The Shadows of the January 6 Prosecutions Set a Dangerous Precedent for the Future (Part 1)
How the DOJ’s sweeping prosecutions let a vigilante mob bring down a rising South Florida Republican star
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
January 6, 2021, is all but forgotten in the media, outside of reports about January 6 pardon recipients who have gotten into trouble, or the odd follow-up profile that pictures a handful of recipients anything but sympathetically: sporting “crude tattoo[s],” “sip[ping]…gin,” and enjoying “presidential pardons that reassured them they were in the right, after all.” Unlike with the controversy over Russian collusion that dogged American politics from 2016 to 2020, there is no even pro-forma questioning of what the ferociously partisan treatment of January 6 might have missed, and what those blind spots might mean going forward. The reason for this absence is straightforward: Because of the politics involved in the events at the capitol four years ago, establishment media was more interested in prosecutions than pardons, more interested in presuming guilty than in presuming innocent.
But the shadows of the January 6 prosecutions live on quietly, in the precedents their politicization set for the future. During the 1,475 days between January 6 2021, when a crowd of approximately 2,000 Trump supporters entered the U.S. capitol building, and January 20 2025, when Trump pardoned the more than 1,500 of these individuals who had been charged by the Justice Department, many new frontiers of justice got crossed which endanger Americans’ liberties. Barbara Balmaseda’s story shows how.
Barbara Balmaseda is 24 years old. A first generation Cuban-American college graduate, she has worked on two state-level political campaigns and has plans to apply to law school. Her husband Brandon Diaz, also a first-generation Cuban-American, is 27, and works in marketing and communications. From January 2021 through January 2025 their lives were changed because of the Biden Justice Department’s decision to mount a symbolic “Defense of Democracy” by attempting to prosecute all of the approximately 2,000 people who entered the capitol building on January 6, whether or not they committed violence or were just walking around.
Identifying and prosecuting this many people created such a logistical challenge that the FBI relied to an extraordinary degree on the work of private groups of tech-vigilantes: “sedition hunters” and “antifascists” operating with the implicit backing of the federal government. But some of these armchair technocrats were not strangers to Barbara. They were local online mobs using the tech vigilantes to settle local political scores. Digging into these operators and their moves against Barbara shows another side to January 6, one that hasn’t been explored. It’s the merging of what have historically been separate forces—cliques in the capital and operators on the ground; or, put differently, surveillance bureaucracies and high-tech lynch mobs—that targeted individuals like Barbara.
This merging represents a danger for the American justice system. To put it simply, the tech-vigilantes were too successful for Americans’ own good. They assisted the FBI to such an extent in conducting such an unprecedentedly sweeping investigation that likely, under another administration, another dragnet investigation could occur based on authorities’ expectation that the vigilantes will help again.
Barbara Balmaseda Shows Up at the Capitol . . .
Against the dark clouds of reportage used to describe January 6, 2021, Barbara Balmaseda’s account of her day at the capitol comes in shades of beige. According to this account, which Balmaseda gave exclusively to Restoration News, her visit to Washington, D.C. that culminated on January 6 was her third time in the capital city. Her life was in Florida, where she’d worked on Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign and in Senator Marco Rubio’s office, and managed the successful state senate campaign of Ileana Garcia, which she won, in a swing district, by 32 votes. She’d also worked for the 2020 Trump Campaign. By the time of her campaign manager stint, Barbara was also a full-time student, first at Miami-Dade College and then at Florida International University, where she graduated in 2024 with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in International Relations.
Balmaseda had originally planned to attend a White House gathering on Jan. 6 with a ticket from the group Turning Point USA, but by the time she woke up, her phone was flooded with texts about a march to the capitol. When Balmaseda and Gabriel Garcia, a fellow Miami Republican, walked up to the capitol they saw no barricades and no fighting; no pushing or shoving; no signs or police officers; and no security instructing people to leave. Instead they found a sea of people, scaffolding, a giant American flag hanging from the exposure next to the capitol steps, and a crowd flowing up the steps into the capitol building. Once inside, Balmaseda moved with the tide of people; eventually she lost Gabe and wandered through the thick crowds, ending up in the rotunda. She saw people taking selfies and pictures and someone smoking pot, and walked around some more to try to find the exit, asking a police officer, who gave her instructions and two mini-bottles of water.
