Speaker 1: Before we get into it, be advised that this series
Speaker 1: contains bad language and references to violence. It's around three
Speaker 1: pm on January six. The steps to the Capitol are
Speaker 1: a seething mass of people. With every surge of the crowd,
Speaker 1: they pushed closer to the doors. At the center of
Speaker 1: a knot of bearded men, alone DC Metropolitan Police helmet surfaces.
Speaker 1: It's officer Michael Finno. I just remember getting violently assaulted
Speaker 1: from every direction, two hundred fifty maybe three hundred feet
Speaker 1: away from where the other officers were at. I knew
Speaker 1: I was up ship creep without tattling. Usual ELI officer
Speaker 1: Phenone works in plain clothes, but today he left his
Speaker 1: desk and put on riot gear for the first time
Speaker 1: in his life, self deploying to assist his fellow officers
Speaker 1: against the mob. Sam had asked why we ran to
Speaker 1: help when we didn't have to. I did that because
Speaker 1: I simply could not ignore what was happening. I could
Speaker 1: not ignore the calls. Did numerous calls coming from the
Speaker 1: Capital Complex for help. Officer Phenone joined the police line,
Speaker 1: but was soon dragged away deep into the crowd. The
Speaker 1: audio you're hearing was reported on Officer Phenone's body camp
Speaker 1: from that day. We see him completely surrounded by these people.
Speaker 1: Phone's helmet dips then resurfaces. He looks like he's fighting
Speaker 1: for air. He was being hit with flagpoles. He was
Speaker 1: being eat with everything, and he can't really fall because
Speaker 1: there's so many people around him, but he's slowly going backwards.
Speaker 1: I was risked of being stripped of and killed with
Speaker 1: my own firearm. God, as I heard chance of kill
Speaker 1: him with his own gun. I could still hear those
Speaker 1: words in my head today. Another split second and Phenone
Speaker 1: is pulled under. He disappears beneath the mass of bodies.
Speaker 1: I'm sure I was screaming, but I don't think I
Speaker 1: could even hear my own voice. When another police officer
Speaker 1: finds Venone minutes later, he's limp, his breathing is shallow.
Speaker 1: They m on here. The voice you're hearing is Officer
Speaker 1: Phenone's partner, Jimmy Albright, who kneels over the unconscious body
Speaker 1: of his friend and colleague. Officer Phenone can't remember the
Speaker 1: faces of the people who beat him with their fists, planks,
Speaker 1: and flagpoles. There were thousands of protesters there that day.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of crimes committed. You might think finding justice would
Speaker 1: be hopeless, and he leads lost in the chaos. But
Speaker 1: miles away someone was watching. To watch it over a
Speaker 1: period of hours and just see it escalate. I was shocked. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's a couple of weeks later businessmen for Wist Rogers
Speaker 1: is pouring over the footage from the Capitol steps. When
Speaker 1: he hits the jackpot. There's something that I called the
Speaker 1: holy Grail of video footage, which is basically four K
Speaker 1: sixty frame per second video. A lot of people who
Speaker 1: raided the capitol posted jubilant live streams on social media,
Speaker 1: but someone brought a really good camera. There were the
Speaker 1: stairs to the Capital, the mob, the struggling police, all
Speaker 1: captured in crystalline HD. We then took this footage and
Speaker 1: single framed it. Forest scrutinizes each frame of the video,
Speaker 1: every a second, rozen in time. Just as Officer Phenone
Speaker 1: is about to be swallowed by the crowd, Forest spots something.
Speaker 1: We see a right hand going in between the shoulders
Speaker 1: of two individuals. It happened so fast that it would
Speaker 1: have been pretty much invisible to the naked eye. It
Speaker 1: probably maybe five or six frames only let's wind that
Speaker 1: back and look at those frames one by one. The
Speaker 1: hand is right next to Officer Phenone. Officer Phone has
Speaker 1: a lot of tattoos, and so you can see the
Speaker 1: left side of the neck. You can see it's dark
Speaker 1: because of his tattoo. The crowder surging frozen through each frame,
Speaker 1: their faces etched with anger and expectant excitement. Officer Phenone
Speaker 1: start to tip backwards. A hand reaches out, turns and
Speaker 1: tazes Officer Phone on his left side of his neck,
Speaker 1: and then the hand holds back and then the suspect disappears.
