The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot

[Achilles]

The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot

Insisting on factual accuracy does not make one an apologist for the protesters. False reporting is never justified, especially to inflate threat and fear levels.

Glenn Greenwald 13 hr ago

Damage is seen inside the US Capitol building early on January 7, 2021 in Washington, DC (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)

What took place at the Capitol on January 6 was undoubtedly a politically motivated riot. As such, it should not be controversial to regard it as a dangerous episode. Any time force or violence is introduced into what ought to be the peaceful resolution of political conflicts, it should be lamented and condemned.

But none of that justifies lying about what happened that day, especially by the news media. Condemning that riot does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was. There is no circumstance or motive that justifies the dissemination of false claims by journalists. The more consequential the event, the less justified, and more harmful, serial journalistic falsehoods are.

Yet this is exactly what has happened, and continues to happen, since that riot almost seven weeks ago. And anyone who tries to correct these falsehoods is instantly attacked with the cynical accusation that if you want only truthful reporting about what happened, then you’re trying to “minimize” what happened and are likely an apologist for if not a full-fledged supporter of the protesters themselves.

One of the most significant of these falsehoods was the tale — endorsed over and over without any caveats by the media for more than a month — that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by the pro-Trump mob when they beat him to death with a fire extinguisher.
That claim was first published by The New York Times on January 8 in an article headlined “Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage.” It cited “two [anonymous] law enforcement officials” to claim that Sicknick died “with the mob rampaging through the halls of Congress” and after he “was struck with a fire extinguisher.”

A second New York Times article from later that day — bearing the more dramatic headline: “He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob” — elaborated on that story:

The New York Times, in a now-”updated” article, Jan. 8, 2021

After publication of these two articles, this horrifying story about a pro-Trump mob beating a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher was repeated over and over, by multiple journalists on television, in print, and on social media. It became arguably the single most-emphasized and known story of this event, and understandably so — it was a savage and barbaric act that resulted in the harrowing killing by a pro-Trump mob of a young Capitol police officer.

It took on such importance for a clear reason: Sicknick’s death was the only example the media had of the pro-Trump mob deliberately killing anyone. In a January 11 article detailing the five people who died on the day of the Capitol protest, the New York Times again told the Sicknick story: “Law enforcement officials said he had been ‘physically engaging with protesters’ and was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

But none of the other four deaths were at the hands of the protesters: the only other person killed with deliberate violence was a pro-Trump protester, Ashli Babbitt, unarmed when shot in the neck by a police officer at close range. The other three deaths were all pro-Trump protesters: Kevin Greeson, who died of a heart attack outside the Capitol; Benjamin Philips, 50, “the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo,” who died of a stroke that day; and Rosanne Boyland, a fanatical Trump supporter whom the Times says was inadvertently “killed in a crush of fellow rioters during their attempt to fight through a police line.”

This is why the fire extinguisher story became so vital to those intent on depicting these events in the most violent and menacing light possible. Without Sicknick having his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher, there were no deaths that day that could be attributed to deliberate violence by pro-Trump protesters. Three weeks later, The Washington Post said dozens of officers (a total of 140) had various degrees of injuries, but none reported as life-threatening, and at least two police officers committed suicide after the riot. So Sicknick was the only person killed who was not a pro-Trump protester, and the only one deliberately killed by the mob itself.

It is hard to overstate how pervasive this fire extinguisher story became. Over and over, major media outlets and mainstream journalists used this story to dramatize what happened:
Clockwise: Tweet of Associated Press, Jan. 29; Tweet of NBC’s Richard Engel, Jan. 9; Tweet of the Lincoln Project’s Fred Willman, Jan. 29; Tweet of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kirstof, Jan. 9

Television hosts gravely intoned when telling this story, manipulating viewers’ emotions by making them believe the mob had done something unspeakably barbaric:
After the media bombarded Americans with this story for a full month without pause, it took center stage at Trump’s impeachment process. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted, the article of impeachment itself stated that “Trump supporters ‘injured and killed law enforcement personnel.’” The House impeachment managers explicitly claimed on page 28 of their pretrial memorandum that “the insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

Once the impeachment trial ended in an acquittal, President Joe Biden issued a statement and referenced this claim in the very first paragraph. Sicknick, said the President, lost “his life while protecting the Capitol from a violent, riotous mob on January 6, 2021.”

---

The problem with this story is that it is false in all respects. From the start, there was almost no evidence to substantiate it. The only basis were the two original New York Times articles asserting that this happened based on the claim of anonymous law enforcement officials.
Despite this alleged brutal murder taking place in one of the most surveilled buildings on the planet, filled that day with hundreds of cellphones taping the events, nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided.

Not only was there no reason to believe this happened from the start, the little that was known should have caused doubt. On the same day the Times published its two articles with the “fire extinguisher” story, ProPublica published one that should have raised serious doubts about it.

The outlet interviewed Sicknick’s brother, who said that “Sicknick had texted [the family] Wednesday night to say that while he had been pepper-sprayed, he was in good spirits.” That obviously conflicted with the Times’ story that the mob “overpowered Sicknick” and “struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher,” after which, “with a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”

But no matter. The fire extinguisher story was now a matter of lore. Nobody could question it. And nobody did: until after a February 2 CNN article that asked why nobody has been arrested for what clearly was the most serious crime committed that day: the brutal murder of Officer Sicknick with a fire extinguisher. Though the headline gave no hint of this, the middle of the article provided evidence which essentially declared the original New York Times story false:

In Sicknick's case, it's still not known publicly what caused him to collapse the night of the insurrection. Findings from a medical examiner's review have not yet been released and authorities have not made any announcements about that ongoing process.
According to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.

The CNN story speculates that perhaps Sicknick inhaled “bear spray,” but like the ProPublica interview with his brother who said he inhaled pepper spray, does not say whether it came from the police or protesters. It is also just a theory. CNN noted that investigators are “vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove someone caused his death as he defended the Capitol during last month's insurrection.” Beyond that, “to date, little information has been shared publicly about the circumstances of the death of the 13-year veteran of the police force, including any findings from an autopsy that was conducted by DC's medical examiner.”

Few noticed this remarkable admission buried in this article. None of this was seriously questioned until a relatively new outlet called Revolver News on February 9 compiled and analyzed all the contradictions and lack of evidence in the prevailing story, after which Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, citing that article, devoted the first eight minutes of his February 10 program to examining these massive evidentiary holes.
That caused right-wing media outlets to begin questioning what happened, but mainstream liberal outlets — those who spread the story aggressively in the first place — largely and predictably ignored it all.

This week, the paper that first published the false story — in lieu of a retraction or an explanation of how and why it got the story wrong — simply went back to the first two articles, more than five weeks later, and quietly posted what it called an “update” at the top of both five-week-old articles:
Caption that now sits atop both New York Times articles from Jan. 8 about Officer SIcknick’s death.
With the impeachment trial now over, the articles are now rewritten to reflect that the original story was false. But there was nothing done by The New York Times to explain an error of this magnitude, let alone to try to undo the damage it did by misleading the public. They did not expressly retract or even “correct” the story. Worse, there is at least one article of theirs, the January 11 one that purports to describe how the five people died that day, which continues to include the false “fire extinguisher” story with no correction or update.

---

The fire extinguisher tale was far from the only false or dubious claim that the media caused to circulate about the events that day. In some cases, they continue to circulate them.

In the days after the protest, numerous viral tweets pointed to a photograph of Eric Munchel with zip-ties. The photo was used continually to suggest that he took those zip-ties into the Capitol because of a premeditated plot to detain lawmakers and hold them hostage. Politico described Munchel as “the man who allegedly entered the Senate chamber during the Capitol riot while carrying a taser and zip-tie handcuffs.”

The Washington Post used the images to refer to “chatters in far-right forums explicitly discussing how to storm the building, handcuff lawmakers with zip ties.” That the zip-tie photo of Munchel made the Capitol riot far more than a mere riot carried out by a band of disorganized misfits, but rather a nefarious and well-coordinated plot to kidnap members of Congress, became almost as widespread as the fire extinguisher story. Yet again, it was The New York Times that led the way in consecrating maximalist claims. “FBI Arrests Man Who Carried Zip Ties Into Capitol,” blared the paper’s headline on January 10, featuring the now-iconic photo of Munchel at the top.

But on January 21, the “zip-tie man’s” own prosecutors admitted none of that was true. He did not take zip-ties with him from home or carry them into the Capitol. Instead, he found them on a table, and took them to prevent their use by the police:

Eric Munchel, a pro-Trump rioter who stormed the Capitol building while holding plastic handcuffs, took the restraints from a table inside the Capitol building, prosecutors said in a court filing Wednesday.

Munchel, who broke into the building with his mom, was labeled "zip-tie guy" after he was photographed barreling down the Senate chamber holding the restraints. His appearance raised questions about whether the insurrectionists who sought to stop Congress from counting Electoral College votes on January 6 also intended to take lawmakers hostage.

But according to the new filing, Munchel and his mother took the handcuffs from within the Capitol building - apparently to ensure the Capitol Police couldn't use them on the insurrectionists - rather than bring them in when they initially breached the building.

(A second man whose photo with zip-ties later surfaced similarly told Ronan Farrow that he found them on the floor, and the FBI has acknowledged it has no evidence to the contrary).

