SEDITION HUNTERS
How January 6th Broke the Justice System
by Ryan J. Reilly
An overstuffed yet fascinating study of the citizen sleuths helping chase down the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The buffoonish “QAnon Shaman” was quickly identified after the Capitol invasion mostly because he was a publicity hound. Another criminal shouted out ads for her Texas real-estate business. Many perpetrators, though, took great pains to scrub evidence of their presence and felonies—an effort that, notes NBC News justice reporter Reilly, might have been successful had it not been for the efforts of a loose-knit band of volunteer investigators whose apps and algorithms have “aided in hundreds of cases against Jan. 6 defendants,” to say nothing of hundreds of other cases that have yet to be prosecuted. As the author shows, the Department of Justice’s handling of the project has been “a clusterfuck,” hampered by inadequate technology and officials who appear to sympathize with the aims of the rioters. Agents and investigators are not allowed to use file-sharing services and have email accounts that can accept only the smallest of attachments, meaning that the “Sedition Hunters” have to provide them with thumb drives containing the videos and photographs they’ve unscrubbed, along with the case files identifying the criminals. Institutional roadblocks also include the FBI’s emphasis on foreign terrorism, even though the vast number of terrorist acts have been committed by the homegrown variety: “The federal government had spent more than two decades going after one kind of terrorism,” writes Reilly, “so it should come as no surprise that it has struggled to pivot to handling the growing threat of domestic terrorism.” Chasing down the facts via citizen crowdsourcing has proved essential to bringing Jan. 6 criminals to justice. Indeed, as one searcher said of a well-known radical whom government agents failed to identify, “He probably would’ve gotten away with it…if it weren’t for these meddling sleuths.”
A strong, fast-moving story that exposes systemic flaws while lauding the work of true American patriots.