Speaker 1: Phenone slumps back into the crowd. The electric shock has
Speaker 1: given him a heart attack. We then single framed it
Speaker 1: back again. Forest reverses the video, hunting for a clearer
Speaker 1: view of the person with the taser. We've found photos
Speaker 1: of this individual there. He is captured in profile a
Speaker 1: few moments earlier, a goatee, glasses with thick black frames,
Speaker 1: and a red maga hat decorated with pins. Then they
Speaker 1: spot him in another video and another We found him
Speaker 1: in other areas where he's also holding the taser in
Speaker 1: his hand, or, as the journalists like to say, a
Speaker 1: taser looking object. We originally called him hashtag taser prick
Speaker 1: because we felt it was an appropriate name for him.
Speaker 1: Forest shares a compilation of the footage online and more
Speaker 1: sightings of hashtag taser prick fled in one video in particular,
Speaker 1: helps crack taser pricks identity. He has a like a
Speaker 1: wooden rod and he's beating the windows. He's breaking down
Speaker 1: the windows. He's causing all this trouble, and he was
Speaker 1: identified in that video. Someone said that is Danny Rodriguez.
Speaker 1: Danny Rodriguez, a thirty eight year old Trump fanatic all
Speaker 1: the way from California. Rodriguez was arrested on federal charges
Speaker 1: on March one, nearly three months after he triggered Officer
Speaker 1: Finone's heart attack. The video evidence identified by these amateur
Speaker 1: salutes was cited in Rodriguez's indictment. Turns out the anonymity
Speaker 1: of the crowd didn't last long for hashtag taser brick.
Speaker 1: From Cool's own media, I Heart Radio and novel This
Speaker 1: is the Assault on America Episode eight, the Digital Dragnet,
Speaker 1: The Justice Department and the FBI have a team of
Speaker 1: thousands working on the prosecutions. From January six, you might
Speaker 1: expect Forest Rogers to be one of them. But Forest
Speaker 1: isn't a special agent or even a cop. He's just
Speaker 1: an ordinary guy with time on his hands and Twitter account.
Speaker 1: In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, people
Speaker 1: like him have played a crucial role in tracking down
Speaker 1: the key suspects. I've said before that this was one
Speaker 1: of the most well documented crimes in history. Thousands upon
Speaker 1: thousands of camera phones were filming. Not to mention news
Speaker 1: channels have ever seen anything like this. Streamers and left
Speaker 1: wing activists who had infiltrated the Maga mob. You'd think
Speaker 1: the volume of evidence would make it easier for the authorities,
Speaker 1: but it's also kind of like having tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of witnesses all shouting their testimony act you at once.
Speaker 1: It's hard to make sense of the noise. That's where
Speaker 1: people like Forest come in. We've spent a lot of
Speaker 1: this series talking about the darker parts of the online world,
Speaker 1: the fever swamps of disinformation and manufactured outrage, but it's
Speaker 1: not all darkness. In this final episode, we're going to
Speaker 1: find out how the attack on the Capitol was the
Speaker 1: catalyst for an online community of citizens sluts from their
Speaker 1: bedrooms and home offices across the United States and the world.
Speaker 1: They've shown a light onto the events of January six
Speaker 1: to understand how these amateur investigators became so important. I
Speaker 1: want to kick off with Forest. Forest has gone back
Speaker 1: and forth between the United States and Germany during his
Speaker 1: career working in economic development. No, I wasn't the corporate
Speaker 1: spive of my friends all think I was. He's basically
Speaker 1: a businessman. He held companies, broker deals about which factories
Speaker 1: get the where. But on January six, Forest isn't thinking
Speaker 1: about wheeling and dealing. He's compulsively scrolling on Twitter. It
Speaker 1: was like watching a car crash and slow motion, and
Speaker 1: Twitter became the hub for gathering all of this information.
Speaker 1: Forest begins deem ng back and forth with some of
Speaker 1: the most vocal people in the information gathering effort, and
Speaker 1: before long they joined forces. We started a Twitter account
Speaker 1: called it deep State Dogs because all of these people
Speaker 1: who were storming the Capitol tend to think the deep
Speaker 1: state is involved in everything. And dogs because we all
Speaker 1: like dogs, the Scooby Doos of online activism. You could
Speaker 1: say we started out with three people, then he went
Speaker 1: to five, and then he went to seven, and now
Speaker 1: we're at about a dozen we are like a family.
Speaker 1: In this case, it's not just the villains who hide
Speaker 1: their identities. Forest is the spokesperson of Deep State Dogs.
Speaker 1: The other members are all anonymous. In the online investigation world,
Speaker 1: people stay anonymous for a number of reasons. When you
Speaker 1: spend your free time exposing insurrectionists, you can piss off
Speaker 1: some pretty dangerous people. The Deep State Dogs take anonymity
Speaker 1: so seriously that they don't even know each other's names.
Speaker 1: You imagine what this person looks like. You think maybe
Speaker 1: that person is a female, and so now you have
Speaker 1: a vision of this person sitting at their kitchen table
Speaker 1: or in their corporate office. You have to have a vision, otherwise,
Speaker 1: if it were just total anonymity, it would be difficult
Speaker 1: to sustain. In the week that follows the riot, Forest
Speaker 1: spends more and more time hunting for images of possible suspects.
Speaker 1: By mid January, he's glued to his laptop for ten
Speaker 1: plus hours a day trawling through footage of the riot,
Speaker 1: hunting for clues that can identify any of the participants.
Speaker 1: Chewing over leads with the other Deep State Dogs, but
Speaker 1: it's tough going. Then around January, he notices a hashtag
Speaker 1: doing the rounds on Twitter. B horn Lady a new target.
Speaker 1: The deep state dogs are on the scent. There were
Speaker 1: all these people who were trying to find this one
Speaker 1: individual who was wearing a pink beanie. These searchs for
Speaker 1: a woman in a pink hat wanted in connection with
Speaker 1: the U. S Capital riots. The FBI still trying to
Speaker 1: confirm her identity. Pink Hat Lady a k a. Bullhorn
Speaker 1: Lady is a middle aged white woman with curly brown hair.
Speaker 1: In footage from January six, her face is partly hidden
Speaker 1: by a pair of white linen sunglasses, and she's carrying
Speaker 1: a bullhorn, hence the hashtag. She wouldn't look out of
Speaker 1: place among the moms at a local school football game
Speaker 1: if it weren't for the fact that she's running amuck
Speaker 1: in the heart of a mob. Bullhorn Lady first appears
Speaker 1: and crowds outside the Capital. She's shouting and taking photos.
Speaker 1: She and the other protesters forced their way up the
Speaker 1: Capitol steps. She looks on as a police officer is
Speaker 1: dragged past her. At one point, she grabs hold of
Speaker 1: a huge battering ram and repeatedly smashes it against one
Speaker 1: of the Capitol windows. What really gets Twitter riled up.
Speaker 1: Is that throughout at all she shouts encouragement through the
Speaker 1: bullhorn instructions. Even she was telling them, you need to
Speaker 1: go through this door, you need to take a ride,
Speaker 1: you need to break through that glass forest. Rodgers is
Speaker 1: determined to track her down. This is one of the leaders.