Why does this matter? For the same reason media outlets so excitedly seized on this claim. If Munchel had brought zip-ties with him, that would be suggestive of a premeditated plot to detain people: quite terrorizing, as it suggests malicious and well-planned intent. But he instead just found them on a table by happenstance and, according to his own prosecutors, grabbed them with benign intent.

Then, perhaps most importantly, is the ongoing insistence on calling the Capitol riot an armed insurrection. Under the law, an insurrection is one of the most serious crises that can arise. It allows virtually unlimited presidential powers — which is why there was so much angst when Tom Cotton proposed it in his New York Times op-ed over the summer, publication of which resulted in the departure of two editors.
Insurrection even allows for the suspension by the president of habeas corpus: the right to be heard in court if you are detained.

So it matters a great deal legally, but also politically, if the U.S. really did suffer an armed insurrection and continues to face one. Though there is no controlling, clear definition, that term usually connotes not a three-hour riot but an ongoing, serious plot by a faction of the citizenry to overthrow or otherwise subvert the government.

Just today, PolitiFact purported to “fact-check” a statement from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) made on Monday. Sen. Johnson told a local radio station:

"The fact of the matter is this didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me. I mean armed, when you hear armed, don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would have liked to ask. How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I’m only aware of one, and I’ll defend that law enforcement officer for taking that shot.

The fact-checking site assigned the Senator its “Pants on Fire” designation for that statement, calling it “ridiculous revisionist history.” But the “fact-checkers” cannot refute a single claim he made. At least from what is known publicly, there is no evidence of a single protester wielding let alone using a firearm inside the Capitol on that day. As indicated, the only person to have been shot was a pro-Trump protester killed by a Capitol police officer, and the only person said to have been killed by the protesters, Officer Sicknick, died under circumstances that are still completely unclear.

That protesters were found before and after the riot with weapons does not mean they intended to use them as part of the protest. For better or worse, the U.S. is a country where firearm possession is common and legal. And what we know for certain is that there is no evidence of anyone brandishing a gun in that building. That fact makes a pretty large dent in the attempt to characterize this as an “armed insurrection” rather than a riot.

Indeed, the most dramatic claims spread by the media to raise fear levels as high as possible and depict this as a violent insurrection have turned out to be unfounded or were affirmatively disproven.

On January 15, Reuters published an article about the arrest of the “Q-Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, headlined “U.S. says Capitol rioters meant to 'capture and assassinate' officials.” It claimed that “federal prosecutors offered an ominous new assessment of last week’s siege of the U.S. Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Thursday, saying in a court filing that rioters intended ‘to capture and assassinate elected officials.’” Predictably, that caused viral social media postings from mainstream reporters and prominent pundits, such as Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe, manifesting in the most ominous tones possible:
Laurence Tribe @tribelaw
Some of the individuals who breached the Capitol intended to "capture and assassinate elected officials," federal prosecutors wrote in this new court filing. This is part of what Trump must answer for in his Senate trial and in post-1/20/21 prosecutions January 15th 2021
711 Retweets2,127 Likes

Shortly thereafter, however, a DOJ “official walked back a federal claim that Capitol rioters ‘intended capture and assassinate elected officials.’" Specifically, “Washington's acting U.S. Attorney, Michael Sherwin, said in a telephone briefing, ‘There is no direct evidence at this point of kill-capture teams and assassination.’"

NBC News, Jan. 15, 2021

Over and over, no evidence has emerged for the most melodramatic media claims — torn out Panic Buttons and plots to kill Vice President Mike Pence or Mitt Romney. What we know for certain, as The Washington Post noted this week, is that “Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation’s statehouses.” That does not sound like an ongoing insurrection, to put it mildly.

All this matters because it inherently matters if the media is recklessly circulating falsehoods about the most inflammatory and significant news stories. As was true for their series of Russiagate debacles, even if each “mistake” standing alone can be dismissed as relatively insignificant or understandable, when they pile up — always in the same narrative direction — people rightly conclude the propaganda is deliberate and trust in journalism erodes further.

But in this case, this matters for reasons far more significant than corporate media’s attempt to salvage the last vestiges of their credibility. Washington, D.C. remains indefinitely militarized. The establishment wings of both parties are still exploiting the emotions surrounding the Capitol breach to justify a new domestic War on Terror. The FBI is on the prowl for dissidents on the right and the left, and online censorship in the name of combatting domestic terrorism continues to rise.

One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the...gerated-claims

[dmatic]

Great article. When do we expect an autopsy report to surface regarding Sicknick's death?

[Lenno]

[Ivan88]

All the official hype about the January 6 set up, is just more noise. Yet most Americans are so dumbed down by 100 years + fake news, liar politiicans, et. al. that they might as well keep on believing their wolf preachers and politicans. Eventually we will all be dead, especially since most of us are mentally & Spiritually dead already.

[Laura19]

At last night's rally in Florida, President Trump asked, "Who killed Ashli Babbitt?" and spoke about meeting with her devastated mother. I hope he continues to ask the question

[Ivan88]

It is obvious who killed Ashli Babbit, the same people who took advantage of a protest to stage a Communist trap for Americans.
I even thought about going, but realized it was a trap to the advantage of those who are making all the noise about it all, and keeping many people locked away for the sin of appreciating President Trump.
If you want names, simply look at who screams the loudest about the "attack" on a pack of liar politicians.

[Green Man]

06/30/2021 02:20 pm ET Updated 5 days ago
‘Sedition Hunters’: Meet The Online Sleuths Aiding The FBI’s Capitol Manhunt

Six months and 500 arrests into the Jan. 6 probe, a motley crew of online sleuths is generating leads, making connections, and keeping the feds on their toes.


By Ryan J. Reilly

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sedit...b653040034f749

There’s a mother and former teacher in south central Pennsylvania, a woman I’ll call Joan, who has what she calls a “weird hobby.” She’s a Facebook detective.

“Some people crochet. Some people paint. I look up people,” Joan told me. “I’m the go-to person for all my friends if they meet a new man. They’re like ‘Hey, look him up, give me all the details.’”


When an enraged mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Joan was at home watching it unfold. She was deeply upset, finding herself in tears about the violent scene transpiring over 100 miles away in the nation’s capital, which she’d visited as a kid and later on field trips with her own children. “This is not who we are as a country,” she said, before pausing and adding, “Or it’s not who we’re supposed to be.”



So just over a week after the Capitol attack, Joan was thrilled to have a new opportunity for online investigative work opportunity land in her inbox. This time, she wasn’t vetting a potential romantic interest for one of her friends. She was hunting down an insurrectionist.

It’s been nearly six months since a violent mob invaded the U.S. Capitol because they believed then-President Donald Trump’s lies about mass voter fraud and supported his efforts to toss out millions of votes and Joe Biden’s electoral victory. The feds were woefully unprepared for what Trump supporters had in store for lawmakers at the Capitol that day; shell-shocked and outnumbered law enforcement officers were overwhelmed by rioters and made only a handful of arrests. The U.S. Capitol — the closely guarded building where a cardboard protest sign or ill-timed laugh could get you led out of a congressional hearing in cuffs — had been overrun by an unruly mob. Hundreds of criminals were on the loose, spread out all across the country.

The feds have spent the first half of 2021 playing catch-up, churning out Capitol attack cases on a near-daily basis that cover behavior ranging from basic misdemeanor trespassing to brutal felony assaults on police officers. As the unprecedented probe reshapes the federal government’s approach to domestic terrorism, Justice Department officials announced last week they had cleared the benchmark of 500 arrests. Hundreds more are in the works, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said federal authorities would “continue to follow the facts in this case and charge what the evidence supports to hold all January 6th perpetrators accountable.”




Garland, the former Oklahoma City bombing prosecutor and federal appellate judge whom Biden formally named as his nominee for the Justice Department’s top position just hours after the insurrection, said DOJ’s efforts were “not possible without the continued assistance of the American public.”







Much of that assistance has come from people who personally knew Capitol suspects, including family members, coworkers, neighbors, Facebook frenemies, and old classmates who tipped off the FBI about the actions of someone they knew in real life.

But there’s a whole other batch of Capitol defendants who ended up on the FBI’s radar thanks to the work of someone they’d never met: anonymous online sleuths who tracked down the digital breadcrumbs that Capitol suspects had often unknowingly sprinkled across the internet.

They call themselves sedition hunters, and they have receipts. They’re members of a loosely affiliated network of motivated individuals and pop-up volunteer organizations with names like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers that developed after the Jan. 6 attack to identify the Trump supporters who organized the Capitol riot and brutalized the law enforcement officers protecting the building.

The sedition hunters scour the web for any and all photographs, videos and posts from people at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack across well-known websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter along with lesser-used sites and apps like Rumble, Gab and Telegram. They’ve got spreadsheets, Google Docs, links, bookmarks, unlisted YouTube backups, group chats and screenshots, as Joan puts it, “coming out the rear end.” They can uncover new evidence of conduct that’ll elevate a misdemeanor trespassing case into something much more serious; find the highest-quality image of a suspect that could generate new leads through facial recognition; and compile multimedia databases that turn the Jan. 6 attack into an interactive, high-stakes and soul-crushing edition of Where’s Waldo.

Some of the early Jan. 6 online sleuthing efforts, much like the early stages of the FBI investigation itself, were a bit chaotic. Some social media users started tossing out names without doing due diligence. But as the weeks and months went on, the online investigators rather swiftly professionalized, taking cues from open-source research experts like John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the open-source research organization Bellingcat. (Rule no. 1: No naming suspects on social media; read up on the Boston Marathon bombing.) The community came together on Twitter, but now much of the more sensitive work takes place in non-public spaces ― chat rooms, DM groups, shared Google documents ― where members of the community collaborate and vet tips before they send them to the feds and, in some cases, share them with reporters.


