Evidence of firearms in Jan. 6 crowd grows as arrests and trials mount

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/08/jan6-defendants-guns/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/eExzb

Some of the startling revelations of the recent blockbuster Jan. 6 House committee hearing came in snippets of police radio traffic captured during President Donald Trump’s rally on the Ellipse and from Trump’s purported response to being told there were armed protesters just outside a secured area.

The chatter included reports of a man with an AR-15 in a tree on Constitution Avenue who was accompanied by two men with pistols on their hips. Another officer radioed, “I’ve got three men walking down the street in fatigues carrying AR-15s, copy, at 14th and Independence.”
The recordings aired during the June 28 hearing in which former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump reportedly “was angry that we weren’t letting people through the [metal detectors] with weapons.”

The full picture of how many among the crowd were armed before the riot occurred is unclear, but court records, trial testimony and accounts from police officers and rioters have supplied growing evidence that multiple people brought firearms to Washington for Jan. 6, 2021. Six men were arrested that day for having guns in the vicinity of the U.S. Capitol, and a seventh who arrived after the riot ended was arrested the following day. Despite some instances in which alerts about people with guns turned out to be false alarms, accounts from police officers and rioters indicate that many firearms were spotted on Jan. 6 but were not seized as law enforcement focused more on defending the Capitol than on arresting gun-law violators.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Park Police said the agency investigated “a report of an individual on the Washington Monument grounds in a tree possibly armed with a pistol. USPP officers contacted the individual and it was determined the individual was unarmed.” A spokesman for the D.C. police said there was no indication that any arrests were made or weapons confiscated on the basis of the people cited in radio transmissions played by the committee.

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[captain queeg]

1. Weren't a lot of weapons stashed nearby?

It sure how well documented it was.