Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're off for the holidays, but that doesn't mean we don't have an amazing show for you Today. NBC's Ryan Riley joins us to talk about his new book, Sedition Hunters, How January sixth broke the justice system. But first we talked to Peter Salad of the Hometown Project about how they use celebrities to elect local officials. Welcome to Fast Politics, Peter select.
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
This is such a cool project. So we are coming off this extremely good off year election for Democrats. Before we start talking about what you are doing, I want to just take a moment because all of us who ingest the mainstream media, of which I am very much a part, a lot of us feel like we can't
have a two second victory lab here. But I was told that Glenn Youngkin was going to take over Virginia and make it Florida, and instead he lost both the House of Delegates and Democrats were able to keep the state Senate, and in numerous races, Democrats over performed including in Kentucky. So I just want when we go into this interview, because this is one of these things that is a thing that really does actually win elections. Like
these kind of projects actually do. They flip seats. They flip Senate seats, they flip House seats, they flip governorships. They are the sort of nuts and bolts of activism. So with that very long winded introduction, tell us what exactly is the Hometown Project.
So great to be here, and thanks so much. I do want to say really quickly, I think your point about celebrating victories is very well taken. One of the Hometown board members is Preparabo, and she's a great actor and political activist, and she's had us at one point a few years ago. You know, look, we never celebrate our victories. So we're like already into twenty twenty four.
We've just had this you know, great election, and you know, I know for our org as well, we're kind of trying to already look into twenty twenty four and we've been doing so for a while. So it is good to celebrate victories because they allow us to ingest some of that positive energy that keeps us going and if we're always in panic mode, we don't, you know, take the time to have that kind of that positivity which leads to better outcomes in the end. Okay, So that's
just about celebration. The Hometown project started after the Trump election. I'm a musician by trade, played for many years in New York City, still do sometimes did a lot of movie work, and for whatever reason, a lot of well known people are people who ended up being well known, needs to come and see me play. After the twenty sixteen election, I was kind of thinking about what could I do? Like so many people, I was think, gosh, I didn't do enough.
What could I have done? What could I have done?
And I started talking to a bunch of different activists and I had a conversation with an environmental activist and he said, you know, when Mark Ruffalo went back to Kenosha, Wisconsin to talk about environmental issues, that was really powerful because he's there. And a little light went off of my head. I thought, I know, Mard Ruffalo, what if we could get Mark and people like Mark to support
local candidates in their hometowns. So these races that are so important that are decided often by five hundred votes, a thousand votes, could we get someone well known to support them. And in the beginning my thought process was we'll get them to go back and lead a rally, that kind of thing. But you know, after going about it for a year or two, came very clear these are busy people. They don't have time necessarily lining up when they might be returning home or getting arranging. All
the travel is way beyond our capacity. However, if they could take twenty minutes and just make a video on their phone, we send them a script. We then take that video, we slap some graphics on it with the candidates name, their picture, and then we digitally distribute that content within the district. Then we are reaching a lot of the right voters within that district. That's kind of just a little overview of what we do.
So give us an example of a place where this happens and how this goes.
So we were in both Virginia and New Jersey this year. It's our fourth cycle. In Virginia. Nadarius Clark, for example, is running in the Hampton Roads area running for a House of Delegates in a new district. And Wanda Sykes is also from Portsmouth Or She grew up there. She's from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, NOH Portsmouth, Virginia.
Yeah, that makes sense, Like.
We define hometown in a bunch of different ways. Essentially, it's where people feel like they have roots. So Connie Britten did something for us. She's from Virginia. She works with us in Virginia all the time. But she's also well known for spending a lot of time in Texas for Friday night lights. So you know, something for us in Texas there too, because she feels an affinity with
that area. So Wanda Sykes from Portsmouth. We work with state based grassroots partners, which can be an organization like Clean Virginia we worked with this past year in Virginia.
They're an advocacy organization. Is primary goal is to disrupt the power monopoly, and they poured a lot of money into the Virginia elections this year and they won and it worked, or it could be For example, in New Jersey, we worked with the New Jersey Democratic Caucus, so they had three priority districts New Jersey, they're state Senate and a State Assembly. You run as a slate because it's the same district. It's just one senator and two Assembly
people per district. So they had three slates that they were their highest priority slates. The Grassroots partner says, hey, here's our top nine, top twelve, top fifteen candidates. These are the people that we think are going to be in the tightest races. And then we come in and we say, you know, we do the research. I want to give a shout out to ourn incredible executive director of the Hometown Project, Aaron Frederick, without whom none of this would be possible. What we do is then we
go we take those candidates. We say, okay, that they're from a specific area, Let's do the research. See who is well known that is from that area. And then, because I've been in the entertainment business for a while and now we've done this for a while, people have had a positive experience. So at its core, the kind of front of camera entertainment industry is pretty small, so it's not that hard for me to reach a lot of different people. So then I say, okay, well, look,
Wanda Sykes is from Portsmouth, Clean, Virginia. Needs we call them hometown energizers. That's our term for the well known person. They need somebody from that area. Oh look, Wanda Sykes is from who knows Wanda? Well, look it turns out Mark Ruffalo knows Wanda. He puts us in touch and she makes a video for us. And so that's the way we work.
Your dream is to get Taylor Swift, right, let's be honest, Well, to run for senate's percentate?
Yeah, how would be amazing?
Marshall Blackburn, bye bye?
How great would that be?
That would be amazing?
I mean, she honestly does not have time to be no, she is. The Taylor Swift question is fascinating because I think we get it all the time, and I think it speaks to how people have thought about celebrity in the political space and how what we feel like we're doing at the Hometown Project is different from that. Taylor is a she's a megastar. She's a supernova. But if we are counting on Taylor Swift to save democracy, fucked.
I so appreciate, shate all the things that she's done and her document the documentary about her is great for us. We're like, hey, look, somebody could be from a local area. They may not be nationally hugely known, but within their local area they're actually really well known. The local papers written about them since they got their first part on
that TV show ten years ago. And you know, we've got that little lower third, the biographical information, which says exactly where they're from, Bergen Counties, Melissa Fromiro and so the thing is is those connections are real and they're you know, we get it all the time. This I won't name names, but this most recent time in Clean Virginia, they said to us, Oh, just so you know, this person that you're trying to reach, his sister used to
date the candidate, you know what I mean. So it's like these are local races where the so and so's babysitter used to you know, babysit, this a cousin or what you know, It's like that this used to they used to be their second grade teacher or whatever. Those things are. Those local connections are real, and we don't have, you know.
What, we don't need. I mean, I think the point is that the people want their local people to come back, right, I mean, that's a very meaningful thing, even if they're not superstars.
Exactly.
To me, part of this work that was so key as we were thinking about it from the beginning is our danger zone is the kind of like, who are these Hollywood elites coming in?
Tell me what to do?
You know?
That kind of right?
Right, right?
And so if we sidestep that and we say, no, this is not a Hollywood elite person. This is somebody who is from your community. They understand your community, they grew up there, their siblings might live there, their parents or whatever it is, we really try to avoid that
sense of it's not a generalized person. And then from our perspective, if I'm going out to Patton Oswald and I'm saying, hey, Paton, would you support a candidate like Russet Perry who's running in the district that includes a lot of loud in county where you grew up, He's ten times more likely to say, yeah, that sounds good.
I want to do that, versus, hey.
Could you support this generalized political cause that doesn't really have anything to do with what his personal life story. So it's much easier for me to recruit people because they want to help out their hometown community.
Yes, exactly. And I think that is a really good point, and I agree, like this is the whole thing about democracy, right is we love these places we come from. I know how I feel about New York City where I grew up and my parents grew up and when the pandemic came, like, I did not go. I just stayed here because this is my place, this is where I'm from, and there was no other place to go. I mean, this is it. And so the idea of right, this
is not some celebrity parachuting in. This is someone who is a person of the place.
That's right.
And because we're connected to the grassroots organization as well, if there's things that the candidate wants the stress or things are organization feels like is resonating with voters, then you know, we can integrate that into the content as opposed to being some national organization that kind of says, oh, these are the national issues.
That everybody's running on wherever it is.
You know, it is it about fixing Route twenty nine, you know, more than it's about some sort of other issue.
And it's also just about like bringing the people who care about a place bringing them back, right. I Mean, that's kind of the larger issue because I mean, one of the things I think a lot about is Peter Teal And I'm sorry. I apologized to Jesse for this tangent, which will likely get us sued. But Peter tele got so excited about Blake Masters and worked so hard on this Blake Master's campaign. And Carrie Lake too ran for governor.
I mean, Kerry Lake is from Arizona. But it was a sense in which you had a vision for the state that may not have actually been what the state was, right, This was a person who lived in Miami or wherever it is, Peter Tieli's where he had a vision of what he wanted the government to look like, of what he wanted you know, he had candidates that he had sort of decided where people who could win in these
And that's not what this is about, right. This is about people who come from place endorsing candidates who come from that place because they think it will serve their community.
That's right.
And the candidates we're supporting, we always feel like are the ones that are better connected to their community. These are local races, and I think that this is again we've seen celebrity used in a national sense. Three days before the election, there's a big rally in Springsteen plays and all that, and again not to I'm a huge Springsteen fan. It's not about that, it's just can we think about this in a different way where to actually prioritize.
We see now how important state legislatures are, How many decisions are made at that level. We talk about abortion, we talk about medicaid, expand gun safety, the minimum wage, so many decisions are made to the state legislation. Not to mention jerrymandering, which impacts Congress, so many decisions are made at that level. Yet for so long the funding model has been so kind of devoted to Congress, Senate and presidential races, and we've missed the boat in so
many ways. And first of all, I want to say to you, it's so great that you've had local candidates from Virginia on your show, and.
Jesse and I have had all. I was like love home watching the results and I was like, wait, we had that person on our show. We had that person.
Nobody does this on the progressive and the Democratic side. There's the funding is screwed. It's such a blind spot and it's very hard as a small organization who does effective work.
Who you know?
Last year in Michigan, we worked with the Michigan Democratic Party. We had I got sixteen famous people from Michigan to support over twenty state ledged candidates. And we're not some magic bullet, but we're a part of something that if you focus on these areas, you can in theory, change an entire state legislature for as much as one single Senate seat. You know, it's like, do we need to raise one hundred million dollars to run against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky or can that money be better.
You flipping legislatures which will ultimately I mean, the reason why Virginia didn't have an abortion ban in twenty twenty two was because they miraculously kept the state center.
That's right, exactly, and that was part of a lot of hard work that was done by a lot of people. Even though at the top of that ticket, we don't need to go into.
The red vest wearing fake moderate.
So and they were able to, you know, utilize some of the fear of mongering tactics for us. The other thing I want to say about our content is we sidestep again all of that negativity. All of our content is positive. We never mentioned an opponent, We barely ever mentioned party. The things that we're trying to do with these short thirty second spots and banner ads is it's
a sense of connection and community and shared values. So in the beginning, we had people and that we're always talking about issues, issues, issues, and we're like, okay, what we realize is issues resonate with people like us. Who are you know, in the kind of people power of demographic. Essentially we're into politics all the time. But for the much more casual voter that are the actual voters that we need to reach to win elections. We can't be relying on just revving people up with a sense of
fear and anger. We have to talk about a shared set of values and they may not be well versed on what the actual issues are. But if we can talk about a shared set of values, and if we can do it from our perspective with the well known person, that is pleasing and draws people in and to the point where we then we see right away that candidate's name, the candidate's image comes down and then people are shown
that ad. We try to get saturations, so we're trying to get people to watch it between ten and fourteen times. Some part of our content, whether it's the video or the banner ad. In the two weeks leading up to the election. We found in Virginia, we ran an RCT and a study in twenty twenty one, voters that had received you know, a randomized control trial and voters that had received our content were eight point six percent more
likely to know the name of their local candidate. And so we're talking about races that are decided by really small margins. And that's the most important thing that we can do for these local candidates is raise their name recognition. So people actually when they're going into that voting booth, they remember, they're like, oh, that's right, Wanda Seikes. I saw that. I saw that actually had Nindarius Clark on there. He's awesome.
Let me vote for him.
Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much, Peter. This is super interesting, Grain and you're doing the work man.
Great to be with you and admire all that you do.
Ryan Riley is an NBC News justice reporter and author of Sedition Hunters, How January sixth Broke the Justice System. Welcome to Fast Politics, Ryan Riley.
Thanks so much for having me.
So the book is called Sedition Hunters, How January sixth Broke the Justice System? Tell me how you got to writing this book.
You know, when January sixth I took this approach that, oh, my gosh, this is going to take over my beat, and I was sort of bummed about it, and it was just figuring it was going to be case after case after case and sort of the same thing over
and over and over again. I thought the scope of it would be big at that point, but I didn't realize the full scope of it, because you know, initially after the capital was reached, the number that was being thrown out there, it was like eight hundred cases, and in reality the number of people who could be charged is a norse of three thousand. Right now we're at about one thousand, two hundred, but there's a lot more left to go in the two plus years that they
have left the stature limitations. But then I really sort of got to working with these slews and it just became this really fascinating story. I had never been ahead of so many FBI investigations. It was not something I
was used to it. I was used to covering what the FBI sort of did and afterwards and oh there's a case for being brought forward, but having this sort of prior no floage of all of these criminals was quite something, and it became this this thing that's just really strange, where now it's like, oh, they finally brought that case. Right, it's not this thing that I'm surprised by something it comes up. It's like, oh, this is coming down the pipeline, the waiting this one. Oh, finally
they got to that. So it's been this really interesting thing and I think has just really sort of revolutionized and brought up a lot of deeper issues within the FBI about their sort of falling behind on the technology front.
But they were sort of rescued by the American people on the technology front. Right explained to us that story.
Indeed they really were. This all sort of happened on the platform formally known as Twitter. Initially, there would be these photos that were posted. There was this really horrific photo posted a few days after January sixth of an officer bed dragged down the steps of the capital face first, and that's sort of what set all of this off. And there is someone who sort of sent out that
photo and said, let's identify everyone in its photos. So they started giving everyone names and hashtags, and then nicknames became a huge part of this because it helped people track various people throughout the day because you're dealing with just such an overwhelming amount of evidence that it's really tough to organize. And that's one of the things that the FBI has really really struggled with, and that's where
sort of this crowdsourcing really came in handy. And initially, you know, this was done out in public via hashtags, but in the years since, it's really more behind the scenes, and a number of these sleuths are feeding information to the FBI that's really assisted them. I mean, there are cases that are shoot to nuts completely built by these online sloughs and the FBI basically just has to press
the button, sign the form. And then there are other cases that would have been brought forward anyway, but then miss lous are really aiding in those investigations and bringing up new information that the government was unaware of.
So this really is an interesting situation where Internet, you know, the people who are so met with such disdain by a lot of people, I mean a lot of people who I think of, you know, in this sort of journalism world, and not just journalism, but a lot of these other worlds tend to have disdain towards these people, and in fact they kind of saved the day. So talk to us a little bit about that, because that's really interesting.
You know, I've covered the FBI for a long time now, and I always sort of knew that they were not as you know, they were not the Hollywood image that we see trade on Tolida. But this really sort of just shattered it for me, getting involved with the loves and how far behind they were in a lot of this stuff. I remember, early on I've started covering the FBI,
there is a round table. This was probably a decade ago now with James Comy, you know, a bunch of reporters were brought in and I remember it being like a stating that I was the only digital reporter there right because they weren't sort of used to that. And the top of the FBI spokesters at the time was like, so do you get like this? This is when I was at huff Post and they were like, so do you guys? You know, do you guys print a newspaper?
And like say to no, no. So that was mebing a little bit of a sign of things to come. And the FBI is a use of technology but if you did, just think about the feeders who goes into the FBI, It doesn't make a lot of sense if you're really technologically skilled that you would join an organization like the FBI, because gosh, they could send you anywhere across the country. They continue you somewhere you don't want to live. And just also that the pay scale is
a huge thing. Also, you can't smoke pot, right, and like that's a thing, you know, Like everyone laughs when I say that, but like James Comy himself has pointed this out, like they actually relaxing the rule a little bit bit more. But like what tech person do you know who hasn't smoked pot, like at least of their life. That's not a thing, right, And now it's like the FBI will about you, okay, smoke except to stop using you know, a marijuana, great year, I guess before you apply.
But you know, it's just there are a lot of these things, and most I think, you know, predominantly being the pay scale issue, that really are sort of holding them back. And it's a real issue because this is the most important thing of our time, like open source investigations and technological skills are really what the FBI desperately needs, and I think it's something that they're struggling to keep up with right now.
Yeah, So tell me like a sort of example of one of these cases.
So let's take a guy named Logan Barnhart. So Logan Barnhart was a construction worker. He used to work with his dad. They had a falling out and he was sort of on his own. You know, he's a lot a lot of photos of him operating heavy machinery. He's also a very fit guy, like to work out a lot. Turned out he was a bodybuilder back in the day.
I mean. He was also on the cover of some romance novels and so he was one of these individuals spoiled or alert who dried to cop down the Capitol stairs And it was a little difficult for the sluice to idem at first because he was kind of covered up, right, So they nicknamed him cat Sweat because he was wearing a Caterpillar brand sweatshirt and that's how they sort of followed him the whole day. But you know he had sunglasses on, is that his face was covered part of
the time he had had on. It wasn't the best shot you could get of him from a facial recognition standpoint, but using some of the technology that the sluice developed. In fact, the app one of these apps that I refer to in the book, they were able to sort
of bring all this information together. And the best way to think of this as sort of like your iPhoto library in that if you told me, like, hey, I'm trying to find this photo of X person, but I don't know when it was taken, right, what you can do on your phone is just sort of swipe up and it'll show you as internal facial recognition, so it'll show you every one of the photos of your friends basically, you know, and even for my kids, it takes them
from when they were babies to Karen Day. It follows them all the way through the facial recognitions pretty good. And that's the best way to think of what the Slues are able to do here. So they found a really good shot of him where he had had his sunglasses off, and it was just this YouTube video that
they had archived a while back. Somebody had very quickly tanned over the crowd at the ellipse during Trump's speech, and at that point Logan Barnhardt did not have his sunglasses on, and that internal facial recognition matched him with the person who was at the Capitol steps dragging down driving a cop down the stairs. So then you had a full face shot without the sunglasses when the sunglasses are on, you know, strapped to his chest or something.
And then he run that through his facial recognition and search, and then what pops up is all of us bodybuilding photos and all of the photos of him on the cover of romance novels. So as the results of all of this, a few authors of romance novels have had to change the covers of their books. Oh wow, were done because he's on a bunch of them. I think one of them was something to do with stepbrothers and
you know, our stepbrother or some sort of thing. That's basically how they were able to find this in the and was using this facial recognition. And then the way that they confirmed us this facial recognition isn't enough for them. Before they sent this into the VFPI, they went to his Instagram and then there they found an image of him wearing a hat of the same happ that he
wore to the Capitol on January sixth. They found him punching a punching bag, wearing that same sweatshirt that he wore January.
These people are kind of dumb, right, I mean, these people are kind of dumb.
Some of them are tougher than you would think. That was still a lot of their investigative work. But like some of the ones that are really the huge breakthroughs are when you have somebody who was like completely covered head to toe, did a really good job of covering their face, and then they'll still find it. And one of the crazy stories there was somebody who was just completely covered and they couldn't get a good face shot
out of him. As I tured out, somebody else was filming behind them at one point and they opened up their phone and what was their backscreen but the name of their LLC, their company that they found it and there it was. That was it. So someone took all of these precautions, but because their rock screen was the name of their LLC, they were id. So it's you never know what detail is really going to break this through. And the FBI just really isn't structured to investigate things
in this really collaborative way. They're sort of very siloed off into these individual investigations, and that's the real thing. I think the secret that the Slows have been able to bring to this is that collaboration and those technological skills.
So interesting, did you kind of get to know these people? Can you sort of explain to our listeners a little bit about what they were, what they're like in whatever vague terms you want.
Yeah, so, I mean, therefore all over the country, sort of all the different walks of life, the things that al This is spoiling a little bit of the book, but one of the things that really shocks people is that one of the key figures here, who I name Alex, actually voted for Donald Trump twice.
Wow. So strange, not what you'd expect.
Not at all. And it just sort of came up in a conversation where they were all talking about, you know, oh who sort of you know there was their primary figure or who is there you know they voted for in the Democratic primary, and he sort of needed this joke, just thought it was a joke at first, and then he's like, no, no, like I did. He's sort of by thinking now he describes himself as more of a Liz Chady Republican. But even when he's I think he's more in the Democratic camp.
Now.
He was a successful guy, so I think that a lot of this was just you know, economics for him. Right. That is something that jocks a lot of people in here that this isn't just you know.
He didn't like crime. Right. There are a lot of Republicans who voted for Trump but didn't like crime.
Yeah. And I think one of the reasons that a lot of this lose. In addition to sort of just building up this trust over more than two years, two and a half years, almost three years, now this lose. One of the reasons I think they spoke with me was they were really interested in shattering some of these
myths that people think of. Like the pushback you get is, oh, look at all these losers in their mom's basement, you know, going through this material, and like, you know, one of them was sort of I think antigonized by somebody on Twitter one time and responded back like, no, dude, I make more money than you, and I work in cancer research. They have a very wide array of people and like, these people are really successful. I've really rich family lines.
But this is something also, it sort of became this passion and this obby of theirs, which you know, hooked up with sort of their interests. But it really is intriguing and can feel like this puzzle and you really do get these little adrenaline first when you know you have these ideas and you figure out a piece of this puzzle that is not known more broadly.
Yeah, I mean such an interesting and I mean just such a crazy kind story. So explain to me what happened. I mean, did people feel that they had been taken advantage of by Trump? I mean, all these people end up in jail or you know, facing thousands and thousands of dollars of legal A lot of them do have sort of come to Jesus moments, right.
Some of them, And it's sometimes tough to figure out whether it's really come to Jesus moment or whether it's sort of an act for the judge. I think there are a lot of people who were legitimately remorseful and
sort of realized they got up. But what's sort of fascinating about this, and it's not something that judges can or should take into consideration, is that there's such a deep link between still believing the conspiracies and being apologetic, right, like if you still believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen and that Joe Biden is unlawful president usurper in the White House, and you didn't do anything too serious, It's like, what would you be apologetic for? So that's
kind of the interesting dynamic for me when it's so intertwined. Right, there shouldn't be a situation where judges are like forcing people to admit, hey, no, the election was legitimate. Right, that's not America. Right. People are free to believe whatever
crazy conspiracy they want to believe. But it just is so remarkable because it is so intertwined in your mind, and I try to put myself in their shoes, and it's like, you know, if I deeply believe that the election was stolen and I'm getting in trouble because I, you know, walked in a building, you can see why some of these people would be really angry. But on the other side of the coin, there are people who just realized they were completely.
Tricked and cool.
Then you know, personally, as an American, those are the most rewarding moments when I'm sitting in court and like, you have someone you like just weigh themselves out there and say I can't believe I fell for this crap, right, and like right right, I'm machined and I'm embarrassed, and like, you know, I don't know if if I were on the bench, I think that would have a lot of sway over me for someone to actually sort of state that the truth and realize how dumb all what's in the first place?
God, it's such an interesting and strange kind of problem. So, I mean, what happens to these people who are the sluice? Do they keep going? There are a lot more people, right, I mean, not everyone's been charged.
So yeah, so, like I said, the scope is like above three thousand. Right now, the FBI knows about the identities of about a thousand people who haven't been arrested. So that's almost double the number of people who in nearly three years have been charged. And so really, you know,
you're kind of getting to this situation. One law enforcement official sort of compared it to the Titanic, right where it's like, okay, you know, not everyone's getting off of this boat, So what cases it's already kind of do before that statute of limitations expires, because really, now you know,
it's really just a little over two years. There's a five year statute of limitations, and and so you know, you would think that the priority would be more towards some of these more violinist enders, and we've seen a little bit of that shift in in recent months. But I think there hasn't been this sort of collective from what I've heard and the sources I talked to, there hasn't been this collective consideration within DOJ of just like what how the clock is ticking and how many cases
there are yet to go? And what I've heard from you know, the book is for people who read the book, is that that's sort of you know, been sort of clarifying for them and has pushed forward a little bit more mentum within DRJ to make sure that they're sort of getting getting things going, because in order to get to anywhere near those thousand cases that they have identified right now, they really need to start pushing, you know, the pedal to the metal.
So, I mean, it's just such an incredible story. So do people continue to do this? I mean, is there sort of or did they kind of go back to their normal lives or is there I mean.
You know, this is less time intensive than it was before because there are so many ideas sitting out there, but now you know some of the slus are getting requests from the Bureau. One of the most shocking moments to me was actually not that long ago, was in the Proud Boys trial earlier this year, and the FBI had worked on this investigation involving five Proud Boys, so it's just conspiracy trial, one of their biggest cases for
two years. Right, they had had this, they had really put all the resources into this, but they had missed a really major moment in which Zachary Reel, one of the defendants, a Proud Boy from Philly, pepper sprayed a cup.
And the only reason that this came up was because the government had released other footage and connection with another case that was then published online that the sleus are sucked up and over this long weekend, when Zachary Reel was on the stand, after denying over and over again that he had assaulted any officers that day, and in fact, the government never accused him specifically of assaulting any officers, the sleuth used a long weekend and found this footage
and found an image of him video of him pointing pepper spray at a cop and found another angle on it as well, And it was just a moment that Gathbi completely missed. And that was really just one of these moments because I saw how this operated and then I saw them sort of. You know, it was just really dramatic court room moment because the guy then is on the stand after lying about what he gad and then has his pastor resort two he said he did not recall assaulting any long work. Yeah, so it was
like this really crazy moment. So this louser are definitely still doing a lot of these cases today, but now a lot of this is because the government's going to them and being like, hey, you know, what do you have on It's defended sometimes before they charge cases. Sometimes it's when a case is about to be brought to trial.
Sometimes it's before sentencing. So you know, they really are relying upon this outside technology and this outside group to really bring these cases to fruition, just because I think of how outdated the technology is within the SBI and within the federal government.
The idea that really the federal government is so behind with technology. It's just because these things are not getting funded or is there something I'm missing here.
What's surprising about this is, you know, there are so many conspiracy theories now on the right January sixth, and like, really the explanation is like really in line with what used to be conservative ideology that government is ineffective, big government is bad, and the private sector is better. And
I really think it is instant. This sort of illustrates that because you know, innovation is just not going to be a huge thing within government, and you know, the joke within the FBI is we have yesterday's technology tomorrow
they're just really behind. And you know that's the sort of maddening thing is seeing all these conspiracy theories about the FBI pulling all these strings in orgerzing all these pieces, and then you know, I'm sorting through thousands of pages of FBI email and it's like set through my Samsung device and like how do you send a contact card?
And just the most bureaucratic things that you could possibly imagine, and it's just like no, like even if you set aside the issue of whether or not the FBI is just that like evil, Like it's the competency and is a real issue there in terms of just you know, then being able to push forward and complete a lot of these sort of schemes that a lot of people seem to believe that they're behind. So I mean, I would just encourage people to like look at some of
these emails. I realized that, like, this is about bureaucracy. And I think that that's one thing that the January sixth Committee sort of did be sitting on the floor. And one thing that I ended up focusing a lot on in the book is just sort of lead up to January six and a lot of the technological failures.
Just one of the most like head slapping moments was that the FBI had their entire system set up on this one social media monitoring tool and they were using that to basically look for any really threatening communications and the lead up to January sixth, and as it turned out, the FBI Procurement of Office had renegotiated a contract a year earlier, and oh lo and behold, it was expiring on New Year's Eve as twenty twenty transition to twenty twenty one, and so you had this whole new system
and they didn't even have logins for it yet on December thirty first, and they were trying to go from you know, one system to the other, and it just it was just a catastrophe. Right. They were not prepared and all the systems were set up on one platform and they could not possibly have set that up in time.
And you see these sort of panicked emails being sent on December thirty first, in the middle of like you know, basically two weeks of vacation for the FIDS, talking about, oh my my gosh, you know, we need to get something. Why don't we have these logins yet?
What's going on here?
So those sort of bureaucratic hurdles and just sort of being buried in bureaucracy was a really big thing here.
Thank you, Ryan, you are amazing. Appreciate youallmech fand me.
That's it for.
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