Some of the investigations, like the one that helped take down Trump fanatic Daniel Rodriguez for electroshocking D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Mike Fanone, are the work of trained researchers who prefer terms like OSINT to refer to their open-source intelligence techniques. Others, like the online sleuths who identified the man who assaulted officers with a fire extinguisher while wearing in an American flag jacket emblazoned with Trump’s name as Robert Scott Palmer, are self-described amateurs bringing their preexisting skills to the table and pick up techniques as they go along.

There are regional-focused sedition hunters like Joan, who collect evidence on Capitol rioters in their own backyards, and then there are groups that zero in on specific organizations like the Oath Keepers. There are archivists with the encyclopedic knowledge of the timeline, locations and key players in the Jan. 6 attack. There are hashtaggers who generate catchy, memorable nicknames to help the community track the actions of suspects still at large. There are the computer whizzes who create slick websites that let you explore evidence in a user-friendly format. There are the diplomats who serve as liaisons between break off groups in the larger sedition hunters network, working to ease tensions and keep everyone working together in pursuit of a common goal.

Since the Capitol attack, I’ve been in touch with dozens of investigators digging into the Capitol attack. They span the country ― from progressive enclaves to deep-red Trump territory ― and even the globe. Some of them have shared their names, others have disclosed personal details, and still others are fully anonymous sleuths I know only by their usernames, icons and investigative track records.

There’s the academic tracking down Capitol seditionists in the heart of Trump country; the woman who perfected her detective skills as she recovered from cancer surgery; the online researcher desperately trying to get someone at the FBI to accept gigabytes of Capitol videos they have scraped from the depths of the internet; the sedition hunter known by their thumbs-up emoji who’s “just helping out” because they felt a duty to their country to archive as much Jan. 6 material as possible, and is still seeing “mountains” of new material every day; the meme-making sleuth from the Hague who enjoys both hunting down insurrectionists and filming TikToks with her grandkids.

Even the spouse of a Capitol Police officer has joined in, leaning on their familiarity with the Capitol grounds and trying to channel their frustration into something productive.
Since Jan. 6, this pop-up probe launched by a ragtag group of volunteer investigators has developed into a well-oiled machine churning out leads faster than feds can pick them up. Sedition hunters are happy to help. They’d just like a little feedback.


Moving A Massive Bureaucracy

Sammy is a sedition hunter who started hunting for insurrectionists as she recovered from cancer surgery. Sammy, which is a pseudonym, found herself “immersed” in the work, which she found to be a wonderful escape from reality. “It’s a great distraction from my own worries,” she told me. “I feel like I’m doing something useful when I can’t do much of anything else.”

Yet Sammy was also growing flustered not knowing whether the tips she submitted actually ended up in the right hands. She jokingly suggested the FBI take a page from the Domino’s Tracker app, imagining getting alerts assuring her that her tips weren’t just buried in an inbox somewhere. ”1 p.m.: Agent Smith has received your tip,” she imagined they’d say. ”3:45 p.m.: Agent Smith is cross-referencing your tip.”

“Then when they actually go and get the guy, they show, like, a Google Map in real time,” she said, laughing.

There are very valid reasons that the FBI can’t go into that much detail about an unfolding investigation, of course, but tipsters still sometimes feel like the feds aren’t paying attention. The bureau has to sort through hundreds of thousands of tips, and solid leads on violent insurrectionists have been overlooked. With no feedback loop, frustrated sedition hunters have no clue what is happening behind the scenes, and are sometimes left thinking that the information they submitted to the bureau is just buried in a database somewhere.

The process between tip intake and arrest can easily stretch into weeks and months, especially given the massive backlog of tips that the FBI received in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack, when there was a 750% increase in calls and electronic tips to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center. Anonymous tips can take longer to verify than tips from those who know a suspect personally. But the feds appreciate the public’s help, and want to reassure Capitol tipsters frustrated by what those operating at internet speed see as the slow-churn of federal prosecutions and bureaucracy.

“As we have seen with dozens of cases so far, the tips matter. While it may appear that no overt law enforcement action is being taken on some tips that have been submitted, tipsters should rest assured that the FBI is working diligently behind the scenes to follow all investigative leads to verify tips from the public and bring these criminals to justice,” the FBI said in a statement to HuffPost.


Members of the public, the FBI statement said, have “provided tremendous assistance to this investigation, and we are asking for continued help to identify other individuals for their role in the violence at the U.S. Capitol.”

While the term “sedition hunters” continues to pop up in FBI affidavits, the full impact of their work often flies under the radar. Take the network’s efforts to publicize images of wanted suspects. The FBI’s Capitol Violence wanted page, which has now featured images of more than 410 suspects, has evolved past the PDF compilations the bureau was posting in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6. But the websites and easily shareable social media cards generated by the sedition hunters, which aren’t subject to the FBI’s constraints, often feature better images, more direct evidence of violence, and catchy nicknames that can generate social media discussion.

Often, witnesses have contacted the FBI about someone they know not because they saw something on the FBI’s website or social media accounts, but because they saw info generated by sedition hunters.

The FBI has long generated nicknames to increase publicity and get tips from the public, particularly for bank robbers. So far, they’ve refrained from doing so in the Capitol manhunt. (Republican trust in the FBI had plummeted even before the bureau started arresting hundreds of Trump supporters and plastering images of MAGA-hatted assailants on its website, and nicknames poking fun at Trump-loving rioters probably aren’t going to build any bridges.) Sedition hunters have no such qualms, and are happy to step into the void.

A sleuth who goes by Erica started working on hashtags after she’d begun her sedition hunting by watching video recordings of the violent attacks on police and reporters at the Capitol. That can be a disturbing exercise, she said, and some sleuths will only watch videos with the sound off. “The reality is that people did terrible, unprecedented things, and there’s a deep responsibility in trying to hold them accountable,” she said. Generating hashtags, Erica found, was a welcome break.


“It’s hard and depressing to watch these videos,” Erica said. “The hashtags, if they’re funny, help add a bit of levity.”

There was “Bald Eagle,” the guy wearing an American flag suit and an eagle mask who, when he took the mask off after joining the mob trying to push through a police line, revealed his bald head; “Tricorn Traitor” for the guy in the colonial hat; “Pippi Long Scarf” for the guy with the long scarf; “Pinky N The Brainless” for a woman with pink hair and her partner. One of the Proud Boys was designated “Ray Ban Terrorist.” (Erica ― noting his slicked back curly light brown hair ― would’ve preferred “Amber Waves Of Lame.”) The guy jumping around with friends and yelling “**** antifa” was a group effort: He had a beard that looked like a lawn ornament, so he became “Party Pants Gnome.” FBI Capitol Violence suspect no. 405 ― the woman in the red outfit wanted for assaulting officers ― became “Trumpy Valentine.”

The sedition hunters don’t have to worry much about upsetting any Trump supporters with nicknames like “Bubba Two Hat” or “Bullhorn Karen;” they may come from different backgrounds, but there aren’t many Trump fans in the mix.

The sleuths say their primary motivation is to their country, and want to bring those who participated in the riot to justice. They may take a bit of glee in how easy some of the Trump supporters made their work in some cases: Making social media posts about your commission of a federal crime probably isn’t the smartest move in the world, nor is committing crimes with your uncovered face when there was a perfectly valid reason — a mandate, in fact — to wear a mask. But they say their primary motivation and focus is getting justice for the victims of the Capitol attack and trying to ensure the violence of Jan. 6 is not repeated.

“This is not a hit job,” said a sedition hunter who goes by Dianna. “I can’t say what I’d’ve done if it had been a million women marching in pussy hats who attacked the Capitol. But guess what? That didn’t happen. We don’t live in that world.”

The ‘Holy Shit’ Moments

Joan, the mom from Pennsylvania, stumbled into the sedition hunters world by chance. Someone in the budding community reached out through a political Facebook group she runs, hoping for publicity. The internet detectives were trying to identify the man who stormed onto the floor of the U.S. Senate wearing a “Hershey Christian Academy” sweatshirt, and they thought she could help spread the word.

Joan got to work. She went to Hershey Christian Academy’s Facebook page and started digging, learning everything she could about the small school with barely a dozen staff members. It had only opened in 2019, and now ― because someone had the bright idea of breaking into the Capitol while wearing school swag ― it was at the center of the insurrection.

“I went and started looking at all the likes, all the comments. Then on every single like and comment I would go look on their profile and snoop around and say, ‘Oh, that guy’s too fat, that guy’s too bald, that guy’s too bearded, it’s not him,’” she said.

Soon she stumbled on a “pretty vanilla” Facebook profile of a man named Zeeker whose main photo was of a snowman. When she plugged Zeeker’s name into Facebook’s search bar, she turned up photos that he’d been tagged in. She realized she might just have a match. She took some screenshots, poked around his Instagram, and did a bit of Googling.

“Zeeker Bozell,” she learned, was Brent Bozell IV — as in the son of Brent Bozell III, the high-profile conservative activist and founder of the Media Research Center, and grandson of Brent Bozell Jr., the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater and supporter of Joseph McCarthy.

“Whoa,” she thought as she went down a Google rabbit hole and read his grandfather’s Wikipedia page, which laid out the family’s ties to William F. Buckley, who founded the National Review and is considered the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement. “I’ve really stumbled on something.”

“I mean, I’m just, like, a mom,” Joan later told me. “It was kind of a holy shit moment.”

The FBI enlisting the public’s help to hunt down criminals is not a new phenomenon. Even back in its early days, when it was still called the Bureau of Investigation, it crowdsourced the hunt for the people who kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby by distributing pamphlets across New York banks that listed the serial numbers for the expiring gold certificates that had been used in the ransom payoff, and eventually got a hit after a sharp gas station attendant thought to jot down a license plate number on the margin of the certificate.


By 1950, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had launched the FBI’s Most Wanted list in an effort to have the public help hunt down dangerous fugitives. During the hunt for the Unabomber in the 1990s, investigators deployed a media strategy that bumped up against internal FBI rules about how much information could be shared about an ongoing investigation, and former Attorney General Janet Reno eventually approved the task force’s decision to publish Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto in hopes of enlisting the public’s help in identifying him.

Twenty-five years after The Washington Post and New York Times published the Unabomber manifesto, Kaczynski’s worst nightmares about technology are reality. The Capitol defendants have been sucked into a digital dragnet: They’ve been captured on surveillance footage, caught on countless cell phone photos, nabbed on police body camera footage. The cell phones in their pockets, in addition to pinging towers that would allow the feds to easily pinpoint their location with a search warrant, also spewed location data to various apps like Facebook, which was not only a forum for Capitol insurrections to document their criminal activity, but also the place where they were radicalized in the first place.

The problem for the FBI isn’t a lack of leads. It’s that they’re drowning in information, and the federal bureaucracy isn’t equipped for this kind of workflow. Hundreds of thousands of tips is a lot to work through, even for a world premier law enforcement organization.

Many sleuths have adapted to the pace of federal investigations, but there are still a lot of the decisions that leave them scratching their heads. The semi-famous QAnon supporters ― previously featured on Vice News and in a HBO documentary ― who were arrested by the FBI last week? Sleuths had the husband pegged back in April after the FBI posted his photo, and wondered why the feds didn’t just Google the names in the article that featured the image. When the FBI raided the home of an Alaska woman the bureau had mistaken for another Trump supporter who’d entered the Capitol and grabbed a laptop in Nancy Pelosi’s office, online investigators didn’t get why the FBI hadn’t taken a closer look at her husband’s public Instagram page, which was cited in the search warrant and made it clear they had the wrong woman.

It’s a bit exhilarating to be a few steps ahead of an FBI investigation, to know what’s coming weeks or even months before the feds arrive at the door of a Capitol rioter. Chris Sigurdson knows the feeling better than most. The Canadian man has submitted at least half a dozen tips to the FBI, but hadn’t heard anything back from the bureau when I spoke to him in April. But his Twitter handle did pop up in an FBI affidavit without warning in February, an experience he described as “surreal.”

“If someone tried to design the whole system in which all of these sedition hunters are operating, you couldn’t create it,” Sigurdson said. “It emerged organically, not just out of this event, but from Charlottesville and that whole experience of trying to identify people involved with that.”

Sigurdson, like a lot of sedition hunters, found the initial days exhilarating. Over time, he said, the work transformed from less of a side hobby to more of an obligation. “Once I had to open up a spreadsheet so I could keep track of everything, suddenly it felt less like an online adventure game and more like an occupation,” Sigurdson said.

‘How Did You Get All Of This?’

Joan dialed in her tip to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center in mid-January, just after midnight. The bureau was completely overwhelmed in the aftermath of Jan. 6, so she was stuck on hold for about 45 minutes. She gave her info, and waited for the FBI to get in touch.

Ten days later, an FBI agent gave her a call. Joan laid everything out. What Joan called her “weird little detective hobby” had left the FBI special agent impressed. ”How did you get all of this just from seeing his picture?” she said he asked her. ”You got his whole life story!”

But the FBI was swamped. Thousands of tips were pouring in everyday, and sorting through the chaos was a logistical nightmare. The charges against Bozell wouldn’t come through for weeks. Joan had at least gotten a call back ― a real, live FBI special agent was on the case. Still, like thousands of other FBI tipsters, Joan grew a bit impatient as time dragged on. ”Come on,” she thought, ”I handed this guy to you on a silver platter! Where is his arrest?”

Finally, it happened: Leo Brent Bozell IV ― aka “Zeeker” ― was arrested, and the charges against him unsealed.





Joan kept going, taking to the broader hunt for insurrectionists with zeal as she scoured videos and followed suspects known only by a hashtag as part of the crowdsourced efforts. She kept an eye out for Bozell too, and she eventually spotted that sweatshirt again. Twice, in fact. In one video, Bozell is on the front line of the battle with police officers, attempting to rip down a tarp and let the mob through. In another, he’s smashing a Capitol window. So weeks after she helped the FBI identify Bozell, she pointed federal authorities to evidence they seem to have overlooked.


“Thank you very much for this new information,” the FBI special agent wrote in an email after Joan passed along links. “I will make sure I share this with the prosecutors in the case.”

The next day, prosecutors presented their evidence before a federal grand jury in Washington, which indicted Bozell on seven counts. Among the new felony charges: destruction of government property for breaking a window.

Joan was blown away — and a bit intimidated — by the role she’d played in identifying a member of a conservative political dynasty as a Capitol insurrectionist and helping the FBI build the case against him. A hobby Joan snuck in while taking care of her kids could land Bozell — the namesake of men who were at the forefront of America’s conservative movement for the better part of a century — in federal prison.

Joan is now all-in on her sedition hunters work. She’s got her files organized and continues sending information to the FBI, and uses an anonymous Twitter account to keep the world informed about the activities of Capitol rioters who have been charged (or who will soon be arrested). She’s mapping out the networks of Jan. 6 riot participants, including many of whom traveled to D.C. on buses paid for by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a right-wing Republican with a big Facebook following who gained notoriety by promoting Trump’s big lie about the election and is now weighing a run for governor.

“You can get really deep in there and addicted,” Joan said. “You can spend hours going down this rabbit hole.”

And she remains astonished that Bozell wore a sweatshirt bearing the name of a tiny school his child attended as he stormed the U.S. Capitol, smashed out a window, and took over the floor of the U.S. Senate in an attempt to overturn the election on behalf of Donald Trump.

“He probably would’ve gotten away with it,” Joan joked, “if it weren’t for these meddling sleuths.”

[Green Man]

06/30/2021
‘Sedition Hunters’: Meet The Online Sleuths Aiding The FBI’s Capitol Manhunt

Six months and 500 arrests into the Jan. 6 probe, a motley crew of online sleuths is generating leads, making connections, and keeping the feds on their toes.

By Ryan J. Reilly

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sedit...b653040034f749

There’s a mother and former teacher in south central Pennsylvania, a woman I’ll call Joan, who has what she calls a “weird hobby.” She’s a Facebook detective.

“Some people crochet. Some people paint. I look up people,” Joan told me. “I’m the go-to person for all my friends if they meet a new man. They’re like ‘Hey, look him up, give me all the details.’”

When an enraged mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Joan was at home watching it unfold. She was deeply upset, finding herself in tears about the violent scene transpiring over 100 miles away in the nation’s capital, which she’d visited as a kid and later on field trips with her own children. “This is not who we are as a country,” she said, before pausing and adding, “Or it’s not who we’re supposed to be.”

So just over a week after the Capitol attack, Joan was thrilled to have a new opportunity for online investigative work opportunity land in her inbox. This time, she wasn’t vetting a potential romantic interest for one of her friends. She was hunting down an insurrectionist.

It’s been nearly six months since a violent mob invaded the U.S. Capitol because they believed then-President Donald Trump’s lies about mass voter fraud and supported his efforts to toss out millions of votes and Joe Biden’s electoral victory. The feds were woefully unprepared for what Trump supporters had in store for lawmakers at the Capitol that day; shell-shocked and outnumbered law enforcement officers were overwhelmed by rioters and made only a handful of arrests. The U.S. Capitol — the closely guarded building where a cardboard protest sign or ill-timed laugh could get you led out of a congressional hearing in cuffs — had been overrun by an unruly mob. Hundreds of criminals were on the loose, spread out all across the country.

The feds have spent the first half of 2021 playing catch-up, churning out Capitol attack cases on a near-daily basis that cover behavior ranging from basic misdemeanor trespassing to brutal felony assaults on police officers. As the unprecedented probe reshapes the federal government’s approach to domestic terrorism, Justice Department officials announced last week they had cleared the benchmark of 500 arrests. Hundreds more are in the works, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said federal authorities would “continue to follow the facts in this case and charge what the evidence supports to hold all January 6th perpetrators accountable.”

Garland, the former Oklahoma City bombing prosecutor and federal appellate judge whom Biden formally named as his nominee for the Justice Department’s top position just hours after the insurrection, said DOJ’s efforts were “not possible without the continued assistance of the American public.”

Much of that assistance has come from people who personally knew Capitol suspects, including family members, coworkers, neighbors, Facebook frenemies, and old classmates who tipped off the FBI about the actions of someone they knew in real life.

But there’s a whole other batch of Capitol defendants who ended up on the FBI’s radar thanks to the work of someone they’d never met: anonymous online sleuths who tracked down the digital breadcrumbs that Capitol suspects had often unknowingly sprinkled across the internet.

