The retired Air Force officer Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., wearing a combat helmet, in the Senate chamber.Photograph by Win McNamee / Getty
As insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol this week, a few figures stood out. One man, clad in a combat helmet, body armor, and other tactical gear, was among the group that made it to the inner reaches of the building. Carrying zip-tie handcuffs, he was captured in photographs and videos on the Senate floor and with a group that descended on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite. In a video shot by ITV News, he is seen standing against a wall adjacent to Pelosi’s office, his face covered by a bandana. At another point, he appears to exit the suite, face exposed, pushing his way through the crowds of demonstrators.
A day after the riots, John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, notified the F.B.I. that he suspected the man was retired Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a Texas-based Air Force Academy graduate and combat veteran. Scott-Railton had been trying to identify various people involved in the attack. “I used a number of techniques to hone in on his identity, including facial recognition and image enhancement, as well as seeking contextual clues from his military paraphernalia,” Scott-Railton told me. Brock was wearing several patches on his combat helmet and body armor, including one bearing a yellow fleur de lis, the insignia of the 706th Fighter Squadron. He also wore several symbols suggesting that he lived in Texas, including a vinyl tag of the Texas flag overlaid on the skull logo of the Punisher, the Marvel comic-book character. The Punisher has been adopted by police and Army groups and, more recently, by white supremacists and followers of QAnon. Scott-Railton also found a recently deleted Twitter account associated with Brock, with a Crusader as its avatar. “All those things together, it’s like looking at a person’s C.V.,” Scott-Railton said.
Two family members and a longtime friend said that Brock’s political views had grown increasingly radical in recent years. Bill Leake, who flew with Brock in the Air Force for a decade, said that he had distanced himself from Brock. “I don’t contact him anymore ’cause he’s gotten extreme,” Leake told me. In recent years, Brock had become an increasingly committed supporter of Donald Trump, frequently wearing a Make America Great Again hat. In the days leading up to the siege of the Capitol, Brock had posted to social media about his plans to travel to Washington, D.C., to participate in Trump’s “Save America” rally. Brock’s family members said that he called himself a patriot, and that his expressions of that identity had become increasingly strident. One recalled “weird rage talk, basically, saying he’s willing to get in trouble to defend what he thinks is right, which is Trump being the President, I guess.” Both family members said that Brock had made racist remarks in their presence and that they believed white-supremacist views may have contributed to his motivations.
In an interview, Brock confirmed that he was the man in the photos and videos. He denied that he held racist views and echoed Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, saying that he derived his understanding of the matter principally from social media. He told me that he had gone to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate peacefully. “The President asked for his supporters to be there to attend, and I felt like it was important, because of how much I love this country, to actually be there,” he said. Brock added that he did not identify as part of any organized group and claimed that, despite the scenes of destruction that day, he had seen no violence. When he arrived at the Capitol, he said, he assumed he was welcome to enter the building.
Brock denied that he had entered Pelosi’s office suite, saying that he “stopped five to ten feet ahead of the sign” bearing her title that insurrectionists later tore down and brandished. However, in the ITV video, he appears to emerge from the suite. Brock said that he had worn tactical gear because “I didn’t want to get stabbed or hurt,” citing “B.L.M. and Antifa” as potential aggressors. He claimed that he had found the zip-tie handcuffs on the floor. “I wish I had not picked those up,” he told me. “My thought process there was I would pick them up and give them to an officer when I see one. . . . I didn’t do that because I had put them in my coat, and I honestly forgot about them.” He also said that he was opposed to vandalizing the building, and was dismayed when he learned of the extent of the destruction. “I know it looks menacing,” he told me. “That was not my intent.”
Legal experts said that people who breached the Capitol could face a range of criminal charges, from disorderly conduct to seditious conspiracy. “Presumably this person broke into Congress in order to stop or intimidate or interfere with the counting of the Electoral College certification, a fundamental feature of the peaceful transition of power in the United States,” Alan Rozenshtein, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, said.
Brock, a fifty-three-year-old father of three who lives in an affluent suburb of Dallas, graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1989, with a major in international relations and affairs. In a LinkedIn profile that Brock recently deleted, he described himself as having served as a chief operations inspector and flight commander with the 706th Fighter Squadron, at one point leading more than two dozen pilots. Brock told me that he served in Afghanistan and, in a non-combat capacity, in Iraq, and that for his service he received three Meritorious Service Medals, six Air Medals, and three Aerial Achievement Medals. In a statement, Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokesperson, said, “This individual is no longer serving in the Air Force Reserve. He retired in 2014. As a private citizen, the Air Force no longer has jurisdiction over him.” Brock now works for Hillwood Airways, a Texas-based private aviation company.
Brock’s family members and his friend said that his service in the Air Force was central to his identity. Several of Brock’s e-mail addresses and social-media accounts featured his call sign and military nickname, Torch. One family member said that Brock derived “this weird sense of power” from his time as a military pilot, along with a Manichean world view. “He used to tell me that I only saw the world in shades of gray, and that the world was black and white,” the other family member said. “He doesn’t understand the fallout and the people he’s hurting. And I can’t imagine what he was doing there with zip ties, or what he thought he was going to accomplish.”
The F.B.I. has identified and charged thirteen individuals involved in the attack on the Capitol. Some of them have been identified by the crowd-sourced online movement. “There’s tons of people taking shots of individual faces and putting them into tweets, which has been extremely helpful,” said Michael Sheldon, an associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who, like Scott-Railton, used facial-recognition software to identify Brock. “We reach out to each other if we see someone has something useful or there’s some room for collaboration.” Experts and citizens with no formal training in digital forensics also tweeted various clues and inferences. Scott-Railton stressed that the approach was a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, traditional law-enforcement investigations. “It’s a powerful technique to hold people accountable that comes with well-known risks,” he said. “Which is why it was so important in this case to not make the name public immediately but to refer it to the F.B.I.,” he added. “Let’s call it the digital ecosystem of accountability that has arisen around what happened at the Capitol.”
Leake said that he believed the same intense commitment that had made Brock an effective fighter pilot had led him to this week’s events in the Capitol. “Torch got all in on Trump,” Leake said. “He went all in on the alternative-news-source world. He actually believes liberals and Democrats are a threat to the country. You can see how the logical conclusion to that is, We’ve gotta take over.”
Right-wing media outlets continue to draw a false parallel to Wednesday’s coup and BLM protests earlier this year. There’s no comparison.
This week, mostly white insurrectionists incited by the president stormed the Capitol, the symbol of our democracy and the home of one of our three branches of government as it carried out its Constitutional duty to certify an election. Police in some cases opened the gates to them and took selfies with them, and then allowed them to walk out of the building.
This summer, a diverse group of people protesting police shootings by exercising their constitutional rights to speak and assemble in Washington, D.C. were met by the national guard, who tear-gassed them on the White House’s orders so he could have a photo-op in front of a church.
Behind the viral photo of Rep. Andy Kim cleaning up at midnight after riots
“It’s a room that I love so much. ... It pained me so much to see it in this kind of condition,” the New Jersey Democrat said.
Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J., cleans up debris and personal belongings strewn across the floor of the Rotunda in the early morning hours on Jan. 7, 2021, after a mob stormed the Capitol.Andrew Harnik / AP
Unlike many of his congressional colleagues, Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J., was in his office in a separate federal building when President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday afternoon. So he didn’t actually see the damage live until nearly midnight, after the House had voted down the last challenge to the presidential election result.
When he finally did walk around the rotunda — his favorite and arguably the most storied room of the building — the disarray left him speechless. Water bottles, broken furniture, tattered Trump flags and pieces of body armor and clothing were strewn on the marble floor as if it were an abandoned parking lot.
“It’s a room that I love so much — it’s the heart of the Capitol, literally the heart of this country. It pained me so much to see it in this kind of condition.”
“I was just overwhelmed with emotion,” Kim, 38, told NBC Asian America. “It’s a room that I love so much — it’s the heart of the Capitol, literally the heart of this country. It pained me so much to see it in this kind of condition.”
So for the next hour and a half, he crouched down and filled a half dozen trash bags with debris. When he finished cleaning up the rotunda, he began working on the adjacent rooms, including the National Statuary Hall and the Capitol crypt downstairs.
