, nothing about the latter.

Chuck Crismier: But you weren't one of those, were you?

Thomas Caldwell: That is correct. I am not. But the president could only pardon the people that were put on a list. The DOJ, as it was composed before, left these people off the list. Now fast-forward to what we've got. We've got new people at the helm of the DOJ, and they admit that there is no evidence to support charges against these people or any of the other people.

These folks who had not been pardoned were ready to go to the Court of Appeals. Their date in court was coming up. The DOJ said, "Okay, this is all wrong. We're going to go to the D.C. Circuit and say we'd like to drop the charges." These people would be exonerated. Now, that sounds like a great thing, doesn't it, Chuck?

Except you know from being an attorney that if they were to go to court now, they would not be shackled by the same rules that we had when we fought at trial. They would be able to name names and show all of the evidence. It would be very embarrassing to many of the people in the federal government now on Capitol Hill and those who are still in the DOJ, FBI, and others that have gone away to white-shoe legal firms in D.C. The DOJ is very self-serving in this, but it would finally exonerate these people and open the door for even more scrutiny of the villainy that drove this J6 persecution machine.

Chuck Crismier: This is almost too much to comprehend, to handle, even as one who engaged for 20 years in the trial law in Southern California. We're talking about motivations of the heart that were so wicked, that were so deceitful, that were so dark in the deepest recesses of their minds and their hearts that it did not matter to them where truth lied. All they had in mind was a political agenda to destroy, no matter what, to destroy as many people as they could to set a stage that would make anyone who would ever try to go to the Capitol again in an event like that to seriously take issue whether they would try it or not because of the risk involved.

Thomas Caldwell: The American people need to understand that the attack on the 1,600-plus people who are actually prosecuted is an attack on all Americans. In fact, the guy who was the US Attorney for the D.C. district, a guy named Michael Sherwin, famously went on 60 Minutes and said what we wanted to do was arrest as many people as possible, whether they were guilty or not, to scare people into not coming to D.C. for the inauguration of Joe Biden. We didn't want any trouble. You can go back and you can still see that interview on YouTube. I recommend that your listeners do that.

Chuck Crismier: It certainly didn't come out in the major media because confessions like that may have been good for the soul, but they didn't do anything to help those that were unrighteously prosecuted. Why were 1,600 selected out? There were maybe 500,000 people there. Were you anywhere near the actual Capitol itself?

Thomas Caldwell: I actually walked down to the Capitol and spent most of that chilly afternoon at a place called the Peace Monument. It was originally called the Navy Memorial or the Navy Monument. How appropriate that a Navy guy should go there. It was a dry fountain. It is not even on the Capitol grounds, and I spent most of the afternoon there.

The crowd was massive. You could hardly move, but again, still a party atmosphere. When the crowd started getting word that Congress had left, the general consensus was that they had done whatever certification there was to be done. I challenge people, before January 6th, could you really have explained to me what the whole certification process was? Probably not.

When people were told that Congress was gone, and bear in mind there were no signs saying don't go up on the Capitol steps or anything like that, I've been on the Capitol steps many times as a boy. I grew up in Washington, D.C. My wife and I said, "Let's go up there where there are already hundreds of people and they're taking pictures. That's where they inaugurate the president. I don't know if we'll ever get back to D.C. again. Let's go up there and take photos." The government has the video that proves that she and I shuffled our way up there, took pictures, were there for five minutes, and then we left D.C.

Chuck Crismier: Did you ever try to bang on the doors of any of those buildings?

Thomas Caldwell: No, sir, none of that. The government knew this, and we even proved this at trial, that they had all the evidence of my innocence, but they wouldn't let the jury see it. They knew I was innocent, but they didn't care because it ran in the face of their narrative.

Chuck Crismier: Let's try to understand when Congress takes up this charge. Liz Cheney as a putative Republican and then the rest of them Democrats coming together, putting together this pseudo-trial, very much like an artificial trial situation to charge everyone they possibly could with malfeasance with regard to trying to disrupt the Capitol, commit sedition, and so on. What do you think of that group of people that was put together that went through the millions and millions and millions of dollars to create an artificial picture of what happened?

