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86 Minutes: Two Arrests Thwarted and Three Cops Disabled by “Bear Shit”

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In the 86 minutes after the Capitol Police first asked for help from the National Guard on January 6, police had to drop two arrests of violent rioters, and three cops — including Brian Sicknick — were temporarily disabled after being sprayed with “bear shit.”

At 1:49 on January 6, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund asked the Commander of the DC National Guard, General William Walker, for urgent help pushing back the riot attacking the Capitol. According to Walker’s testimony, he loaded Guardsmen onto busses to be able to respond as soon as he got authority, but that approval was not granted and communicated to him for over three hours. Walker testified that he could have reinforced the Capitol within 15 minutes, and indeed, once DOD granted approval, according to Walker’s testimony the Guard arrived within 20 minutes (DOD says it took almost 40 minutes).

At 1:49pm I received a frantic call from then Chief of U.S. Capitol Police, Steven Sund, where he informed me that the security perimeter at the Capitol had been breached by hostile rioters. Chief Sund, his voice cracking with emotion, indicated that there was a dire emergency on Capitol Hill and requested the immediate assistance of as many Guardsmen as I could muster.

Immediately after the 1:49pm call with Chief Sund, I alerted the Army Senior Leadership of the request. The approval for Chief Sund’s request would eventually come from the Acting Secretary of Defense and be relayed to me by Army Senior Leaders at 5:08pm – 3 hours and 19 minutes later. We already had Guardsmen on buses ready to move to the Capitol. Consequently, at 5:20pm (in under 20 minutes) the District of Columbia National Guard arrived at the Capitol.

Had DOD worked the way they had in the past then, the Capitol Police might have had reinforcements from the Guard at the Capitol by around 2:10 PM.

About five minutes after the time General Walker says the Guard could have arrived, around 2:15, Hunter Ehmke allegedly started trying to punch through a window from a ledge outside the Rotunda.

Officer Fluke observed Ehmke pointing towards the window, followed by looking at the crowd to his south and waving his hand as if to summon others over to his position. Ehmke repeated the sequence of gestures again. Officer Fluke shouted out, “They’re going to break the window” during this time in hopes to bring attention from fellow officers.

An officer who saw what Ehmke was doing looked at the hundreds of rioters he was trying to repel then back towards Ehmke, only to see that Ehmke had punched the window and broken it.

Officer Fluke looked east to focus back on the crowd pushing on the shields and gave orders for the growing crowd to get back. Officer Fluke turned to look north again and observed Ehmke with a balled fist, pulling his arm back and twisting his upper body. Ehmke then swung forward striking a pane of the window about shoulder level of Ehmke. Officer Fluke began to run toward Ehmke while continuing to hold his shield in both hands.

Officer Fluke managed to knock Ehmke down and two other officers came to help arrest him. Others attempted to set up a perimeter to protect the now-broken window and create space for an arrest. But as confrontations elsewhere grew more urgent and a crowd started demanding that the cops let Ehmke go, police released him and told him not to come back.

As the officers discussed an action plan, the disturbance caused individuals of the crowd facing the Rotunda doors to divert their attention towards the approximately 10 officers in the northwest corner of the landing. Individuals in the throng began to show aggression by pointing fingers and shouting obscenities. One unidentified individual threatened Officer Fluke and the other officers, stating “you’re not leaving with him”, while pointing in the direction of Officer Fluke and Ehmke. Due to the growing aggression of the large crowd that far outnumbered the officers and the exigent circumstances at the time, officers made the decision to allow Ehmke depart under his own power.

Eight minutes after the confrontation with Ehmke began, at 2:23, Julian Khater and others were wrestling with police over a set of bike rack barriers. Khater appears to have sprayed what he had called, “bear shit” towards the cops. Three cops, including Brian Sicnick, withdrew from their position. All three took at least 20 minutes recovering from the toxic spray before they could return to the fight against the insurrectionists.

Officer Chapman’s BWC shows that at 2:23 p.m., the rioters begin pulling on a bike rack to Chapman’s left, using ropes and their hands to pull the rack away. Seconds later, KHATER is observed with his right arm up high in the air, appearing to be holding a canister in his right hand and aiming it in the officers’ direction while moving his right arm from side to side. Officer Chapman’s BWC confirms that KHATER was standing only five to eight feet away from the officers.

[snip]

In reviewing the surveillance footage and BWC video, your affiant observes that Officers Sicknick, Edwards and Chapman, who are standing within a few feet of KHATER, all react, one by one, to something striking them in the face. The officers immediately retreat from the line, bring their hands to their faces and rush to find water to wash out their eyes, as described in further detail below and as captured in the following screen shots.

While Sicknick returned to his work, that spray may have contributed to his death.

About eight minutes after Khater sprayed Sicknick and two others, starting at 2:31, Mark Ponder appears on camera beating an officer’s shield with a pole. After he broke that pole, he found another more substantial one.

Moments later, shortly before 2:32 p.m. PONDER reemerges from the crowd holding another long pole. This second pole appears to be thicker than the first pole and is colored with red, white, and blue stripes.

17 minutes after Ponder first grabbed the pole, at 2:49, he started swinging it more aggressively at individual cops, striking one.

As PONDER swings the pole in the direction of the officers, he struck Officer #3 once in the left shoulder.

Officer 3 and others tackled Ponder and started moving to arrest him. They found his ID at 3:03, but Ponder apparently lied about where he currently lived. By 3:15 — 86 minutes after Sund first requested assistance — the officers learn there’s no transport available to complete the arrest of Ponder at that time. So, as happened with Ehmke less than an hour earlier, the cops let him go, instructing him not to come back.

Ponder remained at the riot for almost two more hours.

At 4:32, according to DOD’s timeline, Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller approved a deployment of the Guard to help at the Capitol. General Walker didn’t receive that order for another 30 minutes. Sometime between 5:20 (per Walker) and 5:40 (per DOD), the Guard arrived at the Capitol and started to help.

That is, in the first 86 minutes of the three hour period between when Sund asked for help and the Guard showed up, police moved to arrest two violent insurrectionists, only to be forced to let them go, and (as NYT had noted in a story some time ago), Brian Sicknick was sprayed with a toxic substance that may have led to his death.

It took 70 days for the FBI to track Ponder down after he was first released, and almost as long — 67 days — to arrest Julian Khater (likely delaying efforts to identify of the substance used against Sicknick in the process). Part of that delay must be attributed to the three hours it took DOD to provide relief to the Capitol Police.

OpSec Shaming Misses the Terrorists for the Forest of Bozos They Hid Behind

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It has been amusing reading the affidavits justifying the arrest of the January 6 insurrectionists to see how easy many of them made it for the FBI.

Yesterday’s favorite example is Samuel Camargo. He posted a picture with some kind of trophy stolen from the Capitol building to his Instagram account and a confession that he had been in the riot on Facebook. After some of his associates reported him and then an FBI agent interviewed him, Camargo posted to his Facebook account claiming — notwithstanding the agent’s view that, “Camargo [had become] uncooperative, questioning your affiant’s loyalty to the constitution, and advised the interviewing agent he had no information to provide” — that he had been cleared of any crime related to the insurrection.

It didn’t work out that way.

InfoSec and cyber journalists are beginning to report on it, too. This happens to be one example, though I’m seeing a number of examples.

But while federal law enforcement has significant legal and technical resources at its disposal — like the ability to get warrants to phone or tech companies to see whose phones were in an area at a specific time, for instance — that’s proven unnecessary for a number of people who have been charged so far.

It goes on to review the OpSec failures of nine different coup-conspirators (and Camargo is not one of them).

I get the sense of schadenfreude that the seeming certainty among insurrectionists that they would not only be victorious but their victory celebrations would be risk-free has instead led to their arrests. I’m especially sympathetic to communities of color for whom similar behavior might have gotten them killed.

But with a few exceptions, notably the identification of “zip tie guys” Larry Rendall Brock (by his ex-wife) and Eric Munschel, as well as the identification of Proud Boys member, “Spaz,” as the retired Marine Dominic Pezzola (the latter of whom was arrested with the help of two seeming insider cooperating witnesses), few of the arrests so far have been of the most dangerous insurrectionists.

For example, even though the FBI posted this image of the person suspected of placing bombs at both the RNC and DNC on the day of the attack, there’s no public indication that the FBI has any leads on who it is.

According to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, the discovery of the bombs distracted his leadership team from the growing riot at a key moment on January 6.

Sund told NPR on Friday that he increasingly believes the insurrection was part of a coordinated, planned attack on the Capitol. Specifically, Sund believes that reports of pipe bombs planted at the headquarter offices of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in southeast Washington were part of an effort to distract police as the violent mob approached the Capitol complex.The Justice Department said it has “no direct evidence of kill or capture teams” but is still looking into what kind of planning there was.

Sund said moments before those reports came through, he was in the operations center for Capitol Police and watching the rally with President Trump at the Ellipse.

“We had the volume up a little bit so I can kind of hear what was going on, listening for anything — anything that was going on down there,” Sund said. Then “we had to turn the volume down to, you know, again, to direct our attention toward the first pipe bomb that was over at the Republican National Committee.”

The FBI has said the first pipe bomb was reported at 1 p.m. ET at the RNC in southeast Washington, followed by a report of a second pipe bomb at the DNC at 1:15 p.m. A suspect in that case has not be identified.

“I think that’s all part of the concerted and coordinated efforts that led to the violent attack,” Sund said. “Those were diversionary tactics to pull resources away from the Hill in advance of that attack. I honestly believe that.”

Likewise, I’ve seen no indication that the FBI has leads on members of a team of men who quietly snaked through the loud mouths on the stairs and into the Capitol in military formation, even though they wore insignia from the Oath Keepers, one of the most closely watched right wing terrorist groups.

As President Donald Trump’s supporters massed outside the Capitol last week and sang the national anthem, a line of men wearing olive-drab helmets and body armor trudged purposefully up the marble stairs in a single-file line, each man holding the jacket collar of the one ahead.

The formation, known as “Ranger File,” is standard operating procedure for a combat team that is “stacking up” to breach a building — instantly recognizable to any U.S. soldier or Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a chilling sign that many at the vanguard of the mob that stormed the seat of American democracy either had military training or were trained by those who did.

[snip]

A close examination of the group marching up the steps to help breach the Capitol shows they wore military-style patches that read “MILITIA” and “OATHKEEPER.” Others were wearing patches and insignias representing far-right militant groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and various self-styled state militias.

Thus far, most of the charges involve involve illegal entry and interfering with cops. It would be easy for law enforcement to focus on the chum along with the murderers of Brian Sicknick, while concentrating less closely on the people whose good OpSec has not only allowed them to delay capture, but seems to have succeeded in ensuring the Capitol would be as vulnerable as possible. Worse still, with limitations on resources in the DC District Court — most notably a scarcity of grand jury time because of COVID — the flood of idiots entering the system might delay the pursuit of more dangerous terrorists.

Yes, let’s have our fun. Let’s use the ease with which some have been caught as a way to scare the terrorism tourists from showing up on Inauguration Day or in their state capitals, to say nothing of exposing them to shame in their communities.

But let’s remember that, to a significant extent, the people taking selfies and trophies from the Capitol building were largely the camouflage behind which more dangerous men appear to have hidden.

Update: After I posted on Sunday, the government arrested several more more dangerous people. Most were all still identified via public videos. But working through these networks will likely lead to those who avoided closer video scrutiny.