They call themselves sedition hunters, and they have receipts. They’re members of a loosely affiliated network of motivated individuals and pop-up volunteer organizations with names like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers that developed after the Jan. 6 attack to identify the Trump supporters who organized the Capitol riot and brutalized the law enforcement officers protecting the building.

The sedition hunters scour the web for any and all photographs, videos and posts from people at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack across well-known websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter along with lesser-used sites and apps like Rumble, Gab and Telegram. They’ve got spreadsheets, Google Docs, links, bookmarks, unlisted YouTube backups, group chats and screenshots, as Joan puts it, “coming out the rear end.” They can uncover new evidence of conduct that’ll elevate a misdemeanor trespassing case into something much more serious; find the highest-quality image of a suspect that could generate new leads through facial recognition; and compile multimedia databases that turn the Jan. 6 attack into an interactive, high-stakes and soul-crushing edition of Where’s Waldo.

Some of the early Jan. 6 online sleuthing efforts, much like the early stages of the FBI investigation itself, were a bit chaotic. Some social media users started tossing out names without doing due diligence. But as the weeks and months went on, the online investigators rather swiftly professionalized, taking cues from open-source research experts like John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the open-source research organization Bellingcat. (Rule no. 1: No naming suspects on social media; read up on the Boston Marathon bombing.) The community came together on Twitter, but now much of the more sensitive work takes place in non-public spaces ― chat rooms, DM groups, shared Google documents ― where members of the community collaborate and vet tips before they send them to the feds and, in some cases, share them with reporters.

Some of the investigations, like the one that helped take down Trump fanatic Daniel Rodriguez for electroshocking D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Mike Fanone, are the work of trained researchers who prefer terms like OSINT to refer to their open-source intelligence techniques. Others, like the online sleuths who identified the man who assaulted officers with a fire extinguisher while wearing in an American flag jacket emblazoned with Trump’s name as Robert Scott Palmer, are self-described amateurs bringing their preexisting skills to the table and pick up techniques as they go along.

There are regional-focused sedition hunters like Joan, who collect evidence on Capitol rioters in their own backyards, and then there are groups that zero in on specific organizations like the Oath Keepers. There are archivists with the encyclopedic knowledge of the timeline, locations and key players in the Jan. 6 attack. There are hashtaggers who generate catchy, memorable nicknames to help the community track the actions of suspects still at large. There are the computer whizzes who create slick websites that let you explore evidence in a user-friendly format. There are the diplomats who serve as liaisons between break off groups in the larger sedition hunters network, working to ease tensions and keep everyone working together in pursuit of a common goal.

Since the Capitol attack, I’ve been in touch with dozens of investigators digging into the Capitol attack. They span the country ― from progressive enclaves to deep-red Trump territory ― and even the globe. Some of them have shared their names, others have disclosed personal details, and still others are fully anonymous sleuths I know only by their usernames, icons and investigative track records.

There’s the academic tracking down Capitol seditionists in the heart of Trump country; the woman who perfected her detective skills as she recovered from cancer surgery; the online researcher desperately trying to get someone at the FBI to accept gigabytes of Capitol videos they have scraped from the depths of the internet; the sedition hunter known by their thumbs-up emoji who’s “just helping out” because they felt a duty to their country to archive as much Jan. 6 material as possible, and is still seeing “mountains” of new material every day; the meme-making sleuth from the Hague who enjoys both hunting down insurrectionists and filming TikToks with her grandkids.

Even the spouse of a Capitol Police officer has joined in, leaning on their familiarity with the Capitol grounds and trying to channel their frustration into something productive.
Since Jan. 6, this pop-up probe launched by a ragtag group of volunteer investigators has developed into a well-oiled machine churning out leads faster than feds can pick them up. Sedition hunters are happy to help. They’d just like a little feedback.

Moving A Massive Bureaucracy

Sammy is a sedition hunter who started hunting for insurrectionists as she recovered from cancer surgery. Sammy, which is a pseudonym, found herself “immersed” in the work, which she found to be a wonderful escape from reality. “It’s a great distraction from my own worries,” she told me. “I feel like I’m doing something useful when I can’t do much of anything else.”

Yet Sammy was also growing flustered not knowing whether the tips she submitted actually ended up in the right hands. She jokingly suggested the FBI take a page from the Domino’s Tracker app, imagining getting alerts assuring her that her tips weren’t just buried in an inbox somewhere. ”1 p.m.: Agent Smith has received your tip,” she imagined they’d say. ”3:45 p.m.: Agent Smith is cross-referencing your tip.”

“Then when they actually go and get the guy, they show, like, a Google Map in real time,” she said, laughing.

There are very valid reasons that the FBI can’t go into that much detail about an unfolding investigation, of course, but tipsters still sometimes feel like the feds aren’t paying attention. The bureau has to sort through hundreds of thousands of tips, and solid leads on violent insurrectionists have been overlooked. With no feedback loop, frustrated sedition hunters have no clue what is happening behind the scenes, and are sometimes left thinking that the information they submitted to the bureau is just buried in a database somewhere.

The process between tip intake and arrest can easily stretch into weeks and months, especially given the massive backlog of tips that the FBI received in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack, when there was a 750% increase in calls and electronic tips to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center. Anonymous tips can take longer to verify than tips from those who know a suspect personally. But the feds appreciate the public’s help, and want to reassure Capitol tipsters frustrated by what those operating at internet speed see as the slow-churn of federal prosecutions and bureaucracy.

“As we have seen with dozens of cases so far, the tips matter. While it may appear that no overt law enforcement action is being taken on some tips that have been submitted, tipsters should rest assured that the FBI is working diligently behind the scenes to follow all investigative leads to verify tips from the public and bring these criminals to justice,” the FBI said in a statement to HuffPost.

Members of the public, the FBI statement said, have “provided tremendous assistance to this investigation, and we are asking for continued help to identify other individuals for their role in the violence at the U.S. Capitol.”

While the term “sedition hunters” continues to pop up in FBI affidavits, the full impact of their work often flies under the radar. Take the network’s efforts to publicize images of wanted suspects. The FBI’s Capitol Violence wanted page, which has now featured images of more than 410 suspects, has evolved past the PDF compilations the bureau was posting in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6. But the websites and easily shareable social media cards generated by the sedition hunters, which aren’t subject to the FBI’s constraints, often feature better images, more direct evidence of violence, and catchy nicknames that can generate social media discussion.

Often, witnesses have contacted the FBI about someone they know not because they saw something on the FBI’s website or social media accounts, but because they saw info generated by sedition hunters.

The FBI has long generated nicknames to increase publicity and get tips from the public, particularly for bank robbers. So far, they’ve refrained from doing so in the Capitol manhunt. (Republican trust in the FBI had plummeted even before the bureau started arresting hundreds of Trump supporters and plastering images of MAGA-hatted assailants on its website, and nicknames poking fun at Trump-loving rioters probably aren’t going to build any bridges.) Sedition hunters have no such qualms, and are happy to step into the void.

A sleuth who goes by Erica started working on hashtags after she’d begun her sedition hunting by watching video recordings of the violent attacks on police and reporters at the Capitol. That can be a disturbing exercise, she said, and some sleuths will only watch videos with the sound off. “The reality is that people did terrible, unprecedented things, and there’s a deep responsibility in trying to hold them accountable,” she said. Generating hashtags, Erica found, was a welcome break.

“It’s hard and depressing to watch these videos,” Erica said. “The hashtags, if they’re funny, help add a bit of levity.”

There was “Bald Eagle,” the guy wearing an American flag suit and an eagle mask who, when he took the mask off after joining the mob trying to push through a police line, revealed his bald head; “Tricorn Traitor” for the guy in the colonial hat; “Pippi Long Scarf” for the guy with the long scarf; “Pinky N The Brainless” for a woman with pink hair and her partner. One of the Proud Boys was designated “Ray Ban Terrorist.” (Erica ― noting his slicked back curly light brown hair ― would’ve preferred “Amber Waves Of Lame.”) The guy jumping around with friends and yelling “**** antifa” was a group effort: He had a beard that looked like a lawn ornament, so he became “Party Pants Gnome.” FBI Capitol Violence suspect no. 405 ― the woman in the red outfit wanted for assaulting officers ― became “Trumpy Valentine.”

The sedition hunters don’t have to worry much about upsetting any Trump supporters with nicknames like “Bubba Two Hat” or “Bullhorn Karen;” they may come from different backgrounds, but there aren’t many Trump fans in the mix.

The sleuths say their primary motivation is to their country, and want to bring those who participated in the riot to justice. They may take a bit of glee in how easy some of the Trump supporters made their work in some cases: Making social media posts about your commission of a federal crime probably isn’t the smartest move in the world, nor is committing crimes with your uncovered face when there was a perfectly valid reason — a mandate, in fact — to wear a mask. But they say their primary motivation and focus is getting justice for the victims of the Capitol attack and trying to ensure the violence of Jan. 6 is not repeated.

“This is not a hit job,” said a sedition hunter who goes by Dianna. “I can’t say what I’d’ve done if it had been a million women marching in pussy hats who attacked the Capitol. But guess what? That didn’t happen. We don’t live in that world.”

The ‘Holy Shit’ Moments

Joan, the mom from Pennsylvania, stumbled into the sedition hunters world by chance. Someone in the budding community reached out through a political Facebook group she runs, hoping for publicity. The internet detectives were trying to identify the man who stormed onto the floor of the U.S. Senate wearing a “Hershey Christian Academy” sweatshirt, and they thought she could help spread the word.

