Six months later, the FBI continues to hunt for hundreds of people suspected of participating in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Tuesday marks six months since hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump descended on the Capitol building, breaching security and forcing their way into the inner restricted chambers just as a joint session of Congress convened to certify the results of the presidential election. Since then, more than 500 defendants have already been arrested on charges related to the riot.
The FBI website looking for information about Capitol rioters currently displays more than 900 photos of around 300 people marked “unidentified,” according to The Associated Press.
“We’ve already arrested close to 500, and we have hundreds of investigations that are still ongoing beyond those 500,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Oversight Committee last month.
One of the people still not apprehended by authorities is the individual who planted two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the riot.
Last month, a 49-year-old woman from Indiana pleaded guilty in the first sentencing of the Capitol riot investigation. Anna Morgan-Lloyd pleaded guilty to one charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct and was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $500.
More than a dozen people have now pleaded guilty in connection with the riot. Some defendants languished in jail for months after they were arrested but before their trials began. Some were kept in solitary confinement for nonviolent crimes.
Meanwhile, high-level prosecutors from across the country are trying cases against alleged participants in the Capitol riot, a Daily Wire review of court records showed.
The U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. has ramped up its resources and called in prosecutors from unrelated areas of its office, including the Violent Crime Narcotics Trafficking Section, Homicide Section, Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, Sex Offense and Domestic Violence Section, and Major Crimes Section. In some cases the prosecutors from those departments are prosecuting misdemeanors only.
The U.S. attorney’s office has also called in prosecutors from special sections of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and dozens of federal prosecutors from offices across the country.
One Justice Department attorney who is helping prosecute Capitol riot defendants, previously assisted in the case against a Brooklyn resident who was found guilty of working to support ISIS.
The defendants range in age from 18 to 70, the vast majority of them men. Many of the cases follow a cookie-cutter pattern involving some combination of trespassing and disorderly conduct charges as well as “Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building.”
Last month, former U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman told The Daily Wire, “This is beyond aggressive, and it’s also one-size-fits-all.”
“There seems to be no careful analysis of the individual criminal intent or lack thereof, and that’s what a prosecutor’s first line of scrutiny and judgment is supposed to be considering,” Tolman said.