Ryan Reilly: The Sleuths Who Helped Nab Jan 6 Rioters

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I am Charlie Sykes.
The world is burning. The house is burning.
Jim Jordan still is short of enough votes to become the speaker of the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is in the Middle East, and that ghastly war is getting even more ghastly.
We're going to talk about a lot of things, but we have a very special guest today, Ryan Riley, who is justice reporter at NBC News and author of the brand new book came out just yesterday, Sedition Hunters, how January 6th broke the justice system. First of all, good morning.
Congratulations, Ryan. Thanks so much.
So what's more amazing to you? The fact that Jim Jordan apparently is going to become the latest GOP speaker candidate to crash and burn, or the fact that Jim Jordan is actually plausibly could have become Speaker of the House of Representatives? I'm asking this in the context of January 6th. What is more amazing to you, the fact that the House GOP is in complete chaos or that they actually, for a few minutes, thought about making Jim Jordan Speaker of the House? You know, Jim Jordan comes up a lot in the course of January 6th, of course.
He's pretty integral to this whole deal. But the case that really jumps out at me is this one individual where he's standing at a stop the steel rally in Pennsylvania, sort of giving a speech.
I think he has a bullhorn in hand. And then directly behind him is a guy who was arrested for trying to storm the US Capitol in full military gear, shouting, take their guns, take their guns at other members of the mob as the mob was fighting with police on the west front of the Capitol, and then pepper sprayed officers.
And, you know, he was also hanging out with Doug Mastriano, who was the, you know, GOP gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania. There are more than half a dozen photos of them together at different events.
And it really is one of these things where how closely tied you see these connections between people who stormed the Capitol and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives these days. It really is astonishing.
It is astonishing. And, you know, there's so much about this in your reporting that is just extraordinary.
But what you just described, the attempt to normalize what happened, the revisionist history, the fact that people like Jim Jordan, he was not the only Republican that voted against certifying the electoral votes, but Jim Jordan played a special role in this. I mean, he was more than just your average run-of-the-mill co-conspirator.
I mean, he was out there, you know, obviously colluding with the Trump White House, you know, appearing at these Stop the Steal rallies. But we get so numb to all of this.
The scene you just described, here's a man who came within a few votes of being Speaker of the House of Representatives, and he's appearing on stage with a violent insurrectionist. And that's kind of a new normal, at least for Republican politics.
What's happened with January 6th and the aftermath of January 6th is really just astonishing, where one point that I constantly come back to that just fundamentally grinds against what's supposed to be a conservative idea of the idea that, you know, government is bloated, government is ineffective. That was at least, you know, my extended family, you know, a lot of core members of my family is that's, you know, belief that they've had for a long time.
That's why they're conservatives, because they think, you know, that government isn't as effective as the private sector, as we sort of saw with these sleuths afterwards. But this idea that they suggested that the FBI was somehow behind this just really assigns this degree of competency to bureaucracy, which just doesn't make a lot of sense to me, right? Like it doesn't fundamentally compute that they think that government is bloated and government's awful.
But at the same time, they're just these masterminds and super geniuses who are able to pull off the perfect crime and manipulate all these people and put people in different spots and leave no traces or any evidence. And it's just not what the facts are when you end up looking at all of these thousands of pages of documents and just see, wow, this bureaucracy really was weighing the FBI down, both in the aftermath and afterwards.
If you go deep down these rabbit holes of these conspiracy theories, and of course you have all of these dark forces, the deep state that are able to manipulate these things, play five-dimensional chess. But of course, stop with the logic and the linear thinking here.
This is one of the moments to remind ourselves that people's minds don't necessarily work in always an orderly way. You and I were chatting right before we started this, and I was describing a college student that I think did not know what NATO was.
And you told a story about one of the better educated insurrection of rioters on January 6th. Can you just tell me that story again? Yeah.
So a lot of rioters mistakenly thought that they were storming the White House and said this as much as they were storming the US Capitol. And you sort of expect that of the guy, this one QAnon believer from

Iowa or Ohio, who was basically really into this idea, didn't really know what he was doing,

just following all these Q drops online. It's really interesting to me when you have people

who are an expert in one field and actually know that field really well, but then have this really

abundance of confidence that they really have not really earned in other areas of life. So for example, one of the individuals who stormed the Capitol and said that they were very embarrassed about this is actually a doctor, you know, someone who graduated from medical school, an expert in his field, who then thought he was storming the White House when he was storming the US Capitol, got the complete branch of government wrong.
I wasn't great at't great at science when I was in high school. That was not my forte.
It's just as amazing to me when you have this situation where people really just have this overconfidence of their knowledge of something when they have none, and they're just believing a lot of stuff because they read something really quick on Facebook without looking very deeply into it or without learning the backstory for how this process actually works. But it is amazing.
We do live in this age where all people need is one source, one piece of data or information that confirms their priors or gets them upset about something that they want to get upset about, and they're going to go with it. To this moment, I cannot tell you, I'm sure you get even more than I do, the number of emails or social media posts that say, well, Charlie, when are you going to talk about Ray Epps? Ray Epps was behind the entire insurrection.

