Even while the events of January 6, 2021 were still unfolding and police had yet to officially re-take and clear the U.S. Capitol, then-President Donald Trump, in a pre-taped message to his supporters, said, “We love you. You’re very special.” From that moment on, including to the present day with House Speaker Mike Johnson recently releasing 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 footage for public consumption, apparently thinking it exculpatory, grifters, craven politicians, and the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Trump, have all tried to recast Jan. 6 as either a peaceful protest (a mere tour of the Capitol), “.. the things and events that happen” when an election is “stripped away from great patriots” as Trump Tweeted that day, the work of antifa, and/or the work of undercover federal agents and the deep state. As usual when it comes to the MAGA crowd, cognitive dissonance (justified patriots! actually, it was antifa!) doesn’t matter. In any event, the fact that Jan. 6 remains a hotbed of discussion and revisionism makes Ryan J. Reilly’s 2023 book, Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System, all the more vital and a clarion call to the dangers within and outside of the justice system.
More than 3,000 people are suspected of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a misguided, conspiracy-addled effort to stop Congress and particularly, then-Vice President Mike Pence (“Hang Mike Pence!”), from counting the Electoral College votes and formalizing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. They turned what was normally a rote, uneventful day into one of the most horrific, heinous affronts to American democracy in our history, and the first time the United States failed to have a peaceful transfer of power between presidents. Almost as troublesome as those who have a revisionist view of Jan. 6 in trying to rationalize the actions of the “patriots” who violently stormed the Capitol, attacked police, ransacked the place, and stole property, all in an undemocratic bid to keep Trump in power, are the centrists who think everyone else is “overreacting” to the events of Jan. 6. As is well documented, if not for some dumb luck and the heroic efforts of Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, the day could have been much worse than it already was. If anything, the American public at large has not fully reckoned with just how violent that day was.
One of the under-told stories, though — after all, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack held riveting hearings on the attacks, but primarily focused on the actions, and lack of actions, of Donald Trump during the attack, which was certainly important to detail — is what Reilly’s book concerns: the FBI’s inability to properly deal with the scope of Jan. 6. Again, 3,000 people are thought to have entered the Capitol (and many more presumably were illegally on the grounds outside the building itself), and even though many of the rioters were morons who filmed themselves, you’re still talking about scores of video to examine, hundreds of thousands of tips, the fact that many of the rioters left the Capitol and dispersed throughout the country, and that there was a quick effort to clean the Capitol and in so doing, inadvertently clean evidence. Add in the political pressure and minefield of going after supporters of the President of the United States, it was a difficult time for the FBI under the best of circumstances, but Reilly also highlights two very specific issues that bogged down the FBI’s response to the Jan. 6. attacks:
- The FBI, like any government agency, particularly one of its size, is a bureaucracy, and as such, it moves exceedingly slow, often opaquely, and is behind the curve on technology. The FBI was not technologically equipped to handle the mountains of video evidence in the most literal sense, as Reilly documents with respect to file sharing services, and even embracing open source research, i.e., publicly available video that these morons were happily posting to social media sites. This created impediments and lag time between the sedition hunters and the FBI.
- Most troubling to me, however, is that the FBI had to deal with people within their own organization, mostly in the field offices throughout the country, who were on the side of the Jan. 6. rioters, or at least, somewhat sympathetic, and therefore, not willing to rise to the task of hunting them down. Reilly talks about one FBI agent who parlayed his disgruntled attitude over the case against J6ers into a podcasting career. On one hand, I’m glad that the overall institution seemed to move forward in a justice-minded sense, but it’s still alarming to consider a.) how many FBI agents were and are sympathetic to the Jan. 6 defendants, and b.) how many of the Jan. 6 rioters had a previous law enforcement or military background. It makes you wonder, right? Yes, the guardrails held this time, ultimately, but what about next time?
All of those issues, including the two primary ones aforementioned, make the “sedition hunters,” the focus of Reilly’s book, vitally important, and is what gave me a sense of optimism in reading his book, incidentally. That is, yes, Jan. 6 was awful, and yes, it was abhorrent to see how quickly the then-president and his minions in Congress and on cable news started either rationalizing their actions and/or castigating antifa as the culprits (rioters on Jan. 6 who expressly went there in support of Trump would do the very same thing!). But there was also a slew of sleuths, if you will, who reacted with appropriate dismay and anger at the Jan. 6 attack and parlayed that into becoming sedition hunters: tracking down through open source research the perpetrators. They sifted through hours of publicly available video and social media posts, catfished on Bumble (one of my favorite sections of the whole book), created nicknames for easily-identifiable culprits, and then sent in those tips to the FBI, often being named in affidavits and complaints filed against Jan. 6 defendants. Heck, one of the most prominent sleuths, who created an app to better centralize all of these efforts and comb through the data with the help of facial recognition software, was a Trump voter. Such is the complexity of the American voter’s mind. These sleuths, these sedition hunters, gave me hope. That there are still sane people in America, and they weren’t going to sit by after Jan. 6 without doing something about it. Without their steadfast efforts, I’m not sure the FBI would have had as many cases and convictions as it did and continues to. (Perhaps the most wild fact about Jan. 6 is that the pipebomb culprit still hasn’t been uncovered, surely owing in part to the fact that the person actually wore a face covering. This despite the FBI upping the reward at the start of 2023 to $500,000 for information.)
