An ongoing threat: Reporter details importance of chronicling the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection

"This is really overwhelming the court system and these cases are going to go on for a very long time."

• Julia Agos/WITF
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  Julia Agos was a reporter and the host of All Things Considered for WITF.

(Harrisburg) — More than 40 Pennsylvanians have been arrested in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with charges ranging from entering a restricted building to assaulting Capitol police officers.

Many of the ongoing cases are in the pretrial phase – with judges deciding whether defendants should be let out on bail or remain jailed until trial.

To better understand where the investigation and court cases stand, WITF’s Julia Agos caught up with the Huffington Post’s senior justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly, who has been covering the court proceedings.

 
Below are highlights of the interview, edited for length and clarity.

Ryan, you and a few other reporters have dedicated quite a bit of time to covering these cases as they play out in court. Why is this an important story to stay on top of?

People who believe that the election was stolen and continue to believe that are a real threat going forward.

And because the federal government wasn’t prepared for what happened on January 6th, all of these people were allowed to leave and spread out across the country. In other circumstances, they would have been arrested on the spot, but because the government had underestimated the threat that was posed on January 6th, people are now spread across the country.

Pennsylvania is one of the biggest spots that we’ve seen people coming from. That’s in part because of the location. And we’ve seen a number of different defendants who came down on bus trips. We had a real concentration of defendants. And that’s why we’ve seen, you know, dozens of cases out of the state.

So, the Keystone State has at least 40 defendants — the second most in the nation, including several high-profile cases. Which ones stand out to you?

You know, there are a few. You can sort of put these cases in two categories. There are some people who might consider MAGA-tourists who are essentially trespassing and went through different parts of the Capitol, but didn’t commit any violence.

And there’s other defendants who were really engaged in violence.

One of those defendants that actually is a really interesting story — or future defendants, I should say — is Samuel Lazarre. He, as far as I know, has not been arrested by the FBI yet, but he actually was in a January 10th story by Lancaster Online just a few days after the Capitol attack. Then months later, his photograph was posted on the FBI’s website. If you simply matched up his photo with a description that Lancaster Online included in their story, this is Samuel Lazarre and you can follow his Facebook accounts. This is obviously him. He’s changed some of them since.

But I think that shows just how overwhelming this investigation is, because that was a circumstance in which already available, open source information would have led the FBI directly to the guy’s door, but because the FBI is getting so many tips and they’ve just been so overwhelmed, they ended up posting this photograph of someone that they could have hunted down on their own.

For listeners who may not be following these cases closely, what do you want them to know about those charged or the investigation?

I do think this is the largest investigation the FBI has ever run, in terms of suspects and just the sheer scale. This is really overwhelming the court system and these cases are going to go on for a very long time.

That’s essentially because the FBI and federal government was not prepared and did not take the threat of January 6th seriously enough in the first place. And I think that this is going to be a continuing story. We’re going to learn more about these suspects and there’s hundreds of suspects that still the FBI is looking for and has posted images of on their website.

So, there’s a variety of old-school and new technologies that are being used to bring some of these defendants to justice. But there are still a ton of defendants out there, who committed very violent acts that day, who have not been arrested.

As I understand it, there have been well over 400 arrests made in total nationwide. Do you have any sense of how many more could be coming?

The government has low-balled it. They said at least 100, but that’s really, really low estimate of how many more cases are actually going to come from this.

If you just look at the FBI’s website alone, which of course does not include all of the future defendants they’d like to charge — it only includes the ones that they haven’t identified yet — we’re talking about hundreds more arrests here. There are over 200 who have not been identified on the FBI’s website alone, in addition to the ones that they have identified, but not yet arrested.

It’s really this balancing act for the FBI, because they don’t have enough capacity and the federal prosecutors don’t have enough capacity to bring all these cases in at once. So, they have to think strategically about who’s the biggest threat when they should actually bring the case forward. But in a lot of cases, there’s still people out there who committed violence that day and still deeply in their bones believe that the election was stolen.

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NPR’s Investigative and News Apps teams have published a database of everyone arrested so far in connection with the Capitol Riot.  Here is the breakdown of all suspects from Pennsylvania:

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