Then he returned to the House floor to debate Pennsylvania's vote count, a session that lasted until 3 a.m. By Thursday evening, he’d been awake for more than 36 hours.
On a day in which video of mayhem and bloodshed inundated social media, a widely shared photograph of Kim, alone on his knees, picking up the final pieces of garbage in a nearly empty rotunda, was a radical break from — and rejection of — the violent impulses that drove the country to the brink of collapse. Many people labeled him a “true patriot.” While Kim said he didn’t dwell much on the symbolic heft of his actions, the term was on his mind.
“I feel blessed to have this opportunity as a son of immigrants to be able to serve in Congress,” he said. “Democracy to me is this place of opportunity that is affording me a chance to do something extraordinary.”
“I feel blessed to have this opportunity as a son of immigrants to be able to serve in Congress,” he said. “Democracy to me is this place of opportunity that is affording me a chance to do something extraordinary.”
Andy Kim at a debate in Newark, N.J., on Oct. 31, 2018.Julio Cortez / AP file
In 2018, Kim became the first Asian American to represent New Jersey in Congress, flipping a predominantly white district that voted for Trump in 2016 and did so again in 2020. (Kim won re-election in November despite voting to impeach the president last year.)
The irony of a history-making Korean American lawmaker dusting up after a white supremacist riot is not lost on Kim. But he also pointed to the progress that’s been made.
“I represent a district where the vast majority of people do not look like me,” he said. “But they’ve voted for me twice now to be their representative, and that’s a beautiful thing. There are others who seek to make me seem like an 'other' whether it’s because of skin color, or gender, or sexuality. But that’s not what this is about. We’re all Americans.”
A former national security aide under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Kim recently spoke about how simmering ideological tensions can become dangerous during presidential transitions. But while he expected the hate and anger that defined the Trump era to escalate in the aftermath of the election, Wednesday’s events still shocked him. In the roughly six hours he spent sheltered in his office, he worried about the safety of his colleagues and staffers as the pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol.
At one point, he recalled receiving a security alert that Capitol police had lost control of the building.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq, I’ve been in war zones where I’ve had to shelter in place, but I never would have imagined that this would happen here,” he said, noting that he didn’t know at the time whether the rioters were armed. “It was a terrifying experience.”
Bridging the deep racial and ideological chasms in this country, Kim said, will require legislative action to rein in the radicalization of white supremacists and the proliferation of disinformation.
At the same time, he said, there must also be profound shifts in the way Americans treat one another on a personal level.
“The depth of the divisions that we have isn’t something any single law can wipe off the face of our planet,” he said. “We also need to recognize that how we get through that is by seeing the humanity in each other. There are ways we can have debates and disagreements but not resort to violence.”
Senator Chris Coons is demanding Senators Cruz and Hawley resign after their roles in inciting the attempted coup on the Capitol.
Cruz and Hawley both proudly led challenges to Wednesday’s electoral certification process to delegitimize Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ win and fuel Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
These senators helped incite a violent insurrection. The last time a group violently took the Capitol, it was during the War of 1812. Today, we need to know where our most ardent supporters stand.
Thank you for making your voice heard,
Progressive Majority
Progressive Majority PAC is leading the fight against Trump’s GOP and their dangerous and divisive agenda by supporting elected progressives, helping elect even more progressive Democrats to Congress, and protecting the gains we made in the past election. This movement is powered by progressives like you.
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The demonstration, which turned into a riot, was originally billed online as a “Stop the Steal” rally. The kind of gathering routinely held in other states after the Presidential election and leading up to the Jan. 6 Congressional certification of Electoral College votes.
Interviews with Cape and Massachusetts Trump supporters who attended the rally, revealed that many of those in Washington Wednesday were unaware of any plans to break into the Capitol building and interrupt the process of certifying Electoral College votes.
“People were determined to make their voices heard and their presence felt,” said Richard Howell, co-founder of the Pioneer Valley Tea Party and vice chairman of the Western Mass Republicans.
Howell was at the demonstration and there was no one saying "Let's storm the Capitol," he said.