Now, you and I know that that's been completely debunked, but we live in an age where everything is on the internet is on your permanent record, but it just never goes away.

So any conspiracy theory that allows you to think about an event differently, no matter

how much evidence there is, no matter how many thousands of pages there are, no matter how much videotape that we saw, people are going to believe what they want to believe. Yeah.
I've talked with my wife, who's a therapist, about some of this. That's convenient.
In the house. Yeah, very much so.
Very helpful in getting through this book. But this idea that people don't feel any sort of shame or embarrassment is quite something to me because a lot of these, for example, with that example of Ray Epps, that has been thoroughly debunked.
It's just garbage, right? It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't compute.
But it's something that people will, to the core of their bones, defend. And the people who were saying this in the first place, that this was all a setup, that this person was encouraging, et cetera, will never take the L, so to speak.
Will never admit, oh yeah, that was dumb. That was wrong.
I was incorrect on this. And that was really what you would have to do if that person has been charged.
Because just take a step back for a second. Ray Epps has now been charged.
Now what people are saying is, oh, the charges weren't strong enough. And they just pivoted and said, wow, they really gave him a good deal.
Even though he hasn't been sentenced yet, we don't know what sort of sentence he's going to get. And even though really comparatively to what other people did, he really is kind of getting singled out, frankly.
There are thousands of people who are on the grounds of the Capitol that day who are not going to ever be charged because mostly the FBI is focused on people who either went inside or attacked officers or destroyed property. Ray Upps didn't do any of those things.
He briefly touched- And he was also not working for the FBI. I mean, I feel guilty even like, you know, giving a little bit of oxygen to this, but he was not.
Do we know, by the way, why did they fixate on this guy? He was just sort of camera ready, right? The big thing was that the night before on January 5th, he was talking about needing to go, you know, into the Capitol. That was the main thing, right? So he was talking about, you know, I'm not going to say this, you know, I shouldn't say this, we need to even go into the Capitol.
But you know, there are lots of people talking about storming the Capitol. And just because he was caught on video, saying it before this idea that there's this FBI setup, it just really, even if you were to think that the FBI was that diabolical, let's set that aside.
They're just not that competent. They could not pull that off, right? The FBI could never do this.
They're not that technologically skilled. They're not that good at covering their tracks.
There's this image of the Hollywood FBI that I think is just really fundamentally out of sync with the reality of the FBI. And it just doesn't make a lot of sense at its core if you have an individual who, let's just say Ray Epps, oh, he was working for the government.
Imagine now how you'd feel, what, he's going to do time in prison just to maintain that cover? This fundamentally doesn't make sense. He wouldn't have been charged if he was actually working for the government.
They can't do that. So that fully breaks the entire argument, but people can't accept that and have to say, oh, you know, I think they're the smartest person in the room.
And I see what's really going on here. And the FBI is just covering their tracks by charging.
It fundamentally doesn't make a lot of sense. OK, so let's go to the other end of the spectrum.
We were talking about the guy who has the medical degree who didn't know what the Capitol was not the White House. There are people who did know what exactly was going on.
So I'm talking about members of Congress, including Kevin McCarthy, who denounced Donald Trump's role. I mean, clearly he was there.
He was on the phone with him. And yet, like so many other Republicans, they've gone along with the various attempts to whitewash it.
Kevin McCarthy giving this unedited tape to Tucker