Eventually she found her way out, into what looked like a movie: People all over the steps; Alex Jones’s stage vehicle, the "Tank," set up near the spot where she exited with Jones talking out of the roof of the vehicle to the crowd; Gabe with tears coming out of his eyes because he’d been pepper-sprayed. By the time she got back to Miami, the government response was all over the news, and, soon after, Gabe was arrested. Barbara assumed that her flight records along with her ticket to the White House had shown up in the government’s investigation, so she got a lawyer. By the end of January, 2021, the FBI had come by her house when she was out and left a card. Barbara’s lawyer called the FBI and told the Miami field office that, if they wanted to arrest Barbara she would surrender voluntarily. Her lawyer never heard back from the FBI, and, for awhile, this seemed like the end of it.
. . . and Becomes a Target
But this was not the end of it, because other groups were at work, groups whose activities have since been extensively profiled. These groups were online vigilantes who responded to the Ready-Fire-Aim approach created by the Justice Department’s attempt to try to prosecute every person who entered the capital on January 6. According to NBC News Justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly, in his book Sedition Hunters,
[Attorney General] Garland called the investigation into Jan. 6 and efforts to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power “the most wide-ranging investigation, and the most important investigation, that the Justice Department has ever entered into.” Another way to describe it? A clusterfuck . . . Hundreds of thousands of tips had rolled in . . . The FBI had nearly four million files, thirty thousand videos from body-worn cameras, surveillance video, and the footage rioters had captured on their own devices (pg. 3).
Enter the people whom Reilly called volunteer “sleuths,” some of whom developed “formalized relationships with the FBI” by “building entire cases [against Jan. 6’rs] for the FBI from soup to nuts.” These “different sleuth groups” were “organized under different banners, with some members who belonged to multiple groups,” one of which was literally called Sedition Hunters.
They’d scour Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Rumble, Gab, and Telegram. Venmo, the payment app that defaulted to lax security settings, proved particularly useful in making connections. Facial recognition played a big role in creating initial leads, but the biggest dopamine hits came from the finds that took some work. One rioter was identified because of the “dumb ass way he folds the brim of his hat”—a sleuth was scouring Parler profiles and the hat fold caught their eye (pg. 3).
Reilly’s sympathies clearly lie with the “sleuths,” which spares him having to consider the problem with what went on. The problem wasn’t that law enforcement was using informants to build cases against suspects, which is standard practice. The problem was how many cases law enforcement was trying to build, and how much latitude this allowed the informants law enforcement was relying on. Many, many of the people who entered the capital building on January 6 were people like Barbara Balmaseda, guilty of nothing more than trespassing—and into a building into which some of them believed they had been allowed access. Now these people were at the mercy of tech vigilantes—armchair operators supported by the government; receiving unprecedented publicity; and, possibly, seeing the chance to run their own agendas against ordinary people they knew and just happened not to like.
Barbara’s story after 2021 shows the problems that Reilly and his book won’t.
A Witch Hunt Begins . . .
On March 24, 2022, Alex DeLuca of the Miami New Times ran a story about Balmaseda titled “Did Marco Rubio’s Former Intern Storm the Capital on January 6?” DeLuca, a recent college graduate and first-year reporter at the New Times, had one source: “Twitter user @ne0ndistraction,” a member of Sedition Hunters, who,
in a Twitter thread posted last week…shared older photos of Balmaseda and images of #PinkGaiterPBG [the handle the online “sleuths” used to label Barbara on Twitter] side-by-side, pointing out similarities in appearance, mannerisms, and accessories, including a distinctive ring Balmaseda wore at previous rallies and that #PinkGaiterPBG appears to have worn at the Capitol on January 6.
Running an article purporting to identify a participant in an alleged crime based on “appearance, mannerisms, and accessories” identified by an armchair operator might seem like a journalistic stretch. But equally strange—DeLuca didn’t actually provide any of @ne0ndistraction’s analysis so that readers could judge for themselves. Instead DeLuca provided one link to an X thread, which at least today is impossible to view because @ne0ndistraction has limited who can see the account’s tweets.