“Most people were just taking it in,” Howell said.
Five people were killed when the mob of Trump supporters flooded into the U.S. Capitol, including Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, 42.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling issued a statement Thursday that said his office would prosecute “anyone who traveled from Massachusetts with the intent to commit” violent assaults on government institutions.
Legal experts said Lelling was referring to the prosecution of those who gathered in Massachusetts to draw up plans to commit a crime in another state. That could include the plan to carry a weapon to that state. Once they traveled to another state, that state would handle the prosecution of any crime committed there.
Following speeches by President Donald Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani at The Ellipse, a park adjacent to the Washington Monument, many just followed the crowd. Some headed back to their hotels, some to catch a bus or train out of town, but many followed Trump’s order to march to the Capitol building a short walk away.
Trump said he’d walk with them, but he went back to the White House and watched the ensuing mayhem on TV.As of Thursday, 82 people had been arrested in connection with breaking into the Capitol, battling with police, and vandalizing the Senate and House and Congressional offices, according to a U.S. Capitol Police report. Sixty-four of those were for curfew violations, 37 for unlawful entry and 17 for weapons violations, including four for possessing large-capacity ammunition feeding devices.
John Catanzara, the leader of Chicago’s police union, is defending the violent attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters and white supremacists, dismissing it as an “inconvenience,” saying “they’re entitled to voice their frustration,” lying about there being no violence or destruction of property, and betraying his oath as a police officer to defend the US Constitution. Catanzara must go.
Join us in calling on Chicago’s city council, police board, police chief, and mayor to use their power to force Catanzara’s firing from the Chicago Police Department, and his removal as leader of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police.
The violent attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters—incited by Trump and his allies—was an attempt to violently overturn the results of the election. It left at least five people dead and threatened the lives of members of Congress, top government officials, Capitol police officers, and everyone who works at the Capitol. Rioters armed with guns, mace, handcuffs, and tactical gear entered the Capitol, and almost reached areas where members of Congress and others were hiding.
Catanzara is defending the rioters, justifying and normalizing their attack on the Capitol, and downplaying the threat they posed. It’s dangerous, and needs to be stopped. When law enforcement signals to right wing militias and white supremacists that they’re on the same side, it encourages more serious acts of violence and sends the message that they may get away with it. Last year, we saw how this escalated violence in Kenosha, Portland, and elsewhere, with tragic results. Catanzara is making it more likely this will happen again, and at the same time he’s making it nearly impossible for people in Chicago to trust their police force.
Here are a few quotes from Catanzara:
“Do I support [the Capitol attack]? I wouldn’t have partaken in it. They’re individuals. They get to do what they want. Again, they were voicing frustration. They’re entitled to voice their frustration.”
“They clearly have been ignored and they’re still being ignored as if they’re lunatics and treasonous now, which is beyond stupid.”
“Do I support the frustration? Listen, I don’t have any doubt that something shady happened in this election. You’re not going to convince me that that many people voted for Joe Biden. Never for the rest of my life will you ever convince me of that.”
“If the worst crime [at the Capitol] is trespassing, so be it.”
“it’s an inconvenience at this point, is all it is.”
After Catanzara made these statements, it was reported that a Capitol Police officer died as a result of the riot.
This is outrageous, but not surprising. Catanzara himself has had more than 35 official complaints against him as a police officer, and been suspended 6 times. He marched alongside white supremacists and QAnon supporters, and he is already being investigated by the Police Board for racist and violent social media posts, including one where he said Muslims “all deserve a bullet.”
Chicago’s FOP and other police unions have long promoted violent, unaccountable, and authoritarian policing—and they viciously attack activists and political leaders who are pushing for change. During this election, Chicago’s FOP, the national FOP, and many other police unions endorsed Trump and waged a campaign of fear, lies, and inflammatory rhetoric to promote his re-election, and the authoritarianism for which he stands.
Chicago’s FOP in particular is notorious for attacking, intimidating, and threatening activists and political leaders who get in their way—and under Catanzara’s leadership, its actions have been more extreme and dangerous than ever.
It’s time for Catanzara to be fired as a police officer and removed from his position as leader of Chicago’s FOP.