Carlson. By the way, did he ever give that to any other news outlets? I mean, it was such an extraordinary thing to give it to one outlet with the clear intent of currying favor with him, but also of aiding and abetting the attempt to completely whitewash what in fact he had experienced.
So what is the psychology of people who were fearing for their lives on January 6th, who saw and experienced that attack, and then have decided, I'm going to do everything I can to convince people that it was just a walk in the park? Yeah. I mean, it's a really politically inconvenient fact.
So I think there is this need to sort of pivot, right? You know, what about ism? Oh, what about that? You know, what about Black Lives Matter protests? And what about this? And what about that? You see very frequently, why aren't they, you know, going as aggressively after them? And, you know, frankly, part of this is that the individuals who stormed the Capitol just left a lot of slowballs sort of hanging over the plate for the FBI here. It's not really that complicated to ID a lot of these folks who are openly bragging about their exploits online and filming their crimes.
When you compare that to, you know, say an Antifa black clock measure where people are covering their faces and it's tough to figure out who's doing what. Owning the libs was sort of the mantra on January 6th by not wearing a face mask.
And lo and behold, that makes it a lot easier to identify. It's so convenient.
Yeah, there's a mask mandate in place. If ever you had an excuse to cover your face while committing a crime, you had it.
But you know, that's not where things went. You mentioned the tapes, they had been making that process open actually to go into eventually, but they sort of opened it up to a lot of more right wing sort of bloggers.
Initially, some people were running some sub stacks and people were basically trying to undermine this entire idea of January 6 and paint this picture of January 6 as a setup. And they eventually opened that up more widely.
But I still have, you know, it's probably over a month old now, a request out because I was trying to get footage of something that happened that evening when an officer who actually later died by suicide was struck in the face with a pole. The Sleuths have really been working on trying to identify who that individual was, but there's not as much footage at night.
And, you know, obviously it's at night, so it's a lot tougher to see things, but I'd requested all these videos and, you know, that's something that has been on pause and I haven't been able to get those videos, I think, basically because of the chaos in the house. But, you know, meanwhile, out videos, or at least were in recent weeks, to some guy who runs a blog who's trying to figure out who the person who set up the gallows off of the Capitol grounds was, as though that's going to undermine this entire thing.
Actually, it's so ridiculous, but they have video of him walking generally in the direction north. And from that, they surmise that, oh, that's where the FBI Washington field office is.
And they're coming from there. And it's just like basic common sense and logic doesn't seem to break through here in terms of, okay, so you're saying that this person was under FBI control and their grand crime was to set up a photo op that actually, you know, it's a really despicable thing to do.
But I actually think setting up a gallows could be as long as it's off the grounds of the Capitol, and it's on accessible land, actually, probably in the realm of protected free speech, right? That's not something that I can see a criminal, an enumerated criminal statute that you could actually be able to charge someone for, but they think that's going to break this wide open, that that one guy was the one who set this all off, instead of just sort of following the obvious logic that a lot of people who thought that the country was being stolen from under them were really mad and got really revved up on January 6th, and that the mob mentality took over for a lot of the people who, you know, the Proud Boys would refer to as quote unquote normies. Your book is really interesting because you mentioned things about the FBI and them

casting some doubt on the competence of the FBI.

This is a really important part of the story, because what you write about is the online

sleuths who helped catch the January 6th rioters.

And the title of your book, and when I first got it in the mail, I was really struck by

it.

I kind of did a little take here.

The Sedition Hunters, How January 6th Broke the Justice System.

Okay, so let's talk about that title.

Because a lot of people are going to go, well, hold it, but the justice system is working now.

We are having, you know, one after another have been arrested.

They have been convicted.

We have a lot of people who have gone to jail.

The justice system seems to actually be working.