Thomas Caldwell: They were all in on a political agenda. It is worthwhile noting that they destroyed thousands of hours and thousands of pages of testimony, much of which behind closed doors, if brought out into the light, would have exonerated many people, including myself. There was never any evidence that I did anything wrong.

It was a show trial, and the timing of it was essential. Why? Because they had tried to focus everyone's ire on these two groups of veterans, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, people that are a community service group, not a white supremacist group. They had these hearings just as the first Oath Keeper trial was getting underway in September of 2022. I was shoehorned into that group. Why? Because I had actually met a couple of members of the Oath Keepers. Guilt by association. Let's just tarnish his name and we'll say that he was the mastermind.

Chuck Crismier: To grasp the depth of the corruption that took place, when you talk about the mouths of the wicked, help us to understand that a little more deeply. Because here you were, you were arrested in darkness, you were put in solitary confinement for how long?

Thomas Caldwell: I spent 53 days in a place, not the D.C. gulag, but a place equally as awful called the Central Virginia Regional Jail in Orange, Virginia.

Chuck Crismier: And that was in solitary confinement?

Thomas Caldwell: Correct.

Chuck Crismier: What does solitary confinement look like?

Thomas Caldwell: It is a 6x9 concrete box with cold air blowing on you all the time. I slept on a concrete floor with a plastic blanket. The end door to this coffin that they put me in was solid steel with a little door that would slide open so they could look in at you at any time. Anytime you leave to go to a shower, for example, once a week, you're in full chains, double handcuffs in the front, shackles around your feet. I won't even get to talking about food because it didn't resemble food as I've come to understand it. Dirty water was all we had to drink at the sink. It was aloneness.

Chuck Crismier: Appalling, utterly appalling. Fortunately, you were exonerated ultimately. We want to talk about that, but also how you and your wife dealt with this and how you deal with it attitudinally when your own government has treated you so horrifically and falsely.

Thomas, how long have you known Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?

Thomas Caldwell: I was sprinkled back in the 1950s as a youngster in a Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C.

Chuck Crismier: Everybody gets sprinkled from heaven with rain here and there, but when did you commit your life to Jesus Christ?

Thomas Caldwell: I would say that the real affirmation, the public affirmation where I turned the corner, was when He met me in solitary confinement. I considered myself to be a Christian, but just sitting in a church pew once in a while doesn't make you a Christian any more than sitting in your garage makes you an automobile.

They talk about foxhole Christianity. I think you could say that I had solitary confinement Christianity like foxhole Christianity and that it lasted and was real. I have seen the glory of God many times, and I was in some death-defying situations in the military that are still classified and we won't talk about them. When you're in total darkness and then the light comes and dispels the darkness in your cell when you're praying only for the release of death so that you can go to heaven, and He comes to you, then you know you ain't alone. You know it is all true and all real.

Everything changed that day. It was the same day that I had spoken with my wife on the phone, and she reminded me of Philippians 4:6 and 7. Through everything with prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Chuck Crismier: How did you gain peace in the midst of that solitary confinement?

Thomas Caldwell: It was tough because I knew that most human contact was me getting beaten by the guards. But I knew that Sharon was in her own difficult time. She was so worried about me. We were praying together. There were many people, we had no idea how many prayer groups were sending up prayers for us all around the country. It was about that time that another prayer was answered. That was in the personage of Mr. David W. Fischer, a defense attorney who came to our rescue when other lawyers would not.

Many people who were prosecuted in J6 were not able to get lawyers. They were only able to get the public defenders, and they were part of the game. David Fischer, I knew that he was sent to us because there was no way we could have found him. Sharon had cast the net wide. Tell everyone that you know in your Christian family what you're trying to do because everybody knows somebody. Sure enough, the word got around to David Fischer. The first time I met him through the bulletproof glass when I was chained hand and foot, he said to me, "You know, Mr. Caldwell, I defend a lot of creepy guys, but you're innocent." I said, "That's what I've been trying to tell everybody." He says, "Incidentally, you're not creepy, either. I want you to be my client if you'll have me." I said, "Absolutely." That's when we began the three-week struggle that finally extricated me from that hell on earth.

Chuck Crismier: Let's talk about what the hell on earth was like. You've mentioned that the guards would beat you. You gave one illustration. We're talking about America. We're talking about a land that supposedly provides freedom and justice for all in due process. What happened?

Thomas Caldwell: No visitation, no exercise, no trips to the library. It was tough, especially in the early days. I had to smuggle notes out to Sharon because they would intercept my mail and then they'd tear it open and laugh about it and shove it back underneath the door. I talked about how cold it was in there. It was terribly, terribly cold.

They moved me to a couple of increasingly worse solitary confinement cells. The inmates called the last place where I spent the most time "The Haunted Wing" of this decrepit, decaying jail. I'll tell you, in the total darkness where your mind tries to make its own connections when there are no connections through all of your senses pretty quickly, you see the things that come out of the walls. You see what they call in the Caribbean the duppies, the evil spirits coming out.

That place was hell on earth, except for the fire part. There were no lakes of fire. I think probably the state of Virginia was too cheap to pay for heat, so they just pumped in cold from the winter outside. Otherwise, it was exactly the same. If you look in so many books of the Bible, including Revelation, it talks about it's a bottomless pit. When you can't see and you can't touch something to get your bearings, you feel like you're always falling, always falling. Even in the Book of Luke, it talks about it's a place of torment where you'll never see anybody or talk to anybody. That's solitary confinement.

Chuck Crismier: So it's kind of like a living hell. You said that you were abused, beaten specifically by the guards. What did they actually do?

Thomas Caldwell: One of the first things that happens when you go into a facility like this is they strip you naked and then they do a total body scan thing with your arms over your head, your legs spread apart. In my particular case, I'm a disabled veteran. I have enough metal in my back to make the frame of a very nice coffee table. It holds me together.

They then knew exactly where to kick and strike. My spine is held together with screws and stuff. My arm is attached with a brass screw, attaches my left arm to my torso. They would chain me up and they'd stand me up and then they'd take sucker punches right in the back, right on those vertebrae. Or they'd make sure that they twisted my shoulder and twisted my arm around in a most uncomfortable way, to put it mildly. Or they'd have me on the ground.

Chuck Crismier: In other words, they were purposely and intentionally seeking to elicit maximum pain.

Thomas Caldwell: Indeed. They were sure that if they did enough of that, I would do anything to make the pain stop, including giving false witness, false testimony against other people who were being charged.

Chuck Crismier: This is the same kind of behavior that we read about in the Middle Ages with the torture chambers, even those carried on by the Catholic Church in order to elicit this, that, or other false testimony. It is just hard to believe that this kind of thing was going on at our nation's capital in the name of justice. How in the world do you deal with the issue of forgiveness? Jesus said, "If you will not forgive others their trespasses against you, neither will your Heavenly Father forgive you."

Thomas Caldwell: That has been the toughest thing, and I speak very openly about this. I struggled with that for a long time. I've been very fortunate because, unlike some J6ers, I have a darling Christian wife who stood beside me all the way. It was easy, I suppose, because she and I did exactly the same thing on that day. She knew I was innocent. So it wasn't like I had to convince her. I try to do things with humor. I used to be happy all the time, never sad, always glad. Even when I was talking to her from prison and when I was bleeding from places a little boy's not supposed to bleed from, I would try to make her laugh. We listen to those recordings now. They recorded all of my conversations with my wife and my lawyer. I listen to that now and I say, "How could I do that?" And she says, "That's you. That's what you do. And you've decided to get their claws out of you by forgiving them."

Chuck Crismier: Thomas E. Caldwell, proud veteran of the United States Navy, Lieutenant Commander, honorably served our nation for nearly two decades, primarily within the Navy's intelligence community. A devout Christian, lives on a small family farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and is awakened in the wee hours of the morning by a SWAT team and taken to solitary confinement without any information concerning why.

This is the modern-day United States of America, friends. Land of the free and increasingly becoming only the home of the brave. I'm not here to talk down my country. I'm here to say it ain't necessarily what you think it is, depending upon who is in leadership and why they do what they do. The motivations of the heart. As Jeremiah the prophet said, "The heart of man is desperately wicked; who can know it?" Thomas, tell us again why you think, if you even know, why they came to your farm and arrested you two weeks after January 6th.

