The Ordinary Americans Who Beat the FBI at Finding January 6 Rioters

Source: New Republic

The Ordinary Americans Who Beat the FBI at Finding January 6 Rioters

Grace Segers
Tue, October 10, 2023 at 6:00 AM EDT·11 min read

In the fall of 2016—years before his supporters laid siege to the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results—Donald Trump was hedging his bets against a potential loss. Less than a month before that year’s presidential election, he ominously warned his supporters in Pennsylvania that “w​​e have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us, and is not taken away from us.” Days later, he wrote on Twitter that the “election is absolutely being rigged,” claiming that the “dishonest and distorted media” was unfairly promoting his rival—former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. If she won, he suggested, the result would be illegitimate.

Some of his most fervent disciples decided to follow what they saw as Trump’s call to action. Curtis Allen, a Kansas resident in his late forties, had joined the military after the September 11 terrorist attacks. In 2016, he spent much of his time on Facebook sharing right-wing memes, while serving as a commander in the so-called Kansas Security Force, a far-right militia movement. Convinced that Clinton was going to snatch up the election, he and a small group of other Kansas Security Force members planned what NBC News journalist Ryan J. Reilly contends “would have been one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks in American history.”

Reilly outlines the unsuccessful plot and its aftermath in his new book, Sedition Hunters. Allen and his co-conspirators were arrested in the fall of 2016, before the election. But bringing a case against them for domestic terrorism was riddled with difficulties and contradictions. In a sentencing memo, his lawyers argued that Allen’s “misguided patriotism was inflamed by the rhetoric of the 2016 political climate,” along with the Russian influence campaign to elect Trump. Allen, a veteran who had joined the military to fight foreign terrorism, had become a terrorist himself, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Meanwhile, the attorneys for one of Allen’s co-conspirators noted that there would be no consequences for the perpetrator of the lies that had inspired the group to violence.

The 2016 case haunts Reilly’s book, which focuses on the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and the ensuing federal investigation, as Reilly traces the conditions that culminated in the siege on the Capitol. The conspiracy to carry out a domestic terrorist attack in Kansas was a precursor to the violence that would occur nearly five years later—and prosecutors would come up against similar problems when they set about identifying and charging the perpetrators of January 6. As Reilly shows, the task was in fact so vexed that the FBI lagged behind a group of independent citizen sleuths, whose work both resulted in many breakthroughs and revealed worrying weak spots in the justice system. Unlike the technologically challenged and politically strained Justice Department, these ordinary Americans had a single-minded focus on identifying the insurrectionists and had the internet savvy to achieve their goals. And as their work exposed flaws in the FBI’s investigation, it highlighted a double-edged trend: In the age of social media, anyone can become a hunter.

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