So that's not what you meant, though. How did January 6th break the justice system? Let's start there.
Yeah, you know, I think that there are a lot of wins, right? And I wouldn't take that away from them, especially the seditious conspiracy cases. These are major victories, I think, for the justice system.
You know, you have the longest sentence, for example, 22 years it was handed out to a member of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers case, you know, very significant prison sentences there. But frankly, it's just the capacity of the justice system.
There are going to be people, frankly, who are going to walk away from this, who have committed violent crimes on January 6, who are never going to be charged. Whether or not they're identified is a different story.
But we're already at the halfway mark of this investigation, because the statute of limitations is five years. And, you know, the total spectrum of people who could be charged in connection with a capital attack, and that means they either entered the building or assaulted law enforcement officers outside or committed some sort of property damage outside, inside just that limited realm, which is sort of where the FBI has drawn the boundaries, that is upwards of 3,000 people.
And today, we have only 1,100, I say only, that's a lot of people, but 1,100 people who have been charged. And there are just hundreds of cases.
In fact, more than 1,000 cases that are identified right now that you could walk in and write up an affidavit against somebody tomorrow. Most of those are identified, are people who are identified directly by the slews and sent into the FBI.
So there are just all these cases sitting out there, and the speed of these cases has really slowed down. And there are just people who are not going to ever be charged and who could be charged.
And I think that that's really, it's sort of a capacity for this. And that also sort of reflects how the system was broken before January 6th, because the fact that January 6th happened sort of shows how the intelligence community or the intelligence part of this justice system was broken, because you just had these bureaucratic hurdles that were in the way of them actually preventing January 6th from taking place.
That's what's really, really valuable about your book, that my takeaway was that if it had been just left up to the justice system, to the FBI, to the intelligence services, we wouldn't have really broken this case, would we? I mean, you tell the story that all of this footage from the cell phones on Twitter, along with the police officer body cams and surveillance cameras from the attack, energized this online group of self-appointed detectives who set out to find the identities of all of the rioters. And as you write in this book, this internet neighborhood watch became an invaluable resource to the FBI.
I mean, this was, I won't say it's the first one, but it was certainly the most dramatic crowdsourced investigation. This whole thing would not have played out that way if you hadn't had people sitting in their basement like you and I right now on their computers doing the work that the professionals either didn't know how to do or just didn't have the resources to do.
So tell me a little bit about this online neighborhood watch that broke so many of these cases. You know, it's funny, you know, with a basement idea, it's one of the reasons I think a lot of the slews were really sort of eager to talk to me as part of it to just sort of dispel this idea that, you know, they're sort of these losers in their mom's basement, right? Like, I think like a lot of these people, I talked about one of one of these guys, really successful guy voted for Trump twice, right? And it plays a critical role in this online community.
And the technological skills that people develop are really valuable. And a lot of these people have really, you know, rewarding family lives, rewarding careers, but have gotten really into this in a, in a really, really good at this.
And it is like, it is fascinating. Those things can keep you sort of going.
So who are they? Give me a profile. I mean, how many people we talk to you about and who are they? They're not the 500 pound guy sitting in his mom's basement.
Okay, I get that. They obviously were very, very skilled.
Yeah. And were able to do a lot of things that are pretty amazing.
So very early on, there were actually some people from overseas who were really good at open source intelligence that were involved in sort of documenting a lot of this. But there's a ton of people, basically, who it's a really diverse group, frankly.
So I'll start with one woman who just considered herself know, just considered herself just so you know, a mom, that was her sort of full time job. She's from Pennsylvania, she lives near Hershey, and she just sort of got a message early on from a sedition hunters group.
And she sort of just went to town on Facebook trying to identify this guy who was actually found inside the US Senate on January 6. And this one wasn't the biggest mystery in the world, because he was wearing actually the sweatshirt that belonged to his children's school.
And it was pretty small school. So she went backwards, worked backwards off of that, went to the Facebook page for the school and basically just started looking at anyone who had ever liked or commented on any post from the school.
Eventually found somebody, it was under the name of Zeker Bozell, clicked on that. And it was just like a snowman, but then it was a profile photo, but went even deeper on it, then ended up figuring out that it was this individual called Brent Bozell IV, who was actually, of course, the son of Brent Bozell III and sort of inherited a lot of this conservative movement back for the past more than century.
So that was an individual who was identified smashing in a window there when they first made entry to the Capitol. So it's been really fascinating to see how this has all come together.
But then there are also people who just really use their technological skills. On the other end, there's one dad who, from the South, works for a major company, pretty successful.
And he really just sort of has been really about archiving as much of this footage as he possibly can and just really gets into this. So, you know, dinner conversations with his wife now are talking about all of these different events on around January 6.
And, you know, obviously, life sometimes sort of gets in the way. So he'll be able to do more of this on some days than others.
Sometimes he's busy with work, sometimes he's busy with with family, but he's really been archiving as much of this as he can. And in one instance, found himself going down this rabbit hole, identifying someone who assaulted an officer that day and using facial recognition software, ended up generating a lot of leads to pornographic websites.
And before he knew it, he was looking through a lot of gay porn to find, ultimately, a man who assaulted officers. And they've since sent that into the FBI.
And you'll probably be hearing about that potentially, you know, next year or whenever the FBI gets around finally bringing that case home. But you really just, you know, brought it beyond any reasonable doubt and with, you know, able to match up some of these things that you knew about that individual with things that you could find out about them online.
You know, freckles play a big role here, tattoos, all sorts of things that can be that little confirming piece of information.

Often it's just who people were with.

If you find one person, you know, there's no guarantee, even with a facial recognition match, perhaps that this is that person.

So how do you get that confirming factor?

If they were with someone and you see them together at the Capitol on one day and then separately outside of that together at another point, you're good to go.

Right. Because that's double confirmation.

If you have two people who look similar and you find them in separate environments, then you've identified similar. And these are all amateur sleuths.
I mean, what I thought was interesting is that, as you write, they use their own vetting process before they turn things over to the FBI. You interviewed one individual, you write, they want to make sure that they're dotting all the I's, crossing all the T's to make sure that they are correct identifications.
So, I mean, these people develop their own protocols for how to go on. Because obviously, you know, you don't want to go into the FBI with something half-baked, something you don't actually understand.
So is there a network? Were they working together? Were they screen sharing? Was this group thing? How does it actually work? Yeah, a lot of it takes place in group chats. And I think, frankly, that's one of their sort of secret weapons, just that they can use some of these collaborative tools that are really available to everyone, whereas that's a little more complicated for the FBI, where you're talking about all these field offices, where email is the primary source of communication between these different field offices.
Whereas, you know, they're just in these group chats chatting, and they can organize them by hashtag, and they can organize them by various subjects. So, you know, everyone gets sort of a nickname or a hashtag, and everything that's found about them is dumped into one of these chats.
It keeps it well organized. Okay, now this report's been sent in.
We're good to go there. They all sort of collaborate really well together.
But, you know, they really are batting a thousand here. And I think it's that peer review process that really helps out because you can sort of challenge the evidence that other people discover, make sure that's true, and sort of really thoroughly vet it, question it, sort of like an editing process almost within the sleuth community.
And because there's so much sort of trust built up there, it becomes this really valuable tool. Whereas the FBI, frankly, they raided someone who wasn't the right person they were looking for.
There was a woman who was raided in Alaska who had her door knocked down because they thought that she was involved in stealing Pelosi's laptop. And after that happened, and this news story sort of blew up because the FBI raided the wrong woman who did not enter the Capitol, the sleuths ended up working on the woman that the FBI was actually looking for here and identified her.
Look, he split within 30 minutes. And now actually she's being sentenced this afternoon.
Her nickname was Airhead Lady along with her son. And they were in Pelosi's office and aided with the theft of Pelosi's laptop.
How'd she get the name Airhead Lady? It's a good nickname. And she earned it because she actually, it's not just sort of a joke, although that's the

underlying part of it, but you see these photos of the individuals on the floor of the house, lawmakers who put these emergency hoods over their head, these clear emergency hoods, sort of an airbag, right? So they stole those and actually walked out of the Capitol with those on their head, these emergency. Brilliant.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that's how they got the nickname. Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast.

We created the Bulwark podcast. on their head, these emergency.
Brilliant. Yeah, yeah.
And that's how they got the nickname.

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We're going to get through this together. I promise.
It's going back to this diverse group of, you know, anonymous Americans, you know, been working to do all this, you know, the range of skill sets that you describe. So in case you think that your 20-something-year-old daughter is wasting their time on dating apps, in fact, one of these 20-something-year-olds entrapped insurrectionists on a dating app, there's the mom who you describe as her Facebook stalking skills in pursuit of justice.
So we might think that, you know, people are wasting their time on all of this, but they've become these valuable, valuable tools here. So let's just talk about January 6th and the way it's understood, because, you know, there are now millions of Americans that think that it's overblown.
They believe either the revisionist history, or they've just decided it was just another protest. You explain that January 6th was a pivot point for American democracy, but it was also a pivot point for, this is what you wrote, it was also a pivot point for the FBI and law enforcement, which were caught flat-footed despite all the warning signs flashing online ahead of the Capitol attack and who were left playing catch-up with open source researchers moving at internet speed.
This is another one of the astonishing aspects of January 6th. How could they have been caught so flat-footed? I mean, this is one of those moments where we have an assumption of our ability to anticipate and monitor something major.
This was a huge intelligence failure. You've looked at this.
What happened? What broke down? Were we just never set up to do something like that? Did we never anticipate that something like this would happen? Was it a policy failure, a structure failure, a failure of individuals? What's your read? I think sort of all of the above. There's one example that this is just a sort of bureaucratic thing that's sort of a head smacker.
There was this contract that was set to expire involving DataMiner, this tool that the FBI had been using for years to sort of alert them of really bad rhetoric on what was bubbling online. It's actually a tool that a lot of newsrooms use as well to alert them of what's getting a lot of traction.
It's built a lot off of Twitter, but it uses some other websites as well. That contract, a year before January 6th, so I think December of 2019, comes up for renewal.
They open it up this process. The data miner gets underbid by another company called zero Fox.
So when does that contract expire? New Year's Eve of 2020. Just as when the clock hit midnight, and we got into 2021, they no longer had access to that tool.
And all of the other FBI sort of components that were built off of that underlying structure of data miner went offline and went kaput. So you see these emergency emails circulating, because this was sort of something that they got blindsided by.
The new company did not set them up with logins and did not sort of have a layover, essentially, to make sure this transition was smooth. And, you know, the best that they could really hope for, even though they started paying for this tool on January 1st, was they were told, you know, we'll definitely get them before inauguration, you know, hopefully we can get them on the 6th before you guys.
But, you know, just look at that, right? You're talking about the last two weeks of December of 2020, you know, which is a time where there's a lot of other events going on, we sort of overlook it now, but there is this massive data breach, one of the biggest data breaches in American history. There's also a bomb that went off in Nashville that didn't kill anyone, but that was something that the FBI surged a lot of resources to.
Everyone went in. That was just at the end of a hell of a year.
And frankly, you know, government, et cetera, you know, this would apply to journalists as well. Nobody's really firing on all cylinders, right, during those final weeks of December.
It's sort of phoned in time. In retrospect, I think that's true, yeah.
Yeah, so, I mean, just a vacation. Yeah, it was a part of this.
Well, you also, you know, talk about the technological capabilities of the FBI. You know, after September 11th, when, you know, the FBI realized that their technology was outdated, that it was the high-tech equivalent of the Stone Age, I think that's your description.
In 2012, the FBI deploys this new computer system. But you write that, while nearly every field office in the country was involved in the January 6th investigation, the FBI deploys this new computer system.
But you write that while nearly every field office in the country was involved in the January 6th investigation, the FBI was drowning. And the Bureau was also impacted by the sizable percentage of agents sympathetic to the rioters.
Okay, so we're talking about now post. So they're drowning in data.
But how significant was that a problem?