Speaker 1: This is a person who is I'm the are with
Speaker 1: all of this information who has a plan to the
Speaker 1: Deep State dogs. Bullhorn Lady looks a lot like a ringleader,
Speaker 1: but between the sunglasses and the beanie, it's impossible to
Speaker 1: get a good look at her face. As well as
Speaker 1: curly brown hair, she has slightly asymmetrical nostrils, but the
Speaker 1: detail isn't enough to find a match on its own,
Speaker 1: so the dogs start to forensically dissect the rest of
Speaker 1: the outfit. We started saying, Okay, these are the boots
Speaker 1: she's wearing, this is the brand of flunglasses she's wearing.
Speaker 1: In one video, Bullhorn Lady pulls out her phone and
Speaker 1: takes a panoramic picture, and as she does so, her
Speaker 1: phone case is clearly visible. It wasn't a standard black
Speaker 1: case or red case. It was a very unique case
Speaker 1: at an interesting floral design on it. A Kate spade,
Speaker 1: Hollyhock floral iPhone eleven case. To be precise, it doesn't
Speaker 1: take Forest long to find the match online. Forest in
Speaker 1: the Deep State dogs watch Trump rallies. Next year will
Speaker 1: be the greater economic year, Mega protests, more years, militia
Speaker 1: meet ups, a large before black any event where a
Speaker 1: budding capital insurgeon might rear their head. Then a crowd
Speaker 1: of patriots surrounded him, and we found some footage at Gettysburg.
Speaker 1: Ju was Homeland Security there and there was police there.
Speaker 1: Supposedly Antifa was going to go there and rip down
Speaker 1: Confederate statues or something, which gave everybody, of course the
Speaker 1: chance to dress up in all their militia and go
Speaker 1: there and protect the monuments. Tearing down a monuments really
Speaker 1: need to stop. And so that's why I drove out here.
Speaker 1: They're halfway through a YouTube video of interviews with people
Speaker 1: defending the monuments. Is a woman wearing a black shirt
Speaker 1: and a camouflage bag. She has curly brown hair. We
Speaker 1: even find out her name and where she might live. Right, So, Rachel,
Speaker 1: why don't you tell me how far did you come?
Speaker 1: Four hours? Oh my god, Mercer County. One of my
Speaker 1: team members saw the video and immediately send it out
Speaker 1: and says, we found her. We have found Bullhorn Lady
Speaker 1: Mercer County. There's the same curly brown hair, the same
Speaker 1: asymmetrical nose, even the same earrings as Bullhorn Lady. But
Speaker 1: Forrest wants to be completely certain. We don't want to
Speaker 1: Dock's an innocent person before we submit it to the FBI.
Speaker 1: We have to connect her to the capitol event. The
Speaker 1: Deep State Dogs trawl the Facebook profiles of every Rachel
Speaker 1: and Mercer County. One jumps out right away, Rachel Powell,
Speaker 1: and there was an image of her, and believe it
Speaker 1: or not, she was holding a bullhorn. Rachel Powell just
Speaker 1: loves a bullhorn. Guys, we had a name. Now the
Speaker 1: dogs have a name. All they need is a smoking gun.
Speaker 1: And in the Gettysburg footage, Forest finds one. We see
Speaker 1: her in the background and she reaches into her back pocket,
Speaker 1: pulls out her iPhone to take a picture and it
Speaker 1: is the same iPhone and the same iPhone case. Boom, gotcha.
Speaker 1: The Deep State Dogs tip off the FBI. On the
Speaker 1: twenty six of January, the dogs advised the other Twitter
Speaker 1: sleuths to call off their hunt for Bullhorn lady. On
Speaker 1: February four, Rachel Powell is taken into police custody indicted
Speaker 1: on federal charges. This particular who done it is solved.
Speaker 1: Deep State dogs move on to other suspects with other
Speaker 1: excellent hashtags hashtag scallops, hashtag maser in black, and my
Speaker 1: personal favorite hashtag Mr Extra creepy. But Forest is left
Speaker 1: with questions, what flipped this person? What was in them?
Speaker 1: What type of trauma did someone like this have to
Speaker 1: have in their life? Or what type of entitlement does
Speaker 1: this person think they have? This is her indictment, eight counts.