Joan got to work. She went to Hershey Christian Academy’s Facebook page and started digging, learning everything she could about the small school with barely a dozen staff members. It had only opened in 2019, and now ― because someone had the bright idea of breaking into the Capitol while wearing school swag ― it was at the center of the insurrection.

“I went and started looking at all the likes, all the comments. Then on every single like and comment I would go look on their profile and snoop around and say, ‘Oh, that guy’s too fat, that guy’s too bald, that guy’s too bearded, it’s not him,’” she said.

Soon she stumbled on a “pretty vanilla” Facebook profile of a man named Zeeker whose main photo was of a snowman. When she plugged Zeeker’s name into Facebook’s search bar, she turned up photos that he’d been tagged in. She realized she might just have a match. She took some screenshots, poked around his Instagram, and did a bit of Googling.

“Zeeker Bozell,” she learned, was Brent Bozell IV — as in the son of Brent Bozell III, the high-profile conservative activist and founder of the Media Research Center, and grandson of Brent Bozell Jr., the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater and supporter of Joseph McCarthy.

“Whoa,” she thought as she went down a Google rabbit hole and read his grandfather’s Wikipedia page, which laid out the family’s ties to William F. Buckley, who founded the National Review and is considered the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement. “I’ve really stumbled on something.”

“I mean, I’m just, like, a mom,” Joan later told me. “It was kind of a holy shit moment.”

The FBI enlisting the public’s help to hunt down criminals is not a new phenomenon. Even back in its early days, when it was still called the Bureau of Investigation, it crowdsourced the hunt for the people who kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby by distributing pamphlets across New York banks that listed the serial numbers for the expiring gold certificates that had been used in the ransom payoff, and eventually got a hit after a sharp gas station attendant thought to jot down a license plate number on the margin of the certificate.

By 1950, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had launched the FBI’s Most Wanted list in an effort to have the public help hunt down dangerous fugitives. During the hunt for the Unabomber in the 1990s, investigators deployed a media strategy that bumped up against internal FBI rules about how much information could be shared about an ongoing investigation, and former Attorney General Janet Reno eventually approved the task force’s decision to publish Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto in hopes of enlisting the public’s help in identifying him.

Twenty-five years after The Washington Post and New York Times published the Unabomber manifesto, Kaczynski’s worst nightmares about technology are reality. The Capitol defendants have been sucked into a digital dragnet: They’ve been captured on surveillance footage, caught on countless cell phone photos, nabbed on police body camera footage. The cell phones in their pockets, in addition to pinging towers that would allow the feds to easily pinpoint their location with a search warrant, also spewed location data to various apps like Facebook, which was not only a forum for Capitol insurrections to document their criminal activity, but also the place where they were radicalized in the first place.

The problem for the FBI isn’t a lack of leads. It’s that they’re drowning in information, and the federal bureaucracy isn’t equipped for this kind of workflow. Hundreds of thousands of tips is a lot to work through, even for a world premier law enforcement organization.

Many sleuths have adapted to the pace of federal investigations, but there are still a lot of the decisions that leave them scratching their heads. The semi-famous QAnon supporters ― previously featured on Vice News and in a HBO documentary ― who were arrested by the FBI last week? Sleuths had the husband pegged back in April after the FBI posted his photo, and wondered why the feds didn’t just Google the names in the article that featured the image. When the FBI raided the home of an Alaska woman the bureau had mistaken for another Trump supporter who’d entered the Capitol and grabbed a laptop in Nancy Pelosi’s office, online investigators didn’t get why the FBI hadn’t taken a closer look at her husband’s public Instagram page, which was cited in the search warrant and made it clear they had the wrong woman.

It’s a bit exhilarating to be a few steps ahead of an FBI investigation, to know what’s coming weeks or even months before the feds arrive at the door of a Capitol rioter. Chris Sigurdson knows the feeling better than most. The Canadian man has submitted at least half a dozen tips to the FBI, but hadn’t heard anything back from the bureau when I spoke to him in April. But his Twitter handle did pop up in an FBI affidavit without warning in February, an experience he described as “surreal.”

“If someone tried to design the whole system in which all of these sedition hunters are operating, you couldn’t create it,” Sigurdson said. “It emerged organically, not just out of this event, but from Charlottesville and that whole experience of trying to identify people involved with that.”

Sigurdson, like a lot of sedition hunters, found the initial days exhilarating. Over time, he said, the work transformed from less of a side hobby to more of an obligation. “Once I had to open up a spreadsheet so I could keep track of everything, suddenly it felt less like an online adventure game and more like an occupation,” Sigurdson said.

‘How Did You Get All Of This?’

Joan dialed in her tip to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center in mid-January, just after midnight. The bureau was completely overwhelmed in the aftermath of Jan. 6, so she was stuck on hold for about 45 minutes. She gave her info, and waited for the FBI to get in touch.

Ten days later, an FBI agent gave her a call. Joan laid everything out. What Joan called her “weird little detective hobby” had left the FBI special agent impressed. ”How did you get all of this just from seeing his picture?” she said he asked her. ”You got his whole life story!”

But the FBI was swamped. Thousands of tips were pouring in everyday, and sorting through the chaos was a logistical nightmare. The charges against Bozell wouldn’t come through for weeks. Joan had at least gotten a call back ― a real, live FBI special agent was on the case. Still, like thousands of other FBI tipsters, Joan grew a bit impatient as time dragged on. ”Come on,” she thought, ”I handed this guy to you on a silver platter! Where is his arrest?”

Finally, it happened: Leo Brent Bozell IV ― aka “Zeeker” ― was arrested, and the charges against him unsealed.

Joan kept going, taking to the broader hunt for insurrectionists with zeal as she scoured videos and followed suspects known only by a hashtag as part of the crowdsourced efforts. She kept an eye out for Bozell too, and she eventually spotted that sweatshirt again. Twice, in fact. In one video, Bozell is on the front line of the battle with police officers, attempting to rip down a tarp and let the mob through. In another, he’s smashing a Capitol window. So weeks after she helped the FBI identify Bozell, she pointed federal authorities to evidence they seem to have overlooked.

“Thank you very much for this new information,” the FBI special agent wrote in an email after Joan passed along links. “I will make sure I share this with the prosecutors in the case.”

The next day, prosecutors presented their evidence before a federal grand jury in Washington, which indicted Bozell on seven counts. Among the new felony charges: destruction of government property for breaking a window.

Joan was blown away — and a bit intimidated — by the role she’d played in identifying a member of a conservative political dynasty as a Capitol insurrectionist and helping the FBI build the case against him. A hobby Joan snuck in while taking care of her kids could land Bozell — the namesake of men who were at the forefront of America’s conservative movement for the better part of a century — in federal prison.

Joan is now all-in on her sedition hunters work. She’s got her files organized and continues sending information to the FBI, and uses an anonymous Twitter account to keep the world informed about the activities of Capitol rioters who have been charged (or who will soon be arrested). She’s mapping out the networks of Jan. 6 riot participants, including many of whom traveled to D.C. on buses paid for by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a right-wing Republican with a big Facebook following who gained notoriety by promoting Trump’s big lie about the election and is now weighing a run for governor.

“You can get really deep in there and addicted,” Joan said. “You can spend hours going down this rabbit hole.”

And she remains astonished that Bozell wore a sweatshirt bearing the name of a tiny school his child attended as he stormed the U.S. Capitol, smashed out a window, and took over the floor of the U.S. Senate in an attempt to overturn the election on behalf of Donald Trump.

“He probably would’ve gotten away with it,” Joan joked, “if it weren’t for these meddling sleuths.”

[merovingian]

‘Sedition Hunters’: Meet The Online Sleuths Aiding The FBI’s Capitol Manhunt

Amendment 1
- Freedom of Religion, Speech, and the Press

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Which is NOT sedition.

[lonewolfinoregon]

06/30/2021
‘Sedition Hunters’: Meet The Online Sleuths Aiding The FBI’s Capitol Manhunt

Six months and 500 arrests into the Jan. 6 probe, a motley crew of online sleuths is generating leads, making connections, and keeping the feds on their toes.

By Ryan J. Reilly

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sedit...b653040034f749

There’s a mother and former teacher in south central Pennsylvania, a woman I’ll call Joan, who has what she calls a “weird hobby.” She’s a Facebook detective.

“Some people crochet. Some people paint. I look up people,” Joan told me. “I’m the go-to person for all my friends if they meet a new man. They’re like ‘Hey, look him up, give me all the details.’”

When an enraged mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Joan was at home watching it unfold. She was deeply upset, finding herself in tears about the violent scene transpiring over 100 miles away in the nation’s capital, which she’d visited as a kid and later on field trips with her own children. “This is not who we are as a country,” she said, before pausing and adding, “Or it’s not who we’re supposed to be.”

So just over a week after the Capitol attack, Joan was thrilled to have a new opportunity for online investigative work opportunity land in her inbox. This time, she wasn’t vetting a potential romantic interest for one of her friends. She was hunting down an insurrectionist.

It’s been nearly six months since a violent mob invaded the U.S. Capitol because they believed then-President Donald Trump’s lies about mass voter fraud and supported his efforts to toss out millions of votes and Joe Biden’s electoral victory. The feds were woefully unprepared for what Trump supporters had in store for lawmakers at the Capitol that day; shell-shocked and outnumbered law enforcement officers were overwhelmed by rioters and made only a handful of arrests. The U.S. Capitol — the closely guarded building where a cardboard protest sign or ill-timed laugh could get you led out of a congressional hearing in cuffs — had been overrun by an unruly mob. Hundreds of criminals were on the loose, spread out all across the country.