Reilly is a Justice Department reporter for NBC News, who I first became familiar with in 2014 when he, along with another journalist I was following, Wesley Lowery, then with The Washington Post, were arrested by Ferguson police while covering the protests over Michael Brown’s death. I think Reilly was primed for covering the events of Jan. 6 in some ways because of his Ferguson experience: a.) on-the-ground reporting experience, and the chaos of understand fast-moving events and in turn, sifting through reams of data; b.) he was with The Huffington Post at the time, which as Reilly quips in his book being that it was new media, baffled the FBI, but served him well here; and c.) unlike a bureaucracy with its old ways, Reilly was willing to take seriously the “sedition hunters.” Amateur sleuths, as Reilly details, have gotten it terribly wrong in the past, most notably redditors with the Boston bombing suspects, but with Jan. 6, they were getting real, verifiable results.
Sedition Hunters, though, isn’t just about the response to Jan. 6, but also how federal law enforcement failed in the run-up to, and on the day of, Jan. 6. As Reilly indicates, there was plenty of encrypted chatter from right-wing groups, such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, along with then-President Trump making Jan. 6 out to be a last ditch effort to stop the certification of Biden as the next president and how it will be “wild.” Of course, something law enforcement rightly has to contend with is what is protected speech, aka “just talk” versus what is an actionable, imminent threat. While that is difficult to parse, and I’m always going to vociferously err on the side of protecting free speech, even despicable speech (especially despicable speech, as that’s kind of the whole point), I think it should have been obvious to better protect the U.S. Capitol. However, I suspect some level of hubris went into the issue. Nobody could imagine that the Capitol of all places could be overrun, so they didn’t fortify it. Reilly also makes a good point that the FBI was so laser focused on lone wolf attacks (and you can understand why) that they didn’t have the imagination for collective violence, i.e., the mob violence enacted on Jan. 6. Maybe it’s as simple as those factors. Or, in addition, as Reilly writes, there’s also the issue of domestic terrorism, particularly ring-wing domestic terrorism. The incentives just aren’t there in the same way as there are for going after foreign terrorism, and there’s the added aforementioned political minefield of going after ring-wing domestic terrorists.
I understand that, again as Reilly outlines, the Republican Party has long flirted, often overtly, with “concerns” over rampant voter fraud and ensuring poll watchers are present as polling places, rhetoric and efforts that long pre-date Trump’s takeover of the GOP. That “concern” and the often unconstitutional dabbling in poll-watching isn’t new for the Republican Party, nor is it new for Trump to complain when he loses an election (or whatever it happens to be) and claims it was rigged against him. And yet, I still can’t wrap my head around fashioning yourself a patriot who is not only willing to storm the Capitol on Trump’s behalf, but are also willing to die on his behalf (so they claim). Like I said, many of these people are so deep in conspiracy theories and whatever other issues they might have (including the hallmarks, domestic violence and child porn), that they become convinced of Trump’s correctness and the evilness of anyone who opposes him. When you really get into the weeds of it, as Reilly does in the book, it’s frightening. Yes, it can be funny because of how absurd these people can be, like on page two, the furries guy (enough said) or the Bumble catfishing, but how impenetrable the façade these folks have erected to rationalize their support of Trump and the actions therein at the Capitol, even after being convicted and sentenced to prison, is astoundingly upsetting. It’s like, what do you even do in response to that? Yes, we can hold the relatively (compared to Trump’s overall support, like the 74.2 million Americans who voted for him in 2020) small contingent willing to be violent on Trump’s behalf culpable — and again, Reilly’s explained in-depth with his book how difficult that’s been for the FBI to ensure — but what about everyone else in these fever swamps of conspiracy thinking and false beliefs? For nearly nine years now, many of us have been trying to find the answer to that question, and even nearly three years after seeing it coalesce into the awful, unprecedented events of Jan. 6, and the fever still not breaking, I’m not sure we have any good answers.
The best we can do is embody the spirit of the sedition hunters: defend democracy (I get that it sounds cheesy, but it’s also a very salient and real), the rule of law, and holding those who break the law accountable, up to and including the former president of the United States.
Reilly’s book, written as the aftermath of Jan. 6 is still unfurling (the statue of limitations runs out in 2026), is nevertheless of the utmost importance to read. If watched Jan. 6 unfold in real time and were angry and aghast like I was, or you sat through the House Committee on the January 6 Attack’s hearings, like I did, you may think you’ve seen and read it all about Jan. 6. But Reilly’s book proves there is so much more to the story with vital lessons, both good and bad, for the country. I also have to say, Reilly has a way of writing that makes reading a book about Jan. 6. accessible, often times even fun and funny, while still being hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and thorough. I can’t recommend Sedition Hunters enough.
Milam's Musings 