A former government official who worked for an unnamed agency has been charged with falsely accusing seven colleagues of participating in the January 6 riot.
Investigators say Miguel Zapata used "burner emails" to submit false tips to an FBI tipline about seven ex-colleagues, causing the FBI to interview and investigate several of them. Investigators discovered that most of the subjects weren't in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and were working in their offices during the hours of the attack.
Prosecutions resulting in tips from the FBI tipline have netted more than 1,300 people who allegedly took part in the riot on January 6.
Zapata’s first tip, submitted on Feb. 10, 2021, alleged that a former co-worker was "trying to overthrow the U.S. government, espouses conspiracy theories and retaliates against colleagues who don’t share their political views," according to the Washington Post.
Another tip accused a government contractor of sharing classified intel with far-right groups “to foment terror and incite violence.”
According to his arrest affidavit, Zapata said his former colleagues were tied to groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and even accused some of sharing classified information with the extremist groups in what he described as a coordinated plot to overturn the government.
When agents ran down the tips, they were easily debunked, according to the court records.
It's not clear why Zapata falsely targeted his former colleagues or why he is no longer employed by the U.S. government.
He has not yet entered a plea and was released on bond following a hearing before a federal magistrate judge in Washington, D.C.
Obviously, this was some kind of revenge plot for either real or imagined slights. Given that most of his targets work for intelligence agencies in some capacity, he may have been fired for divulging secrets in some way.
The tips included similar language and were submitted from four IP addresses. The affidavit says Zapata used a company’s “web anonymizer” service to submit the tips.
The unidentified company’s logs showed that Zapata’s user account accessed the FBI’s tips site, conducted research on two of his targets, searched Google or the term “fbi mole,” and accessed the website of an Office of Inspector General for an intelligence agency, the affidavit says.
The document doesn’t identify a possible motive for making the false reports.
The FBI is still getting tips on the tipline they set up in the immediate aftermath of J6. They have been aided by an army of private citizens who call themselves "sedition hunters" and who spend their lives pouring over video from the riot, trying to find someone who might have escaped the clutches of the FBI.
The "PBS News Hour" from Jan. 3, 2024, shows Judy Woodruff interviewing one of the citizen snitches named "Sandy."
One of the first things is just getting a face. And there is one rioter, #OrangeGoggleSpiker is his hashtag, you can see him in the tunnel section of the Capitol beating up the officers.
Eventually, when I found his face, we were able to plug it into some facial recognition software. That popped up a picture of him at his work.
(Laughter)
Crowd-sourcing rioters who may or may not have committed a crime sends a chill down my spine. And when it goes wrong, you have people like Mr. Zapata to take advantage of the zealous investigators and prosecutors looking for anything to act on.
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