The feds have spent the first half of 2021 playing catch-up, churning out Capitol attack cases on a near-daily basis that cover behavior ranging from basic misdemeanor trespassing to brutal felony assaults on police officers. As the unprecedented probe reshapes the federal government’s approach to domestic terrorism, Justice Department officials announced last week they had cleared the benchmark of 500 arrests. Hundreds more are in the works, and Attorney General Merrick Garland said federal authorities would “continue to follow the facts in this case and charge what the evidence supports to hold all January 6th perpetrators accountable.”

Garland, the former Oklahoma City bombing prosecutor and federal appellate judge whom Biden formally named as his nominee for the Justice Department’s top position just hours after the insurrection, said DOJ’s efforts were “not possible without the continued assistance of the American public.”

Much of that assistance has come from people who personally knew Capitol suspects, including family members, coworkers, neighbors, Facebook frenemies, and old classmates who tipped off the FBI about the actions of someone they knew in real life.

But there’s a whole other batch of Capitol defendants who ended up on the FBI’s radar thanks to the work of someone they’d never met: anonymous online sleuths who tracked down the digital breadcrumbs that Capitol suspects had often unknowingly sprinkled across the internet.

They call themselves sedition hunters, and they have receipts. They’re members of a loosely affiliated network of motivated individuals and pop-up volunteer organizations with names like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers that developed after the Jan. 6 attack to identify the Trump supporters who organized the Capitol riot and brutalized the law enforcement officers protecting the building.

The sedition hunters scour the web for any and all photographs, videos and posts from people at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack across well-known websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter along with lesser-used sites and apps like Rumble, Gab and Telegram. They’ve got spreadsheets, Google Docs, links, bookmarks, unlisted YouTube backups, group chats and screenshots, as Joan puts it, “coming out the rear end.” They can uncover new evidence of conduct that’ll elevate a misdemeanor trespassing case into something much more serious; find the highest-quality image of a suspect that could generate new leads through facial recognition; and compile multimedia databases that turn the Jan. 6 attack into an interactive, high-stakes and soul-crushing edition of Where’s Waldo.

Some of the early Jan. 6 online sleuthing efforts, much like the early stages of the FBI investigation itself, were a bit chaotic. Some social media users started tossing out names without doing due diligence. But as the weeks and months went on, the online investigators rather swiftly professionalized, taking cues from open-source research experts like John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the open-source research organization Bellingcat. (Rule no. 1: No naming suspects on social media; read up on the Boston Marathon bombing.) The community came together on Twitter, but now much of the more sensitive work takes place in non-public spaces ― chat rooms, DM groups, shared Google documents ― where members of the community collaborate and vet tips before they send them to the feds and, in some cases, share them with reporters.

Some of the investigations, like the one that helped take down Trump fanatic Daniel Rodriguez for electroshocking D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Mike Fanone, are the work of trained researchers who prefer terms like OSINT to refer to their open-source intelligence techniques. Others, like the online sleuths who identified the man who assaulted officers with a fire extinguisher while wearing in an American flag jacket emblazoned with Trump’s name as Robert Scott Palmer, are self-described amateurs bringing their preexisting skills to the table and pick up techniques as they go along.

There are regional-focused sedition hunters like Joan, who collect evidence on Capitol rioters in their own backyards, and then there are groups that zero in on specific organizations like the Oath Keepers. There are archivists with the encyclopedic knowledge of the timeline, locations and key players in the Jan. 6 attack. There are hashtaggers who generate catchy, memorable nicknames to help the community track the actions of suspects still at large. There are the computer whizzes who create slick websites that let you explore evidence in a user-friendly format. There are the diplomats who serve as liaisons between break off groups in the larger sedition hunters network, working to ease tensions and keep everyone working together in pursuit of a common goal.

Since the Capitol attack, I’ve been in touch with dozens of investigators digging into the Capitol attack. They span the country ― from progressive enclaves to deep-red Trump territory ― and even the globe. Some of them have shared their names, others have disclosed personal details, and still others are fully anonymous sleuths I know only by their usernames, icons and investigative track records.

There’s the academic tracking down Capitol seditionists in the heart of Trump country; the woman who perfected her detective skills as she recovered from cancer surgery; the online researcher desperately trying to get someone at the FBI to accept gigabytes of Capitol videos they have scraped from the depths of the internet; the sedition hunter known by their thumbs-up emoji who’s “just helping out” because they felt a duty to their country to archive as much Jan. 6 material as possible, and is still seeing “mountains” of new material every day; the meme-making sleuth from the Hague who enjoys both hunting down insurrectionists and filming TikToks with her grandkids.

Even the spouse of a Capitol Police officer has joined in, leaning on their familiarity with the Capitol grounds and trying to channel their frustration into something productive.
Since Jan. 6, this pop-up probe launched by a ragtag group of volunteer investigators has developed into a well-oiled machine churning out leads faster than feds can pick them up. Sedition hunters are happy to help. They’d just like a little feedback.

Moving A Massive Bureaucracy

Sammy is a sedition hunter who started hunting for insurrectionists as she recovered from cancer surgery. Sammy, which is a pseudonym, found herself “immersed” in the work, which she found to be a wonderful escape from reality. “It’s a great distraction from my own worries,” she told me. “I feel like I’m doing something useful when I can’t do much of anything else.”

Yet Sammy was also growing flustered not knowing whether the tips she submitted actually ended up in the right hands. She jokingly suggested the FBI take a page from the Domino’s Tracker app, imagining getting alerts assuring her that her tips weren’t just buried in an inbox somewhere. ”1 p.m.: Agent Smith has received your tip,” she imagined they’d say. ”3:45 p.m.: Agent Smith is cross-referencing your tip.”

“Then when they actually go and get the guy, they show, like, a Google Map in real time,” she said, laughing.

There are very valid reasons that the FBI can’t go into that much detail about an unfolding investigation, of course, but tipsters still sometimes feel like the feds aren’t paying attention. The bureau has to sort through hundreds of thousands of tips, and solid leads on violent insurrectionists have been overlooked. With no feedback loop, frustrated sedition hunters have no clue what is happening behind the scenes, and are sometimes left thinking that the information they submitted to the bureau is just buried in a database somewhere.

The process between tip intake and arrest can easily stretch into weeks and months, especially given the massive backlog of tips that the FBI received in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack, when there was a 750% increase in calls and electronic tips to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center. Anonymous tips can take longer to verify than tips from those who know a suspect personally. But the feds appreciate the public’s help, and want to reassure Capitol tipsters frustrated by what those operating at internet speed see as the slow-churn of federal prosecutions and bureaucracy.

“As we have seen with dozens of cases so far, the tips matter. While it may appear that no overt law enforcement action is being taken on some tips that have been submitted, tipsters should rest assured that the FBI is working diligently behind the scenes to follow all investigative leads to verify tips from the public and bring these criminals to justice,” the FBI said in a statement to HuffPost.

Members of the public, the FBI statement said, have “provided tremendous assistance to this investigation, and we are asking for continued help to identify other individuals for their role in the violence at the U.S. Capitol.”

While the term “sedition hunters” continues to pop up in FBI affidavits, the full impact of their work often flies under the radar. Take the network’s efforts to publicize images of wanted suspects. The FBI’s Capitol Violence wanted page, which has now featured images of more than 410 suspects, has evolved past the PDF compilations the bureau was posting in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6. But the websites and easily shareable social media cards generated by the sedition hunters, which aren’t subject to the FBI’s constraints, often feature better images, more direct evidence of violence, and catchy nicknames that can generate social media discussion.

Often, witnesses have contacted the FBI about someone they know not because they saw something on the FBI’s website or social media accounts, but because they saw info generated by sedition hunters.

The FBI has long generated nicknames to increase publicity and get tips from the public, particularly for bank robbers. So far, they’ve refrained from doing so in the Capitol manhunt. (Republican trust in the FBI had plummeted even before the bureau started arresting hundreds of Trump supporters and plastering images of MAGA-hatted assailants on its website, and nicknames poking fun at Trump-loving rioters probably aren’t going to build any bridges.) Sedition hunters have no such qualms, and are happy to step into the void.

A sleuth who goes by Erica started working on hashtags after she’d begun her sedition hunting by watching video recordings of the violent attacks on police and reporters at the Capitol. That can be a disturbing exercise, she said, and some sleuths will only watch videos with the sound off. “The reality is that people did terrible, unprecedented things, and there’s a deep responsibility in trying to hold them accountable,” she said. Generating hashtags, Erica found, was a welcome break.

“It’s hard and depressing to watch these videos,” Erica said. “The hashtags, if they’re funny, help add a bit of levity.”

There was “Bald Eagle,” the guy wearing an American flag suit and an eagle mask who, when he took the mask off after joining the mob trying to push through a police line, revealed his bald head; “Tricorn Traitor” for the guy in the colonial hat; “Pippi Long Scarf” for the guy with the long scarf; “Pinky N The Brainless” for a woman with pink hair and her partner. One of the Proud Boys was designated “Ray Ban Terrorist.” (Erica ― noting his slicked back curly light brown hair ― would’ve preferred “Amber Waves Of Lame.”) The guy jumping around with friends and yelling “**** antifa” was a group effort: He had a beard that looked like a lawn ornament, so he became “Party Pants Gnome.” FBI Capitol Violence suspect no. 405 ― the woman in the red outfit wanted for assaulting officers ― became “Trumpy Valentine.”

The sedition hunters don’t have to worry much about upsetting any Trump supporters with nicknames like “Bubba Two Hat” or “Bullhorn Karen;” they may come from different backgrounds, but there aren’t many Trump fans in the mix.

The sleuths say their primary motivation is to their country, and want to bring those who participated in the riot to justice. They may take a bit of glee in how easy some of the Trump supporters made their work in some cases: Making social media posts about your commission of a federal crime probably isn’t the smartest move in the world, nor is committing crimes with your uncovered face when there was a perfectly valid reason — a mandate, in fact — to wear a mask. But they say their primary motivation and focus is getting justice for the victims of the Capitol attack and trying to ensure the violence of Jan. 6 is not repeated.

“This is not a hit job,” said a sedition hunter who goes by Dianna. “I can’t say what I’d’ve done if it had been a million women marching in pussy hats who attacked the Capitol. But guess what? That didn’t happen. We don’t live in that world.”

The ‘Holy Shit’ Moments

Joan, the mom from Pennsylvania, stumbled into the sedition hunters world by chance. Someone in the budding community reached out through a political Facebook group she runs, hoping for publicity. The internet detectives were trying to identify the man who stormed onto the floor of the U.S. Senate wearing a “Hershey Christian Academy” sweatshirt, and they thought she could help spread the word.

Joan got to work. She went to Hershey Christian Academy’s Facebook page and started digging, learning everything she could about the small school with barely a dozen staff members. It had only opened in 2019, and now ― because someone had the bright idea of breaking into the Capitol while wearing school swag ― it was at the center of the insurrection.

“I went and started looking at all the likes, all the comments. Then on every single like and comment I would go look on their profile and snoop around and say, ‘Oh, that guy’s too fat, that guy’s too bald, that guy’s too bearded, it’s not him,’” she said.

Soon she stumbled on a “pretty vanilla” Facebook profile of a man named Zeeker whose main photo was of a snowman. When she plugged Zeeker’s name into Facebook’s search bar, she turned up photos that he’d been tagged in. She realized she might just have a match. She took some screenshots, poked around his Instagram, and did a bit of Googling.

“Zeeker Bozell,” she learned, was Brent Bozell IV — as in the son of Brent Bozell III, the high-profile conservative activist and founder of the Media Research Center, and grandson of Brent Bozell Jr., the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater and supporter of Joseph McCarthy.

“Whoa,” she thought as she went down a Google rabbit hole and read his grandfather’s Wikipedia page, which laid out the family’s ties to William F. Buckley, who founded the National Review and is considered the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement. “I’ve really stumbled on something.”

“I mean, I’m just, like, a mom,” Joan later told me. “It was kind of a holy shit moment.”

The FBI enlisting the public’s help to hunt down criminals is not a new phenomenon. Even back in its early days, when it was still called the Bureau of Investigation, it crowdsourced the hunt for the people who kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby by distributing pamphlets across New York banks that listed the serial numbers for the expiring gold certificates that had been used in the ransom payoff, and eventually got a hit after a sharp gas station attendant thought to jot down a license plate number on the margin of the certificate.

By 1950, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had launched the FBI’s Most Wanted list in an effort to have the public help hunt down dangerous fugitives. During the hunt for the Unabomber in the 1990s, investigators deployed a media strategy that bumped up against internal FBI rules about how much information could be shared about an ongoing investigation, and former Attorney General Janet Reno eventually approved the task force’s decision to publish Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto in hopes of enlisting the public’s help in identifying him.

Twenty-five years after The Washington Post and New York Times published the Unabomber manifesto, Kaczynski’s worst nightmares about technology are reality. The Capitol defendants have been sucked into a digital dragnet: They’ve been captured on surveillance footage, caught on countless cell phone photos, nabbed on police body camera footage. The cell phones in their pockets, in addition to pinging towers that would allow the feds to easily pinpoint their location with a search warrant, also spewed location data to various apps like Facebook, which was not only a forum for Capitol insurrections to document their criminal activity, but also the place where they were radicalized in the first place.

The problem for the FBI isn’t a lack of leads. It’s that they’re drowning in information, and the federal bureaucracy isn’t equipped for this kind of workflow. Hundreds of thousands of tips is a lot to work through, even for a world premier law enforcement organization.

Many sleuths have adapted to the pace of federal investigations, but there are still a lot of the decisions that leave them scratching their heads. The semi-famous QAnon supporters ― previously featured on Vice News and in a HBO documentary ― who were arrested by the FBI last week? Sleuths had the husband pegged back in April after the FBI posted his photo, and wondered why the feds didn’t just Google the names in the article that featured the image. When the FBI raided the home of an Alaska woman the bureau had mistaken for another Trump supporter who’d entered the Capitol and grabbed a laptop in Nancy Pelosi’s office, online investigators didn’t get why the FBI hadn’t taken a closer look at her husband’s public Instagram page, which was cited in the search warrant and made it clear they had the wrong woman.

It’s a bit exhilarating to be a few steps ahead of an FBI investigation, to know what’s coming weeks or even months before the feds arrive at the door of a Capitol rioter. Chris Sigurdson knows the feeling better than most. The Canadian man has submitted at least half a dozen tips to the FBI, but hadn’t heard anything back from the bureau when I spoke to him in April. But his Twitter handle did pop up in an FBI affidavit without warning in February, an experience he described as “surreal.”

“If someone tried to design the whole system in which all of these sedition hunters are operating, you couldn’t create it,” Sigurdson said. “It emerged organically, not just out of this event, but from Charlottesville and that whole experience of trying to identify people involved with that.”

Sigurdson, like a lot of sedition hunters, found the initial days exhilarating. Over time, he said, the work transformed from less of a side hobby to more of an obligation. “Once I had to open up a spreadsheet so I could keep track of everything, suddenly it felt less like an online adventure game and more like an occupation,” Sigurdson said.

‘How Did You Get All Of This?’

Joan dialed in her tip to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center in mid-January, just after midnight. The bureau was completely overwhelmed in the aftermath of Jan. 6, so she was stuck on hold for about 45 minutes. She gave her info, and waited for the FBI to get in touch.

Ten days later, an FBI agent gave her a call. Joan laid everything out. What Joan called her “weird little detective hobby” had left the FBI special agent impressed. ”How did you get all of this just from seeing his picture?” she said he asked her. ”You got his whole life story!”

But the FBI was swamped. Thousands of tips were pouring in everyday, and sorting through the chaos was a logistical nightmare. The charges against Bozell wouldn’t come through for weeks. Joan had at least gotten a call back ― a real, live FBI special agent was on the case. Still, like thousands of other FBI tipsters, Joan grew a bit impatient as time dragged on. ”Come on,” she thought, ”I handed this guy to you on a silver platter! Where is his arrest?”

Finally, it happened: Leo Brent Bozell IV ― aka “Zeeker” ― was arrested, and the charges against him unsealed.

Joan kept going, taking to the broader hunt for insurrectionists with zeal as she scoured videos and followed suspects known only by a hashtag as part of the crowdsourced efforts. She kept an eye out for Bozell too, and she eventually spotted that sweatshirt again. Twice, in fact. In one video, Bozell is on the front line of the battle with police officers, attempting to rip down a tarp and let the mob through. In another, he’s smashing a Capitol window. So weeks after she helped the FBI identify Bozell, she pointed federal authorities to evidence they seem to have overlooked.

“Thank you very much for this new information,” the FBI special agent wrote in an email after Joan passed along links. “I will make sure I share this with the prosecutors in the case.”

The next day, prosecutors presented their evidence before a federal grand jury in Washington, which indicted Bozell on seven counts. Among the new felony charges: destruction of government property for breaking a window.

Joan was blown away — and a bit intimidated — by the role she’d played in identifying a member of a conservative political dynasty as a Capitol insurrectionist and helping the FBI build the case against him. A hobby Joan snuck in while taking care of her kids could land Bozell — the namesake of men who were at the forefront of America’s conservative movement for the better part of a century — in federal prison.

Joan is now all-in on her sedition hunters work. She’s got her files organized and continues sending information to the FBI, and uses an anonymous Twitter account to keep the world informed about the activities of Capitol rioters who have been charged (or who will soon be arrested). She’s mapping out the networks of Jan. 6 riot participants, including many of whom traveled to D.C. on buses paid for by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a right-wing Republican with a big Facebook following who gained notoriety by promoting Trump’s big lie about the election and is now weighing a run for governor.

“You can get really deep in there and addicted,” Joan said. “You can spend hours going down this rabbit hole.”

And she remains astonished that Bozell wore a sweatshirt bearing the name of a tiny school his child attended as he stormed the U.S. Capitol, smashed out a window, and took over the floor of the U.S. Senate in an attempt to overturn the election on behalf of Donald Trump.

“He probably would’ve gotten away with it,” Joan joked, “if it weren’t for these meddling sleuths.”

And the only charges are trespassing..

No insurrection charges no murder charges.

Means 99.9% of the claims by you and your marxist, communist, and socialist allies are "LIES".

It's clear you would have been a British loyalist during the revolutionary war. Member of the Bolishiviks in Russia's revolution.