In other words, DeLuca was leveraging the legitimacy of the Miami New Times, Miami’s second most influential paper after the Miami Herald, to make an accusation that had not been definitively corroborated. She was also drafting off a local group of anonymous online antifascists, Miami Against Fascism, who had been working for at least two weeks off of Sedition Hunters’ information to make Barbara’s story a local news item—and score political points. Indeed, twelve days before DeLuca ran her piece, on March 12, Miami Against Fascism had picked up on Sedition Hunters’ report. It had run a post purporting to identify Balmaseda at the capitol on January 6. They followed this up with extended commentary on her alleged involvement in the events at the capitol via lengthy X posts on March 13, March 15, March 17, March 18, and March 21.
During that stretch of days, Balmaseda and Diaz started getting calls from friends—especially Isabella “Bella” Rodriguez, a local Republican activist who had tangled with Miami Against Fascism before, and who had an idea of what would come next. When Rodriguez had come out against Miami-Dade County masking and school shutdowns in 2021, she had run into opposition from the powerful teachers’ union United Teachers of Dade as well as local Democratic operators. Two of these operators worked at Balsera Communications, a Coral Gables-based consultancy founded by a former Obama campaign aide, and one had United Teachers of Dade as a client. Then Miami Against Fascism appeared, and posted an x thread purporting to connect Rodriguez and her fellow activists with what they called “anti maskers” and “the Far Right.” Their thread included attacks on participants for being “a natural wellness influencer (read: grifter),” having “praised Putin,” having personal relationships with other activists, and being linked to accounts associated with QAnon. These Miami Against Fascism threads were promoted by United Teachers of Dade as well as by one of the two protest leaders from Balsera Communications, who seemed to have advance knowledge of what Miami Against Fascism would post.
Eventually Rodriguez and her allies tried to stop their personal information from being released by Miami Against Fascism by reaching out to Twitter, which briefly banned Miami Against Fascism. Soon after, the Miami New Times released an article reporting that “Right wing groups” were “wield[ing]” twitter against “antifascist activists,” and naming Rodriguez as a culprit. The writer of this article, Joshua Ceballos, later contributed reporting to Alex DeLuca’s story March, 2022 story about Balmaseda.
By March, 2022, then, when Miami Against Fascism lined up its attacks against Balmaseda, Bella Rodriguez was familiar with its supporting players and the tactics they used, and she saw the same play that had been run against her six months before. Diaz agreed. But there wasn’t a lot they could do, over the next 21 months, as Miami Against Fascism dragged Balmaseda through the online mud.
. . . and Accelerates
Online outlets (Politico, Florida Politics) picked up the story and ran it without question. The non-profit Balmaseda worked for, which advocated for conservative solutions to Climate and Environmental Issues, fired her. The DeSantis, Rubio, and Garcia camps put up distance. The Vice Chair of the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee, Kevin Cooper, said publicly that if Balmaseda was the person in the photo she should resign from the organization, which she did.
Within a year and a half, Cooper was in private contact with Miami Against Fascism disparaging another Republican group, Miami Young Republicans, where Diaz and Balmaseda served on the board. Local politics were at play in this disparagement: Cooper was aligned with the “older guard” of centrist Republicans Balmaseda, Diaz, and their allies at Miami YRs oppose. Tellingly, this older guard had already used Balmaseda’s alleged presence at the capitol on January 6 to try to marginalize these younger members. Its vehicle was a New York Times article that appeared in the summer of 2022.
Titled, “How the Proud Boys Gripped the Miami-Dade Republican Party,” and co-authored by Patricia Mazzei, a longtime Miami Herald reporter who had joined the New York Times as Miami Bureau Chief in 2017, the article cited Barbara’s alleged attendance at January 6 and the work of “local sleuths” Miami Against Fascism to make the case for the new “radicalism” in the Party. According to “veteran party leader” Liliana Ros, an ally of Kevin Cooper: “The meetings are a bunch of fights, people screaming. The nice people — the decent people, the people that are real Republicans — are leaving.”
This, it turned out, was only the beginning of Barbara Balmaseda’s ordeal. In the next two and a half years, Barbara would find a combination of government security and local online mobs trained on her, Brandon, and their friends. Their lives would become part of the human cost of the Justice Department’s insistence on “sending a message” about January 6 to America.