Speaker 1: It's serious business. We're looking at twenty years to lose
Speaker 1: everything for that, for the big lawe. What triggered it?
Speaker 1: What triggered Rachel Powell's evolution into mob cheerleader. That's a
Speaker 1: question I'm interested in too. I've watched the footage, I've
Speaker 1: seen her in action, But who is Rachel Powell really?
Speaker 1: And what drove her across state lines with a bullhorn
Speaker 1: and a battering ram. On January six, she calls me
Speaker 1: one day and she says, hey, do you have any
Speaker 1: logs in your forest? So she came over with a
Speaker 1: chainsaw and she cut up trees and we drilled holes
Speaker 1: in all the logs and we plugged them with mushroom plugs.
Speaker 1: That's Jennifer Horseman, a homeschool mom Western Pennsylvania, and so
Speaker 1: that was a really fun thing that we did together,
Speaker 1: is made ourselves a whole bunch of mushrooms. Her friend
Speaker 1: with the chainsaw, that's Rachel Powell. They first met long
Speaker 1: before Rachel was battering in the capital windows embarking orders
Speaker 1: at fellow insurrectionists. We met probably ten years ago when
Speaker 1: Rachel was doing a co op for vegetables and fruit
Speaker 1: and organic produce, and she would go and pick up
Speaker 1: the produce and pack it into boxes for everybody, and
Speaker 1: that was kind of how she made a little bit
Speaker 1: of money and got some food for her family and
Speaker 1: supplied the local moms with good organic food for their families.
Speaker 1: Jennifer and Rachel are closed, so obviously she's not an
Speaker 1: impartial witness here, but the picture she paints is pretty
Speaker 1: different from the militant ringleader Forest Rogers and the dogs
Speaker 1: thought they were chasing down. Rachel is a mother of eight,
Speaker 1: and according to Jennifer, she's community minded. I guess from
Speaker 1: the standpoint of most quote normal people I guess you
Speaker 1: would say we're kind of hippies. Yes, they were butchering chickens.
Speaker 1: Today they both rear their own animals from meat sharp knife,
Speaker 1: it's the best thing to do, and then put their
Speaker 1: throat and it leads out to the bucket. It's not
Speaker 1: unusual to see all kinds of rare chickens and other
Speaker 1: fowl running around their yards. This past summer, we pulled
Speaker 1: our resources together and um butchered all of our own
Speaker 1: chickens together, and we did over five chickens this summer.
Speaker 1: And then afterwards we sat around and did some canning
Speaker 1: and you know, canned some of the meat and prepared
Speaker 1: it to eat. It was several days worth of work
Speaker 1: all day. There was a lot of work, but a
Speaker 1: lot of fun, right and in all those hours of
Speaker 1: chicken canning and log drilling. Politics was never at the
Speaker 1: top of conversation. She wasn't ever into politics. It wasn't
Speaker 1: her thing. If she was into politics, it was mostly
Speaker 1: you know, making sure that it was someone that was
Speaker 1: going to protect the earth. I was never into politics either,
Speaker 1: So we just never discussed politics. Before all of this
Speaker 1: stuff started happening with the pandemic and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: The pandemic came up a lot when I was talking
Speaker 1: to people for this series. It's turned life upside down
Speaker 1: for everyone to a greater or lesser extent. For Forrest
Speaker 1: Rogers and the other citizens sluths, lockdowns and working from
Speaker 1: home meant they had time on their hands to put
Speaker 1: towards information gathering. But for Rachel Powell, the lockdown pushed