Thomas Caldwell: From what we were able to gain from what they call discovery, with which you're well familiar from your time in courtrooms, because I had met a member of the Oath Keepers and that person was a veteran as most of them were, we sort of connected a little bit. This was a young lady who actually had served with a Ranger battalion in Afghanistan. That's the kind of person that I would normally celebrate. That's a hero right there.

I had met her in Washington, D.C., during the Million MAGA March when the Oath Keepers had come to D.C. then, as when they came to January 6th. They were there to provide bodyguard services and escort services to protect against Antifa attacks for conservative and Christian speakers. Many people know that veterans refer to each other by the rank they held on active duty. Pamela might become Sergeant Pamela, or Jane might become Lieutenant Jane.

When she walked away with my phone number in her phone, I asked her, "Take my phone number. If you're ever in town again, you need a meal or you're broken down, just give me a call." She put the phone number in, but the entry became, because she couldn't remember my last name, "Commander Tom" because she remembered I'd been a Lieutenant Commander. This happened long before January 6th. They found your name on her cell phone, and that's why they came after you.

That's exactly right. I've looked at it now and I said maybe they just needed an officer. They could not sell an insurrection attack without an officer to lead it, and that's what they did. There are so many things like this in this book, and people will say, "Why are we still talking about January 6th?" Because we still haven't gotten the full truth. That's why.

Chuck Crismier: The reason we're still talking about it is because Donald J. Trump in his second term now is seeking to remedy many of the injustices that took place by the Biden administration and by those who were seeking to completely undo everything that Donald J. Trump had been trying to do in the first administration. They did try to impeach him two or three times, didn't they?

Thomas Caldwell: They sure did.

Chuck Crismier: That's like putting you in a political zone like what you had been put in in solitary confinement.

Thomas Caldwell: That's very true. Sharon and I prayed a lot about putting this book out there. We wanted to have an historic record. It's filled, as you know, with pages and pages of references. When I tell you that Special Agent Michael Palian of the FBI lied on the stand on day four when he said so-and-so, you better believe that I have the transcripts and I do the references.

More than that, I hope through all of this that I'm also able to convey to anybody who reads it the power and protection of a loving God who was always with us, even when Sharon and I felt utterly alone. This is His story and the way that He held us in the palm of His hand was the primary factor in my mind in our deciding to go forward and publish. It's because of Him that we survived it.

Chuck Crismier: You're a modern-day Daniel in the lions' den.

Thomas Caldwell: I would accept that. When they took us to federal court and they lied and they falsified evidence and they perjured themselves, they actually had the star witness against the Oath Keepers and yours truly as a guy named Abdullah Rashid, who was a convicted child sexual predator who traded his testimony, false as it was, for a new identity supplied by the Department of Justice with our tax dollars.

Chuck Crismier: In other words, they suborned perjury by threatening this guy. He was under the gun legally and righteously, but they were willing to trade him off and give him freedom in order to gain to put the rest of you that were innocent in the box.

Thomas Caldwell: That's true. The FBI agents perjured themselves and they knew they were perjuring themselves because it's part of an FBI operation. They are required to do whatever is necessary to put away the "enemies of the state." You well know from being such a good lawyer that the DOJ prosecutors operate under a thing that most Americans don't know about, which is called absolute immunity. That means they can lie and cheat and suborn perjury and falsify documents and indulge in witness tampering, all these things they did against me and the Oath Keepers and others, and they cannot be prosecuted, held to task, dismissed for doing any of that because they have absolute immunity.

Chuck Crismier: Breathtaking, utterly breathtaking. You don't want to think that this is the country that we live in. We want to think of our country, it's not our country right or wrong anymore, it's are we living in righteousness or not. Are we dealing with people in our country the way we're accusing the Iranian government of dealing with people in their country? It's almost like the kettle calling the pot black, isn't it?

Thomas Caldwell: It absolutely is. This was a long battle, even when we had our time in court. They just kept up weaponizing every aspect of American society. They canceled our credit cards. They called USAA and they canceled my automobile insurance. Forty-six years I had them. With one phone call, they stopped it. They stopped my Social Security payments quite illegally. They stopped my military disability. But who was going to stop them, Chuck? They have absolute power.

