WASHINGTON — With less than 50 days to go before President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House, the Justice Department is continuing to prosecute and arrest January 6th protesters, just as Trump did. he said he would forgive The number of more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack is unknown.
There are still more than 90 people The FBI’s Capitol Violence pageThe bureau has photos of some of the most wanted rioters identified by the FBI but not yet arrested, online intelligence sources told NBC News. And the detectives who helped with these cases identified hundreds more rioters who were not listed on the Capitol Violence page and who were never brought to justice.
With little time left, the Justice Department plans to focus on arrests and prosecutions “worst” casesespecially people who will be charged with aggravated assault on law enforcement, a law enforcement official told NBC News last month.
Among them is a man who online detectives say they know as a longtime rioter who attacked police officers and has not been arrested in years. NBC News reports that the FBI has searched a residence linked to the man in recent weeks.
The rioter is known on the Internet”mischief hunters” nicknamed “Old Double Shot”. won because he appears in the video of the January 6 attack”double fisting spray cans” he appeared to have used to attack police officers with chemical spray on the west front of the US Capitol. The video later surfaced shows someone who appears to be the same man, wearing a Trump camouflage hat and a T-shirt that he wears as a cap, attacking police with a pole as the crowd climbs the steps and approaches the Capitol.
Numerous rioters were charged with felonies and accused of using pepper spray or bear gas against officers during the Capitol attack, many of whom received prison terms.
Weeks after the Capitol attack, when online sleuths ran images of Old Double Shot through publicly available facial recognition software, they told NBC News they found an old video of a man at a tea table who looked strikingly like the same man. rally and then a more recent video of someone who looks like him outside of a Trump rally. Facial recognition software led them to the site of Koetting Insurance in Germantown, Illinois, and to a man named Michael Koetting.
“Old Double Shot” is one of the early identifications of explorers; they say they gave it to the FBI more than 3½ years ago. His photo appeared in another statement on January 6. NBC News reported in Februarybut “Old Double Shot” was never arrested.
NBC News confirmed that in recent weeks, the FBI searched public records for a residential address linked to Koetting. BBC reporter posted first On Jan. 6, a search was conducted in a small town in southern Illinois, and an FBI spokesperson confirmed to NBC News: “The FBI served a search warrant at the address in Springfield.”
Koetting did not respond to a request for comment for this article or an earlier report in 2021. According to standard practice, the FBI does not comment on cases where charges have not been filed and only confirms that it has executed a search warrant. At the address associated with Koetting.
In the nearly four years since the Capitol attack, Michael Koetting has been removed from the Koetting Insurance website, and an employee who answered the phone said he was no longer affiliated with the firm and that the employee had no contact information for him. and was “not sure” if he was still in the country. The employee confirmed that he knew the FBI had searched Koetting’s home, which was with the insurance company, but said the insurance company did not.
Photos of “Old Double Shot” never appeared on the FBI’s Capitol Violence website, which usually features photos of persons of interest not yet known to the FBI. Because the website is set up to generate new public tips, people are usually not added to it when the FBI already has names or solid leads.
Of the more than 1,500 defendants the FBI has arrested to date, federal prosecutors on January 6 indicted more than 1,100 on charges ranging from unlawful picketing or parading to seditious conspiracy against the United States. prison terms ranging all the way from a few days in jail to a record 22-year federal sentence for former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy.