Capitol insurgents were volunteer FBI informants

On themselves!

Two arrests were made yesterday in the death of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick.  Julian Elie Khater of Pennsylvania and George Pierre Tanios of Morgantown, W.Va., and were expected to appear in federal court today, according to a story published in the Washington Post.  They were charged with assaulting three officers with a deadly weapon, allegedly a highly toxic chemical “bear spray” they used to spray in the faces of the officers.  Sicknick later went back to his police office and collapsed.  He was taken to a nearby hospital where he died the next day. 

You want to know how the FBI identified them?  They were recorded on cell phones in the act of spraying Sicknick and the other officers at the lower west terrace of the Capitol where the officers were standing guard behind metal police barriers.  “Give me that bear shit,” Khater told Tanios on the video.  “Hold on, hold on, not yet, not yet,” Tanios is seen replying. “It’s still early.”  Prosecutors are using the exchange between the two men to establish that they were “working in concert and had a plan to use the toxic spray against law enforcement.”

Over 300 arrests have been made so far in the assault on the Capitol, with at least 100 more expected to be made in the coming days, according to an FBI spokesman.  The FBI is following more than 270,000 “digital media tips.”  FBI Director Christopher Wray testified last week that “we have identified hundreds of suspects and opened hundreds of investigations in all but one of our 56 field offices.”

The investigation was described last week as “the most complex investigation ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice.”  The FBI has served over 900 search warrants and collected more than 1500 hours of video footage shot during the Capitol attack.  They have collected more than 1600 “electronic devices” and conducted hundreds of searches of “electronic communications providers.”

You know what all this legalese means, don’t you?  The FBI has been watching footage recorded by the insurgents themselves on their own cell phones, which federal law enforcement officers are rounding up by the thousands. 

Remember FISA warrants, so famously sought by the Bureau in its investigation of the connections between the Trump campaign and Russians?  No FISA warrants this time!  All the FBI has had to do in many cases is sit down and go through the same footage used in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump in order to make arrests of the loons who attacked the Capitol on January 6. 

The Capitol insurgents, including the more than 46 arrested who have connections to white supremacist and other extremist groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters, did the FBI the great favor of surveilling themselves as they launched assaults on police officers with axe handles, metal pipes, flag poles, and sledge hammers.

Irony has piled upon irony over the last weeks as the FBI has fanned out around the country making arrests.  If the FBI had clandestinely surveilled and photographed the militia groups who attacked the Capitol, we would be hearing screams of “intimidation tactics” and “targeting conservatives” from Republicans on Capitol Hill.  But not this time.  The FBI didn’t need warrants to surveil the Capitol attackers.  That task was handled for them by the insurgents themselves.

You have to wonder what these lunatics were thinking.  The FBI has footage of insurgents breaking into the Capitol building, into the Senate chamber, chasing Capitol police officers through the building and attacking them with metal batons and flag poles, in one case, a flag pole holding an American flag.  They even have footage of the footage – shots taken by insurgents showing other insurgents using their cell phones to record the attacks.

These guys – in most but not all cases it was men doing the damage – were in the process of committing some serious federal crimes:  assaults on police officers, destruction of federal property, interference with the legitimate business of the Congress of the United States.  Why didn’t they think they needed to take precautions against getting caught?

I’ll tell you why.  Because they thought their skin color would protect them.  They thought that the inherently white structure of law enforcement in this country, and the inherently white structure of prosecutors and courts, would end up giving them a pass.  They were almost right.  As we saw in comments by right-wing loons like Ron Johnson, senator from Wisconsin, he would have been a lot more “concerned” if the attackers had been from Black Lives Matter, rather than the "people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law."  Those are the attackers he’s referring to, of course.  The ones waving Trump flags as they called for the hanging of Mike Pence and used the same flag poles to beat police officers.

The 300 arrested so far in the Capitol attack were more interested in bragging to each other about what they had done by sharing their cell phone videos on social media like Facebook and Twitter than they were in protecting themselves from prosecution.  That’s why they have been standing before federal judges around the country and listening as charges are read out to them.  That’s why at least a percentage of them currently find themselves behind bars.

Some of them, like the so-called “QAnon Shaman” and the guy photographed sitting behind a desk in the office of Nancy Pelosi, actually thought Donald Trump would pardon them. 

He probably would have if he had more time, or if more of them had been arrested by the time he left office.  But he didn’t. 

They were the stars of their own videos until they became the FBI’s stars in cell phone footage shown during their indictments in federal court.  They were white and they were stupid.  Their skin color didn’t save them.

This time, anyway.