If any of your listeners go on the internet now, ninety percent of the stuff that you will see is absolute twaddle that was disproved at trial. Yet it will exist out there forever. I am forever scarred with the modern-day equivalent of the Scarlet Letter J6.

Chuck Crismier: The Scarlet Letter J6. That's almost a title in and of itself, isn't it? In other words, you're forever labeled. Now I want to ask you a question because an awful lot of people with stories that they feel are worthy of being heard by others will hire somebody to represent them, to go out and gain speaking engagements and so on. Have you done any of that?

Thomas Caldwell: I have been able to speak in public before. It started with speaking with a group called the Constitutional Conservatives of Charleston, South Carolina. I spoke at the Citadel, the world-famous Citadel. But I do not take any money for that. I come out to tell people what happened and to talk about the goodness of God.

I wrote this book, I'm no academician, I don't write like one. I wrote in the first person in a voice that's the same as if I were talking to you on the phone just now. That's the way I speak in public. People want to know, and they've been so supportive. Sharon and I have been able to address groups in Florida. Most recently we were down in Sebring, Florida. Faith coalition down there had about 250 beautiful people we got to speak with and meet that day.

We're also in Georgia, a little place called Dahlonega, Georgia. Adorable place there. South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, we've spoken. We've spoken in Arizona, Texas. In fact, they've asked me to be the keynote speaker at a place called Hope for Heroes. It's a support organization for the families and police officers who have been traumatized on the job. They've asked me to come out there and I'm going to do it. It's going to be in July. It's going to be a gala, and I wouldn't think to take a dime for it because I still through all of this support as I always have the men and women of law enforcement, that thin blue line. Never more than now have we needed them. The people that persecuted me in the FBI, who are still there incidentally, none have lost their jobs. They are not true law enforcement, they're political hacks. I really believe that. They tend to tarnish an organization which, incidentally, I used to work for. Yes, I worked for the FBI, not as a special agent, and yet the DOJ claimed for years that that too was a lie, although all they had to do was look at the employment records.

Chuck Crismier: Since your pardon, when did that occur?

Thomas Caldwell: I actually had a pardon signed by the president on the 20th of March, 2025.

Chuck Crismier: A little over a year ago. How have things gone for you since then? What are you doing other than speaking like this?

Thomas Caldwell: We still live on the farm that we were able to hold onto because of outreach from people all across this country. Not only with cards and letters and their favorite Bible passages, but as they could with tens and twenties and thirties to keep the home fires burning and to help the legal machinery keep going. Freedom isn't free, as they say.

We're here on the farm now. All of our farm equipment and all of our animals of course long ago sold when we were desperate to get money. But we still have our home. We're doing the best we can. We have to still maintain the property. Local farmers are helping because they're renting our pastures. They make the hay for us because they know we don't have the equipment. It's been wonderful.

In fact, I had two major operations to correct some of the damage done to my body while I was a guest of the state. During that time, what I have come to call the "Covered Dish Legion" descended on us here in this part of the Shenandoah Valley and kept us going. "Oh yeah, we just had this chili, here's 14 quarts of it, we had some left over," that sort of thing. It's just been wonderful.

The many people that have reached out to us, some of whom we've actually gotten to see when we've gotten out on the road in my janky old Toyota Highlander that's falling apart, meet folks and speak at these local conservative events, Republican events, Christian events, we just love them so much. They are our family now. We are, even though we haven't been restored the way the world would understand that term, we are so rich now. We just think that the future is wide open for us. We're worried about the other people who are hurting including those people who have not gotten clemency, but we know that God is with us and we think the future is bright for this wonderful country.

Chuck Crismier: Tom, thanks so much for taking the time to join us here on the program. I think it's very important to a certain extent, it's a certain kind of catharsis that we need because of the wickedness that took place even under cover of darkness. Mouths of the Wicked, friends, that's the title of Thomas's book. It's not on Amazon, you can't get it there. But you can get it here through our website, saveus.org. Mouths of the Wicked. $20 will put the book in your hand, the true story, January 6th story. Just give us a call, 1-800-SAVE-USA, or write to us at Save America Ministries. I think it'll be an encouragement, it'll be a blessing to you. We need to come to grips with what has really happened, not in the name of justice and truth, but in the name of unrighteousness. God bless, and be blessed.