That in law enforcement, there were sympathizers for what happened on January 6, which is really disturbing going forward, too? It is. And I think there are degrees of this, right? There are FBI agents who aren't just like, you know, necessarily gung ho Trump guys, but who also don't think that these cases should be a priority just because, you know, they're not used to working, say, misdemeanors.
That's not typically something that the FBI does a lot of is work misdemeanor cases. And there was that sort of belief about this within the Bureau that they'd much rather be working what one official called sexier cases, right? Sort of whether that's international terrorism or sort of these harder gang cases.
A lot of this is because it's sort of coming down from the sluice now. The FBI agents are really just sort of there to check a box and to sort of vet that information.
It's not, I set that aside in terms of the seditious conspiracy cases. The FBI did a lot of really thorough work on those.
But some of these sort of more run-of-the-mill ones, they're just sort of handed to them on a silver platter. And, you know, it's not something that maybe, you know, get your blood going.
But there certainly is a lot of Trump sympathy within the Bureau. And I think it's tough to think about that in the current political environment, because we've had, you know, I don't know how long, six, seven years now, eight years now of Donald Trump saying that the FBI is out to get him, it's part of the deep state.
But just fundamentally, if you look at, you know, the inputs to the FBI, it's more conservative leaning. It's a law enforcement organization.
Military veterans have priority there. You can enter the FBI a little bit later if you're a military veteran than you otherwise could have.
So when you're talking about the inputs there and you look at who is within the FBI, it really is kind of more of a conservative leaning organization. And I think that that's played out.
And we've seen some of that bubble up into public, where you now have these, quote-unquote, whistleblowers who have testified before the House about what their beliefs are about the January 6th cases, who've written books and have podcasts that are centered upon them being whistleblowers, quote-unquote, about what was happening inside the FBI after January 6th. So going ahead out of this has changed everything.
One of the sleuths told you that the FBI computer system is fucking stupid. Others said they needed to make sure the reports they sent to the FBI did not surpass the FBI's file size limit.
So you point out one of the great innovations from this open source intelligence from the sleuths is the FBI didn't have to put all their faith in them. The Bureau could simply vet the information themselves or verify through cell phones that the suspects were actually in the Capitol.
So by, you know, early this year, the FBI was deeply indebted to these sluices. So going forward, is this going to be a continuing relationship? Is this like a new era of monitoring law enforcement? Have these moms at their kitchen tables now, have they changed the way the FBI is going to do its work? I think hopefully, will be the hope there, because the FBI has to change how it's doing its work, just altogether, frankly, right? This is not, this is just really outdated.
One of the things that I learned that just sort of smacked me in the face, I graduated, you know, in 09, right? So I've been covering and I've covered DOJ and the FBI ever since. So, you know, 14 years now, right? And when I was first starting out and up until a few years ago, when I emailed the FBI, there was, it was typically the format was, you know, a name at ic.fbi.gov.
And I never really knew what that stood for. I guess I probably thought maybe like intelligence community, some other acronym along those lines.
And working on this book, I came to learn that it actually stood for Internet Cafe. Oh, no.
From the days of dial-up and AOL, because it was created at a time when you actually had to physically go to a separate room because their system wasn't hooked up to just the Internet in general. So you had to go to this Internet cafe within your FBI field office to check into your electronic mail.
And it just it's I think that that's really sort of what we're what we're dealing with here. It's just when you have these massive contracts and to fix these systems, it just really just becomes bogged down in the bureaucracy.
And they're just not as nimble as a lot of these outside groups can be. The First Amendment concerns are real here.
And, you know, I think that that's going to be sort of a challenge going forward, because the FBI just can't shouldn't be collecting mass information on just protest, right? They shouldn't be doing a lot of the stuff that outsiders can. But that's really what's broken some of these cases open for the slews is they just, you know, they do some sort of search and then okay,, we're going to document everyone who is at this protest.
And then if you see them at the Capitol, and then you see them at a protest in the state Capitol and their home state, then you already know, you know, okay, this person is from Michigan, who else can I connect them to? And that becomes a really quick lead. So a lot of this, you know, stuff is stuff that the FBI shouldn't be keeping on their internal systems, but they could be looking out there on the world wide web.

And the Boston Marathon bombing is one that really, I think, that could have been a lesson for the FBI because they were just flooded with all of this information. And ultimately, this is sort of a bad example of how this sleuthing can go bad because you had people on Reddit who were falsely accusing innocent people of doing the wrong thing.
There's a real danger there, right. Yeah, and that ultimately is what spurred the FBI to put out photos of the actual suspects because they didn't want innocent people getting in the line of fire, so to speak.
And that was what spurred. And then because of they put those photos out, they actually got a tip from a family member.
That's what led to the identification. But there could have been some lessons learned.
And that was 10 years ago now from that instance where they needed a better way of collecting all these digital materials, not just leaving them sitting in an FBI inbox somewhere in some server somewhere, actually make them more accessible, more readily accessible and searchable for the FBI. Because they really took the approach to this case that was all about documents.
And that's the multi-million dollar contract that they handed out was for this product that could really well organize PDFs. And that's just not what January 6th was about.
Give me the video. That's all the slews want.
Every video you can possibly see because that's what really can break these cases open. Okay.
So this seems related to it. I'm hesitant to take us into a deeper area here, but help me out here, Ryan, because a lot of this is about the information age, the flood of information.
You write,

the internet was both to blame for January 6th and responsible for help solving. It's also just changed the way that we deal with information and with truth.
And so I'm not asking for any reporting here or any decision. I think millions of people this morning, today, we're watching what's going on in the Middle East.
We're watching this horrific bombing of a hospital. Palestinians are saying 500 people were killed.
They are blaming Israel. Israel is coming out with data and video saying, no, it was Islamic Jihad.
We did not bomb this hospital. But it's one of those moments where the information is, the facts have a hard time catching up with the spin.
I think a lot of the media went with the original claims from the Palestinians. This was an Israeli bombing.
I guess cutting through all of it is how the fuck do we know who to believe anymore? How do we, and the stakes are so high because the whole world is on fire. There's going to be retaliation.
People will die because of these narratives that are going to be spread about all of this. The Israelis are trying to say, and Joe Biden apparently believes them, that this was not the Israelis.
But how do you catch up when you have these vast resources and people who are committed to putting out disinformation, misinformation, ambiguous information. Do you know what I'm getting at? I'm not asking for a definitive answer, but I mean, this is this moment where we have lived through the annihilation of truth where you just don't know who to believe for so long.
And now we're faced with life or death decisions on all of this. How do we know who to believe anymore, Ryan? And is it going to get worse? It's really tough.
And frankly, I do think it can get a lot worse from here because I think it's a unique scenario where you have different parties claiming different things and whatever value you want to assign to both sides there and you can weigh them. I think obviously a lot of mistakes were made in the reporting yesterday.
But I think that, you know, overall, if you're just sort of broadened out, the tools for creating disinformation are getting more complicated, especially with these sort of AI creations that could fool well-intentioned, reasonable people, not just sort of the most vulnerable people in the world. They can trick you.
I could be fooled by AI, right? Other people may be AI. This isn't some crazy email that your uncle's forwarding about what Hillary Clinton did.
These are real looking things. They're not on their face ridiculous.
And I think that that's what is interesting with January 6th, because there's so many things that to me, and I think that to a lot of people were just on their face ridiculous, like a lot of these claims and just logic doesn't work here when you're talking about a multi state criminal operation operated by dastardly Democrats to steal, you know, hundreds of 1000s of votes across several states, it's too big of a conspiracy that can actually take place. They're not that confident again.
But you know, it's tougher when you're talking about these sort of more complicated tools that really can trick people.

