The FBI has arrested two cousins who attacked police officers during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and were identified by online sleuths, illustrating once again how independent investigators are aiding the federal investigation into the attack inspired by former President Donald Trump.
Tommy Smith, known as #MississippiFlagGuy, and Donnie Wren, known as #KingstonAsh, were arrested this week, nine months after the attack. Both face a 10-count indictment that includes several felony charges.
Online sleuths operating under the #SeditionHunters moniker identified Wren and his cousin back in February thanks to the jacket featuring a company logo that Wren was wearing, one sleuth told HuffPost. As of Wednesday, Smith had images from Jan. 6 on his Facebook page.
Wren was identified by sleuths thanks to his distinctive jacket.
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“Still can’t believe these pics made it so far LOL,” Smith posted on Facebook with a story that featured him in the mob outside the Capitol.
Smith also had photos of himself wearing a Trump hat alongside his cousin, Wren, carrying a Trump flag in Washington on Jan. 6.
“Oh cuz running with me,” Smith wrote.
The cousins in Washington on Jan. 6.
FACEBOOK
The arrests are yet another indication of the huge role that online sleuths are playing in helping the FBI identify the Trump supporters who assaulted police and stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI has thanked the public for its help and said that authorities are working behind the scenes to follow up on tips, even if the resulting arrests take several months.
One of the sleuths who worked the case told HuffPost back in March that the duo were “hard to miss” in part because of Smith’s old Mississippi flag that featured the Confederate battle flag. That version of the flag was retired in 2020, after 126 years. They said the investigation was truly a group effort by the “Sedition Hunter” community.
Also in March, an online sleuth managed to match a foot seen kicking a police officer to the individual they called #MississippiFlagGuy.
“Add it to the charges,” one sleuth tweeted on March 25.
Wren, holding a Trump flag, passes a line of police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
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Smith’s Facebook page is full of pro-Trump memes and debunked conspiracy theories about a stolen election. He called Jan. 6 “a wonderful day [in] Washington” and called on Trump to declare “martial law to fix this election.”
Like many Trump conspiracy theorists who assaulted cops, Smith claimed that a bus of “people dressed like Trump supporters” who were “probably antifa” caused the trouble on Jan. 6.
“I can tell you this Trump people did what was right Patriots did what was right not only did we come here to stand up for our right we came here to stand up for our fellow man and as the day progressed the cops treated [us] worse and worse,” he wrote on Facebook.
“We pretty much got our asses kicked by the cops then we kick the cops asses,” he wrote. “Patriots stood together and battled the tyrannical cops throughout the entire afternoon and as I sit here now at the footsteps of the Capitol they’re still shooting off flashbangs pepper spray and innocent people.”
The FBI has made more than 625 arrests in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, representing about one-fourth of the total universe of suspects who could face charges for their conduct that day. Many more arrests are in the works.
Judge: Sentence in Capitol riot case should send message
By LINDSAY WHITEHURST
FILE - In this Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, Trump supporters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington. The House committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, with its latest round of subpoenas in September 2021, may uncover the degree to which former President Donald Trump, his campaign and White House were involved in planning the rally that preceded the riot, which had been billed as a grassroots demonstration. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)
A federal judge said Friday he hopes a three-month sentence behind bars in a U.S. Capitol insurrection case will send a message to other defendants who don’t seem to be “truly accepting responsibility.”
U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan spoke as he sentenced Robert Reeder, a Maryland man who had originally described himself as an “accidental tourist” before video emerged of him grabbing a police officer.
“It’s become evident to me that many of the defendants pleading guilty do not truly accept responsibility. They seem, to me, to be trying to get this out of the way as quickly as possible, stating whatever they have to say ... but not changing their attitude,” Hogan said.
He said he believed Reeder is sorry now and sentenced him to half of the six months prosecutors had wanted, but the judge said some of Reeder’s previous statements had been “disingenuous and self-serving.” Hogan said he hopes the sentence sends a signal that people convicted in the riot will face jail time.
“This was an attack on the operations of Congress and the Capitol of the United States, a really sacrosanct building,” he said.
Reeder had been expected to get probation last month, after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor and saying he had not been involved in any violence that day. Then armchair detectives who call themselves Sedition Hunters unearthed the video online. Prosecutors said the recording captured an assault on an officer, though they opted not to file new charges.
Reeder said he touched or grabbed the officer’s shoulder, and forgot to mention it in previous FBI interviews where he voluntarily shared video with agents.
“Immediately after the interaction with the police officer I just wanted to get out of there. It just wasn’t me,” he said. “I’ve always been regretful and ashamed of being there, not because I’m in trouble but because I saw what happened and it was disgusting.”
