Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 93. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach the Mississippi: “Here we are, then, on this so renowned river, all of whose peculiar features I have endeavored to note carefully.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Tim Miller writes The FBI Did It? LOL:
Was the FBI behind the violent siege of the Capitol on January 6?
This is the latest piece of unreality that the MAGA right is grasping onto to shed culpability for the domestic terror attack at the Capitol and exonerate the great patriots who watch their television programs.
Fingering the FBI in all this is a bizarre turn. After-all the agency was in the fourth year of being controlled by their swamp-draining, all-powerful god king. But whatever. Part of the appeal of Trumpism is the belief that you are simultaneously #winning but also being cheated by implacable, nefarious forces.
….
Their evidence is two-fold: (1) During a congressional hearing, Christopher Wray did not answer directly when asked whether the federal government had infiltrated any of the militia groups that were present at the siege. (2) There are “unindicted co-conspirators” in the charging documents for some of the insurrectionists which Beattie et al assume must be government agents.
And here, per [Darren] Beattie, are the implications of such a “revelation”:
A still more disturbing possibility arises from a careful study of the unindicted co-conspirators listed throughout the various charging documents of individuals facing the most serious charges related to 1/6 . . . In many cases the unindicted co-conspirators appear to be much more aggressive and egregious participants in the very so-called “conspiracy” serving as the basis for charging those indicted.
Stripped down to its barest parts, what we have here is the same debunked “the insurrectionists were really secret Antifa” conspiracy—only rejiggered so that now FBI agents are cast in role of instigators who victimized the peaceful, innocent patriots who love their country.
But as with secret Antifa, there are some holes in this theory. The most important is that there is no actual evidence that the unindicted co-conspirators are agents of the government. That’s just a wild supposition being made by MAGA apologists based entirely on an anodyne non-response of Director Wray when he was asked about the bureau’s infiltration of extremists groups. Is it possible that the unindicted co-conspirators were undercover agents? Maybe? Or they could have been Russian special forces. Or Martians. There is an equal amount of evidence for each of these possibilities. Which is to say: None.
Also, there’s some legal problems with it. Some criminal lawyers who are not professional trolls seem to think this is something that prosecutors literally cannot do. Here’s the Washington Post:
Legal experts say the government literally cannot name an undercover agent as an unindicted co-conspirator.
“There are many reasons why an indictment would reference unindicted co-conspirators, but their status as FBI agents is not one of them,” said Jens David Ohlin, a criminal law professor at Cornell Law School.
Added Lisa Kern Griffin of Duke University Law School: “Undercover officers and informants can’t be ‘co-conspirators’ for the purposes of establishing an agreement to violate the law, because they are only pretending to agree to do so. … An unindicted co-conspirator has committed the crime of conspiracy, and investigative agents doing their jobs undercover are not committing crimes.”
Reporter asks Putin why his political opponents are ‘dead, in prison, or poisoned’: