Debra Maimone pulled down her American flag mask for a moment on Jan. 6 and gazed at the unruly mob of supporters of President Donald Trump overrunning the U.S. Capitol.
“Put your mask on,” warned her fiance, as the couple stood beneath an unblinking array of surveillance cameras. “I don’t want them to see you.”
It was too late.
That scene, recorded in a cellphone video Maimone posted to the social media site Parler, helped FBI agents identify the Pittsburgh-area couple and pinpoint their location inside the Capitol, FBI agents said in a federal criminal complaint filed before Maimone’s arrest last month. Video cameras mounted throughout the complex also captured the pair from 10 different angles, the complaint says, as they allegedly stormed the halls of Congress, rummaged through a police bag, and made off with protective equipment that Senate officials kept on hand in case of a chemical attack.
Their case is among the more than 1,000 pages of arrest records, FBI affidavits, and search warrants reviewed by The Washington Post detailing one of the biggest criminal investigations in American history. More than 300 suspects have been charged in the melee that shook the nation’s capital and left five people dead.
The federal documents provide a rare view of the ways investigators exploit the digital fingerprints nearly everyone leaves behind in an era of pervasive surveillance and constant online connection. They illustrate the power law enforcement now has to hunt down suspects by studying the contours of faces, the movements of vehicles, and even conversations with friends and spouses.
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The cache of federal documents lays out a sprawling mix of FBI techniques: license plate readers that captured suspects’ cars on the way to Washington; cell-tower location records that chronicled their movements through the Capitol complex; facial recognition searches that matched images to suspects’ driver’s licenses or social media profiles; and a remarkably deep catalog of video from surveillance systems, live streams, news reports and cameras worn by the police who swarmed the Capitol that day.
Agents in nearly all of the FBI’s 56 field offices have executed at least 900 search warrants in all 50 states and D.C., many of them for data held by the telecommunications and technology giants whose services underpin most people’s digital lives. The responses supplied potentially incriminating details about the locations, online statements and identities of hundreds of suspects in an investigation the Justice Department called in a court motion last month “one of the largest in American history, both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence.”
“If the event happened 20 years ago, it would have been 100 times harder to identify these people,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a D.C.-based think tank. “But today it’s almost impossible not to leave your footprints somewhere.”
Many of the Trump supporters who marauded through the Capitol that day showed little interest in concealing their presence, posting selfies, gloating on Twitter and sharing video of chaotic violence and ransacked hallways. James Bonet, of Upstate New York, uploaded a Facebook video of himself inside the Capitol’s halls, allegedly smoking a joint, a criminal complaint states. And Dona Bissey, an Indiana follower of the extremist ideology QAnon, posted a location-tagged photo of herself and her friends to a publicly available Facebook page: “Picking glass out of my purse,” she wrote, according to a charging document. “Best f—ing day ever!!”
Others, however, attempted to hide their identities and throw off investigators afterward, according to FBI agents’ claims. Suspects covered their faces, switched hats during the day and threatened family members and witnesses to keep quiet afterward, the criminal complaints allege. They deleted social media accounts, hid out in hotels or ditched potentially incriminating phones, according to the documents. One suspect stopped using a car he feared might be on authorities’ radar, the federal documents show, while another said he “fried” his electronics in a microwave. The FBI’s surveillance efforts found them anyway.
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