More than 630 people have been charged in the insurrection, where a pro-Trump mob beat and bloodied police in an effort to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. The throng sent lawmakers running for their lives and caused $1 million damage.
Online Sleuths Identify Second Jan. 6 Rioter Seen Battling DC Cop Who Died By Suicide
Ryan J. Reilly
Weber thought #SeditionHunters might be able to help him crack open the Smith case. Soon he was working with the Deep State Dogs, one of the volunteer open-source research organizations that popped up after the Capitol attack. The group has helped identify several violent Capitol rioters, including Daniel Rodriguez, who was arrested for electroshocking Officer Mike Fanone in the neck when he was seized by the mob on Jan. 6. Rodriguez is currently locked up until trial.
“With Michael Fanone, our search for his attacker was fueled by fury,” said Forrest Rogers of the Deep State Dogs, who was on Sunday’s Zoom call with Erin Smith. “With Jeff Smith, it feels as if we are being propelled by pain.”
The Deep State Dogs got to work quickly. Working under the tag #TeamJeff, they compiled a spec sheet identifying the minor details of Officer Smith’s uniform that might make him easier to spot: the white mask; the radio on his left side; the number on his helmet, 4626.
The spec sheet that members of
Members of the Deep State Dogs sorted through thousands of hours of amateur footage of the Capitol attack. They found Jeff Smith in a video of the hallway outside the House Speaker’s Lobby. They followed his movements, and soon they found him again, at a dicey moment when rioters were brawling with officers inside the Capitol building.
Officer Smith had reported that he was struck by a metal object outside the Capitol. But the video footage the sleuths uncovered showed a different assault, just inside the second-floor doors on the southeast House side of the Capitol building, not far from the Speaker’s Lobby. The confrontation takes place not long after Ashli Babbitt, a QAnon conspiracy theorist wearing a Trump flag as a cape, hopped through a broken window to the Speaker’s Lobby and was shot by a Capitol Police officer as lawmakers made their escape behind him.
Video shows Smith going down in the mob as another officer comes to his assistance. The sleuths zeroed in on two men who are right in front of Smith when that happens. Moments earlier, one of the men, holding a weaponized cane with a sharpened edge in one hand, had grabbed another officer’s baton. The second man ― his face, visible in body camera footage, twisted in anger ― can be seen lunging in Smith’s direction just before Smith goes down. Seconds later, the man is grabbing a police officer’s baton and fighting with them as he’s forced out of the building.
The sleuths, and Weber, believe it is possible that Officer Smith was assaulted twice. They’re still looking for additional footage to see what Smith faced outside. But the footage of him going down in the middle of a mob inside the Capitol, clearly stunned after being assaulted, led Jonathan Arden, the former chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., to find that Smith suffered a concussion.
“The symptoms that he manifested after being injured in the riot and leading up to his suicide, including anxiety and depression, represented postconcussion syndrome,” Arden wrote in a formal declaration. “Therefore, his mood changes were the direct result of the head trauma he suffered in the riot on January 6, 2021.”
On Aug. 13, HuffPost published a story on how members of the Sedition Hunters community uncovered a moment where Officer Smith collapsed in a heap during a battle. One man, a D.C. chiropractor named David Walls-Kaufman, is a central player in the fracas. In the hours that followed, an effort got underway within the broader #SeditionHunters movement. They wanted to track down the other man who tangled with Smith — the man wearing a “Make Space Great Again” hat, and wielding a black cane with a sharp tip within striking distance of the officer.
They got to work on finding the man, referring to him as #AstroNOT. Online sleuths turned up a good deal of video of #AstroNOT at the Capitol, including footage of him using his cane as a weapon against other individuals on the steps of the building.
The crowdsource-generated evidence was a revolution for Weber. He sat in his loft off the Chesapeake Bay, listening to the seagulls outside, until 4:30 a.m., and watched as the #SeditionHunters did their thing. He eventually got a few hours of sleep. When he woke up, he got to work on the amended complaint.
“Sedition Hunters’ gears really started rolling,” said Rogers of the Deep State Dogs. “Within a matter of hours, the Deep State Dogs DMs were full.”
By the early morning of Aug. 14, the identification had been confirmed. A facial recognition search had pulled up images of a man on the website of the Franklin County Republicans in Washington state. There were multiple images of a man soon identified as Taylor Taranto of Pasco, Washington.
In two images, Taranto was posing with a cardboard cutout of former President Donald Trump.
“When I saw him grinning with the Trump cutout, that’s when I figured we probably had a good lead,” another sleuth who helped identify the man told HuffPost.
Taranto is listed as webmaster of the Franklin County Republicans, where a biography says he spent six years in the U.S. Navy and is a “computational biophysicist” who enjoys “making memes and homeschooling my children” when he’s not “helping the President take down the deep state.” A call to a phone number associated with Taranto was not returned. The chairman of the group indicated to HuffPost that he spoke with Taranto about what happened on Jan. 6.
“He said he did witness a bunch of buses coming in posing as Trump supporters who orchestrated this whole damn thing,” Clint Didier, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Executive Committee, told HuffPost in a phone interview. “They had buses full of these ‘antifa’ people posing as being Donald Trump supporters.” (Didier, a farmer, ended the call shortly after by explaining that he had to go because he was riding a tractor.)
Later, Didier, who is also a Franklin County Commissioner and former player for what is now known as the Washington Football Team, said he didn’t recall if it was Taranto or someone else who told him about the super-secret undercover antifa plot. But he did call Taranto “a veteran” and “a fine man” who “has some issues with PTSD.”
Taranto’s identification wasn’t definitive until online investigators found evidence of Taranto admitting he was in the Capitol that day. More than six months after the Capitol attack, Taranto seemed confused that he hadn’t yet been arrested for his conduct. On July 15, a Facebook account that Taranto evidently shares with his wife posted a selfie video that appeared to be filmed in the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“Soooo... we’re in the Capitol building, the legislative building, we just stormed it,” Taranto says in the video. The caption on the Facebook post reads: “I’m only sharing this so someone will report me to the feds and we can get this party rolling!”
The FBI hasn’t gotten the party rolling yet, but Weber has. Taranto and Walls-Kaufman were both served last week, and Weber issued a subpoena to the Metropolitan Police Department to obtain Officer Smith’s body camera footage. He’ll also be seeking footage from the U.S. Capitol Police, who control surveillance video from inside the Capitol. (HuffPost visited the Capitol last week and found that there appear to be at least three cameras covering the area, including two positioned from above in a manner that should offer clearer evidence of the encounter.)
The first amended lawsuit alleges that Taranto “directly aided, abetted and encouraged” the attack on Jeffrey Smith. The lawsuit also names Walls-Kaufman. On Facebook, in the days after the election, Walls-Kaufman shared an open letter to Trump that called on the then-president to “save this election” by doing “everything” in his power to deliver the “honest” vote. “Throw down the gauntlet and divide this nation to save what remains, and the rest will follow,” the letter read. Walls-Kaufman, in addition to being a chiropractor on Capitol Hill, runs tai chi classes and has “won and competed in numerous international Tai Chi competitions,” according to the Capitol Hill Tai Chi website.
There’s a different standard for civil complaints and criminal complaints, and the allegations in the lawsuit stem from Weber’s independent analysis of the video based on a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, not the definitive conclusions of any online sleuths. Neither Taranto nor Walls-Kaufman has been charged with any crime, although the evidence that they were unlawfully present in the U.S. Capitol during the attack, and involved in battles with law enforcement, is overwhelming.
On Friday, Weber filed a new filing with the D.C. Police and Firefighters Retirement and Relief Board, seeking to get full benefits for Erin Smith.
“The new evidence cements the causal nexus between the events of January 6, 2021 and Officer Smith’s death,” Weber wrote. “Officer Smith was clearly [enmeshed] in the traumatic events... the video evidence together with Dr. Arden’s new report demonstrate beyond all doubt that there is a causal nexus between the events of January 6, 2021 and Officer Smith’s death on January 15, 2021.”
A total of four officers involved in the law enforcement response to Jan. 6 have since died by suicide. Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood died on Jan. 9, three days after the Jan. 6 attack and five days before Officer Smith’s death. Last month, in testimony before the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn implored his fellow members of law enforcement to seek help to deal with the trauma they suffered that day.
In last Sunday’s Zoom call, Erin Smith addressed Rogers, asking him to relay her thanks to the Deep State Dogs and the broader #SeditionHunters community.
“Please let your team know that I am deeply thankful,” she told Rogers. “There’s no good words to say thank you, but from the bottom of my heart, I really do appreciate everything that everyone has done.”
Erin said she appreciated that the sleuths took the time to comb through everything and see what happened to her late husband, even as she was struggling to get any information out of D.C. police.
“I know it’s not easy, I know they’re moving quickly and it’s sometimes hard to see even their helmets or what the little white numbers are,” she said. “I’m deeply grateful for everything y’all have done, and really given myself the chance to prove... there was an actual cause to the effect that happened.”
Weber was amazed at how the power of crowdsourcing was able to answer so many questions for a family that has struggled with the stigma of suicide in a law enforcement community that doesn’t always recognize the mental health injuries that come with police work.
“We have, in real time, on social media, an electronic manhunt going on in a way that has never, ever happened before,” Weber said.
“If it wasn’t for them,” he said, “we would have been back at square one.”
