The Department of Justice will shell out a whopping $6.1 million for a database of evidence to be used by prosecutors handling criminal cases stemming from the January 6th riot at the United States Capitol.
The DOJ has been clear that it views arresting, charging, and prosecuting alleged rioters as a high priority and, as The Daily Wire noted earlier Tuesday, the government has around 560 individuals in custody connected to the January 6th riot.
Despite leftists claims, however, the DOJ and federal prosecutors have yet to charge any of the 560 with “treason” or “sedition,” though, according to a database produced by Business Insider, some of the alleged rioters are facing serious charges of trespassing on federal property and obstructing justice.
The most common charges include “entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds,” “disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds,” “engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds,” “disorderly conduct in a Capitol building,” and “assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers.”
“To date,” the Associated Press said Tuesday, none of the “more than 500 defendants accused in the attack has been indicted for sedition or for the gravest of crimes a citizen can face, treason. And as an increasing number of lesser charges are filed and defendants plead guilty, those accusations may never be formally levied.”
The government is, however, serious about prosecuting cases against the 560 defendants — and serious about allowing defendants access to the mountains of evidence being compiled by investigators. According to Politico, the Department of Justice has paid $6.1 million for a “massive database of videos, photographs, documents and social media posts related to the Capitol riot as part of the process of turning relevant evidence over to defense attorneys for the more than 500 people facing criminal charges in the Jan. 6 events, according to a court filing and government records.”
“To take on the daunting task, the federal government has turned to Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, a firm prosecutors called ‘a litigation support vendor with extensive experience providing complex litigation technology services,'” Politico noted.
“Prosecutors are trying to organize thousands of hours of body-worn camera footage, closed-circuit surveillance camera footage, more than a million social media videos, data from phones and email accounts, and the responses to more than 6,000 grand jury subpoenas, according to a court filing Thursday,” the outlet added.
The DOJ says it is wading through thousands of hours of footage, as well as individual accounts, and even interviews with Capitol Police officers. The DOJ, Politico said in a separate report, has “reviewed reports of alleged misconduct by police officers who responded to the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and is preparing to share them with defense attorneys in the sprawling case, prosecutors revealed in a Monday filing.”
That investigation is related to claims, many by Democrats, that Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in the assault on the United States Capitol, or may have made it easier for protesters to enter the building, whether accidentally or intentionally.