And especially when you're in an environment with X, for example, where people are incentivized because they gain a payment structure to actually fool people and trick people and promote misinformation because they actually get a paycheck showing up the more views they get. And you have this sort of universal skepticism now, because there was maybe once a time where if I showed you a photograph or if I showed you the video of what actually happened you'd go okay now I know what actually happened people now and going forward even when you show them the video proof this happened this person did this thing they won't necessarily believe it they'll think that it's fake and it might be fake I mean this is this is the problem that we face.
And I'll confess to you, this morning, as I was reading through, trying to figure out what actually happened, I found myself, and I think probably the Israelis are telling the truth, but I also know that I want the Israelis to be telling the truth. This is the problem, is that people now essentially decide whose side are they on and therefore they want to believe them.
Do I have the capacity to tell you right now what actually happened? No. But you can see that people are already sorting themselves out, some of them based on the evidence, some of them based on what they want the evidence to be.
And I just think this is a very dangerous, I mean, And we've lived through January 6. And, you know, as I'm reading your book, I'm thinking January 6 was just a dry run for what's going to happen, especially with all of the things you described.
You know, suddenly my silly education, my major media studies, you know, one of those goofy liberal arts terms isn't so out the door anymore, because I really do think that, you know, these critical media skills and critical thinking skills are so essential to the reality where we are today, because you have to be able to challenge your own biases to check with other people to really vet these sources and rely on reliable sources of information, you know, as much as you can sort of disparage the media overall, at least when you have someone who's grounded in reality, and there's consequences for them just putting out putting out garbage. And that's, you know, one of the things that is just so frustrating when you have people who don't have that, you know, don't have any repercussions for putting out information, don't have any, you know, blowback, and just like the core sense of also embarrassment, when you put out a lot of this stuff, I would be, I would be so embarrassed if I leaned into humiliated.
If I look like, I probably would, you know, crawl into a hole if I were saying, this guy's responsible for January 6, and he's an FBI informant, and then the FBI charged him, right? And then he was charged with a federal crime. Oh, how embarrassing, gutting, devastating.
But that's not the situation we're in. People can just very easily pivot and say, oh, no, I was still right and sort of try to save face.

And, you know, the toughest thing now is figuring out who actually believes the garbage and who is just saying the garbage because it's politically expedient. And there's not necessarily a red line between those two.
I mean, the way the way people's minds work. You know, I understand that people, you know, in the age of whataboutism will say, well, look, here's this report.
you know, you say we need to find sources that we trust. Well, here's where the BBC or NBC or

the Washington Post got the story wrong. The key, I think, red line has to be when people get it wrong, as inevitably they will, because we are human beings, do they correct it? Do they say we were wrong, we are sorry, or do they double down on it? And I would think that one of the life lessons would be that if somebody has lied to you, and then when they're caught lying, do not apologize, do not correct it, then you don't regard them as a credible source ever again.
If somebody tells you something is wrong, but then they come back to you later and say, okay, we didn't have the complete story. We were wrong.
Then that person obviously, or that entity, that organization is concerned about credibility. There are, as you point out, there are entities that frankly, clearly do not give a fuck whether or not they are putting out disinformation, misinformation, because if it gets them the clicks, if it gets them the donations, if it gets them the attention, if it gives them the political edge they want, they're going to go with it.
Those people are the ones who are toxic, but I don't know how to solve this problem anytime soon. In my sense, I mean, it was bad in 2017.
It's exponentially worse now. What's it going to be like in five years, Ryan, especially with AI? And I think also just people getting hit with so much information, right? You even talk to reasonably well-informed people who are paying more attention to the news than your average American.
And they're like, what trial is this again? Which one is this with Trump? Like, you know, people get very easily lost. And sometimes you have to remind yourself and you're like, wait, what happened in this case? When's this one happening? It's a lot of information that you're sort of getting, you're getting blasted with.
And it's a lot for people to handle. And I think those deep fakes are going to be really troublesome when they ultimately hit.
And whenever I get frustrated, I guess, with any of my jobs that I've had, it's something I think about now where it's like, getting these stories through, how difficult it is, especially in some of these cases where I identified someone before they were arrested by the FBI, the amount of internal vetting that that had to go through, gosh, to get to publication, whether it be with a standards desk or whether it be with legal and make sure every I is dotted and T is crossed in those cases, it was extraordinary. But it's also, it shows that there is responsibility.
And frankly, we see stuff with the Dominion settlement, where that's where this ultimately boils down to is money. And I think it's only when people start seeing, you know, consequences to their bottom line, that you're really gonna have some accountability there.
And sadly, that's not an effective way to have a sort of an information environment work, because, you know, obviously, some entities are much bigger targets than others. But when you have these established media companies that have a lot on the line, they really do work hard to vet that information internally.
So I would say trusted sources, while obviously the media doesn't have a perfect track record, those are a lot better than the alternative of just sort of misinformation and internet garbage out there. The book is Sedition Hunters, How January 6th Broke the Justice System.

It is a really an incredible read.

It is very eye-opening.

It's very entertaining.

Ryan Riley is justice reporter at NBC News.

The book is out yesterday.

Ryan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Thanks so much for having me.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes.

We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark podcast is produced

by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.