Speaker 1: her in the opposite direction. She is a single mom
Speaker 1: of eight kids, you know. So if you can imagine
Speaker 1: being a single mom of eight kids trying to feed
Speaker 1: your kids, and then you take a pandemic which wasn't
Speaker 1: affecting our area very much, you know, we don't see
Speaker 1: the effects that maybe a big city would see. And
Speaker 1: so um, she had her livelihood taken away, and so
Speaker 1: she couldn't make a living to do what she needed
Speaker 1: to deal for her kids, you know. And I think
Speaker 1: that it was the injustice of all of that. I mean,
Speaker 1: we live in the middle of the country. There's no
Speaker 1: COVID flying amongst the forest. It's not fair to say
Speaker 1: that Mercer County hasn't been affected by COVID. According to
Speaker 1: the New York Times Statistics, the rate of COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: cases per hundred thousand people in the county has been
Speaker 1: pretty much in line with the Pennsylvania average over the
Speaker 1: pandemic as a whole. As of auguste, the COVID death
Speaker 1: rate in Mercer County to date is higher than both
Speaker 1: the state and the national average. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: the fact that the pandemic was a turning point for
Speaker 1: Rachel is still important. The re search is only just
Speaker 1: emerging on how COVID nineteen has affected radicalization across the
Speaker 1: United States, but we know that people are more vulnerable
Speaker 1: to disinformation in times of crisis. Of course, plenty of
Speaker 1: folks had a rough time in without taking a battering
Speaker 1: ram to the capital. But it seems that Rachel fell
Speaker 1: victim to a mix of right wing conspiracy theories being
Speaker 1: shared in places like Facebook and right wing thought leaders
Speaker 1: like Alex Jones and the Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani. This
Speaker 1: all hit her at a time when she was vulnerable.
Speaker 1: This combination of factors brought Rachel Powell from being a
Speaker 1: nature loving she's seller from rural Pennsylvania to being a
Speaker 1: capital insurgent in the space of a year. She's really
Speaker 1: just a normal mom. I mean, she sells. She's at
Speaker 1: a farmer's market. That's literally what she did for a living.
Speaker 1: She's just very free spirited, and my personal opinion as
Speaker 1: that it is so far beyond what she should be facing.
Speaker 1: People who rape and murder people get less time in
Speaker 1: jail than what she's facing. I mean, forty seven years,
Speaker 1: that's a long time. That's a lifetime. You heard that right.
Speaker 1: If convicted, Rachel Powell is currently looking at a maximum
Speaker 1: sentence of forty seven years. It's hardly surprising that Rachel's
Speaker 1: friend thinks she's been screwed over. Obviously, if people attempt
Speaker 1: to carry out a fascist coup and get slapped on
Speaker 1: the wrist, they'll keep right on trying until they succeed.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't make the reality of her case any
Speaker 1: less grim. Her youngest daughter is only five years old.
Speaker 1: It's a bleak reminder of just how much people were
Speaker 1: convinced to gamble on stopping the steel. I asked Jennifer
Speaker 1: whether people in her hometown still believe the election was stolen.
Speaker 1: Within my circle and my friends, yes, definitely. Um So,
Speaker 1: as far as I see in my view, I see
Speaker 1: most way people that do feel that way, that it
Speaker 1: might not have been a fair election, or that there
Speaker 1: might have been some not so honest things going on there.
Speaker 1: With her battering ram and her bullhorn, Rachel took her
Speaker 1: belief in the big lie to an extreme. But for
Speaker 1: every person who turned up at the Capitol on January six,
Speaker 1: there are a lot more people like Jennifer who share
Speaker 1: many of the same beliefs that moved their friends or
Speaker 1: family to violence. And that's actually what makes Rachel's story
Speaker 1: so important. There were a lot of people at the
Speaker 1: Capitol like her, pretty normal Americans who had only been
Speaker 1: occasionally political before COVID and had been radicalized largely on
Speaker 1: Facebook through things like groups and viral memes spread by
Speaker 1: friends and communities. Darryl Johnson is a former lead domestic
Speaker 1: terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security. We heard
Speaker 1: from him last episode, and what shocked him most about
Speaker 1: the Capital riot was how many previously a political people
Speaker 1: like Rachel Powell, we're willing to throw their lot in
Speaker 1: with the armed militias and other fringe and far right groups.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't extremists. There were other people there who
Speaker 1: typically they don't belong to these groups. They're just you know,
Speaker 1: ordinary Americans. Influenced by conspiracy theories as well as disinformation
Speaker 1: and these false allegations by the President himself of a
Speaker 1: regular election. Last episode, we looked at how a backlash
Speaker 1: from the conservative media turned right wing extremism into a
Speaker 1: political hot potato and led to Homeland Securities Domestic Terrorism
Speaker 1: Department getting gutted for Darryl The Rachel Powells of January
Speaker 1: six are a direct consequence of that failure to tackle
Speaker 1: the problem head on. Far right extremism, for the most part,
Speaker 1: is something that happens on a regular basis. A lot
Speaker 1: of times it's dismissed in the media or you know,
Speaker 1: even by government officials as other types of crime rather
Speaker 1: than terrorist attacks. If you don't crack down on far
Speaker 1: right extremism and call it out for what it is,
Speaker 1: then it starts to bleed into the mainstream. When we
Speaker 1: have violence that's ideologically motivated and it's meant to instill
Speaker 1: fear in a certain population or want to change government policy,
Speaker 1: it meets the definition of terrorism and we need to
Speaker 1: label it such. The thousands of ordinary citizens swept up
Speaker 1: in the insurrection are a symptom of what happens when
Speaker 1: you don't the sheer scale of it then creates a
Speaker 1: new challenge for all of us. In the past, you know,
Speaker 1: they've had major investigations, but they haven't been focused on
Speaker 1: this larger a range of suspects. Ryan Riley is a
Speaker 1: reporter with Huffington's Post. It's fair to say he's seen
Speaker 1: his share of Justice Department investigations. Essentially, I've been covering
Speaker 1: the Justice Department for my entire career, but he's never
Speaker 1: reported on an investigation quite like this. Even really big
Speaker 1: investigations like the Oklahoma City bombings or nine eleven only
Speaker 1: had a few perpetrators at the center of them. On
Speaker 1: January six, there were thousands from all over the country.
Speaker 1: Some of them were probably on FBI watch lists, but
Speaker 1: a lot of them, like Rachel Powell, we're not anyone's radar.
Speaker 1: The Justice Apartment is facing a really massive challenge right now.
Speaker 1: There's so many suspects, there's so many cases. It's just
Speaker 1: this huge logistical nightmare because you have all of these leads,
Speaker 1: because you have all these tips, um and when we're
Speaker 1: talking about literally hundreds of thousands of tips, you can't
Speaker 1: solve a mass crime on this scale without a mass investigation.
Speaker 1: That's where the citizens sleuths come in. Deep State Dogs
Speaker 1: are one of the many groups tracking down capital suspects
Speaker 1: online at Sedition Hunters, at Country Over Party, at Capital Hunters.
Speaker 1: The list of Twitter accounts goes on. Forest Rogers remembers
Speaker 1: Bullhorn Lady as the Deep State dogs first big win.
Speaker 1: She was the first one, I think where everybody said wow, yes,
Speaker 1: we we got one, and that kind of gave the
Speaker 1: Twitter slew is momentum to keep looking and keep looking.
Speaker 1: In many cases, the FBI have been several steps behind
Speaker 1: the amateurs. Tips from citizen sleuths have gone weeks without
Speaker 1: being investigated, and while the sleuthing groups were posting video
Speaker 1: compilations of suspects almost immediately, the FBI was way behind.
Speaker 1: Ryan Riley watched as they tried to keep up. It
Speaker 1: was a month before the FBI really had the capability
Speaker 1: of putting out more than one image of a person
Speaker 1: on their website. Was almost two months before we saw
Speaker 1: them put up any videos to try and speed up
Speaker 1: police investigations. Ryan has been working with the online sleuths
Speaker 1: to verify and publicize their findings. Remember Danny Rodriguez, the
Speaker 1: guy who tasered d c Met police Officer Phenone. At
Speaker 1: the start of this episode, Ryan helped Forest Rodgers in
Speaker 1: the Deep State Dogs spread the word about Rodriguez's identity.
Speaker 1: The FBI actually only stepped in after Ryan and his
Speaker 1: colleague Jesselyn Cook published an article on Rodriguez. As much
Speaker 1: as we have this image of the FBI as this
Speaker 1: sort of crime fighting state of the art institution that
Speaker 1: we see portrayed in Hollywood, it is still a massive
Speaker 1: federal bureaucracy. They're just clearly overwhelmed. It's just not something
Speaker 1: that they're equipped to keep up with. It's inspiring to
Speaker 1: see ordinary people like the citizens sleuths take personal responsibility
Speaker 1: for protecting their democracy. But the fact that these amateur
Speaker 1: investigators have proven so vital also shows the extent of
Speaker 1: the problem. We're facing, a problem that will only intensify
Speaker 1: if the political tensions across the country continue to worsen.
Speaker 1: Darryl Johnson, the security analyst, believes something dangerous could be brewing.
Speaker 1: What keeps me up at night is the Capital Insurrection happened,
Speaker 1: and we had these different groups come together. Now some
Speaker 1: of them are disbanding and reforming under other names, and
Speaker 1: so we're entering this period of time where it's going
Speaker 1: to be much more difficult to detect the next terrorist
Speaker 1: attack from the far right. So I'm afraid there's another
Speaker 1: Timothy McVeigh lurking out there that's going to be undetected
Speaker 1: and carry out a mass, casually producing attack. It's a
Speaker 1: chilling thought. In fact, I've come to believe that another
Speaker 1: attempt like the Capital insurrection is almost inevitable. In the
Speaker 1: months since January six we've seen what was initially a
Speaker 1: widely condemned active anti democratic violence turned into a cause
Speaker 1: celeb for the American right wing. Back in late July,
Speaker 1: Republican Congress people Gate, Screen and Gomert attempted to visit
Speaker 1: separate of the January sixth defendants in jail. Former President
Speaker 1: Trump repeatedly called upon the government to reveal the name
Speaker 1: of the Capitol Police officer who shot Ashley Babbitt, and
Speaker 1: other prominent right wingers have pushed for the man to
Speaker 1: face charges. At this point, I'd be shocked if Republican
Speaker 1: presidential candidates in aren't at the very least falling over
Speaker 1: themselves to see who can promise to pardon the January
Speaker 1: sixth defendant's first right wing violence. With the express aim
Speaker 1: of punishing their political opponents has grown only more normal
Speaker 1: ever since. This will not go away on its own,
Speaker 1: but there is some good news because the grassroots networks
Speaker 1: of volunteer sluits and researchers who came together to catch
Speaker 1: these people aren't going away either. Neither are the anti
Speaker 1: fascist activists who have spent the last five years confronting
Speaker 1: groups like the Prowdboys and the oath Keepers in the Street. However,
Speaker 1: all that on its own is not enough. We won't
Speaker 1: be through the woods and truly safe from a repeat
Speaker 1: of January six until a majority of Americans are willing
Speaker 1: to confront what happened at the Capitol head on. This
Speaker 1: was an attempt to overthrow democracy and institute an authoritarian regime,
Speaker 1: encouraged by some of the most powerful people in the
Speaker 1: country and enabled by a social media ecosystem that functions
Speaker 1: as a disinformation fire hose. We have to admit where
Speaker 1: we're standing if we're going to move our culture in
Speaker 1: a better direction. The Assault on America is presented by
Speaker 1: me Robert Evans. The producer is Robbing Againness extra production
Speaker 1: by Caroline Thornim Powell, Sedgwick and Avana Yadev. Sound design
Speaker 1: and original music by Nicholas Alexander, fact checking by Andrew Schwartz,
Speaker 1: Danya Suleiman, Cheyenne Hohman, Sonja Avaki, and Teresa Campania. The
Speaker 1: executive producers are Max O'Brien and Sophie Lichterman. The Assault
Speaker 1: on America is produced by Kool's own media, I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and novel Frank Thanky, Thank You Very Much, and Hello,
Speaker 1: Do you miss Me