The Shadows of the January 6 Prosecutions Set a Dangerous Precedent (Part 2)
How the DOJ’s sweeping prosecutions let an online mob bring down an innocent South Florida college student
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
In a recent report, Restoration News investigated the unexpected consequences of the FBI’s investigation of over 2,000 people involved in the January 6, 2021 protest at the U.S. capitol. Lacking the resources for an investigation this vast, an investigation which Attorney General Merrick Garland called unprecedented, the FBI happily farmed out its duties to armchair tech vigilantes like the group “Sedition Hunters.” These “amateur sleuths,” as they liked to style themselves, poured over footage of January 6 and traced participants for the FBI. But the process wasn’t confidential: they publicized these participants’ identities, or their suspected identities, often long before the FBI made any arrests. This created a wide space for local vigilante groups to use these public “gotchas” to run their own political agendas.
The subject in the previous Restoration News report was how this process began playing out in the life of a single person: Barbara Balmaseda, a rising South Florida Republican star and college student who entered the capitol on January 6, committed no violence, and left. By mid-2022, as Restoration News reported, Balmaseda had been “identified” by armchair vigilantes, then attacked by a local Miami anti-fascist group, Miami Against Fascism, and a progressive-leaning Miami newspaper, The Miami New Times, as well as by older “centrist” Republicans trying to keep Balmaseda’s political faction from local power.
But, as Restoration News will show, this was just the beginning of Balmaseda’s ordeal at the hands of local mobs and the FBI. By the end of it, Balmaseda was arrested, her name smeared again, and she was a few months from going to Court based on a case that had many weak links.
The Attacks Tighten . . .
By the summer of 2022, Balmaseda’s and her fiancée Brandon Diaz’s lives had undergone a sea change, as colleagues, acquaintances and even friends backed away. They were worried about getting smeared, or worse, by Miami Against Fascism. The group had already started attacking Balmaseda’s friend and fellow activist Bella Rodriguez as well as Diaz and his friend Miguel Granda, because of their prominence as young Republicans active with the Miami-Dade GOP, where Diaz was Executive Director. Balmaseda’s connection to January 6 gave fuel to these attacks. Granda got a death threat messaged to his phone and Diaz, in response, started carrying a 9-mm pistol. He had good reason for concern. Rodriguez had told him that Caleb Firestone, a local activist had attacked and vandalized Heartbeat of Miami, the family clinic providing an alternative to abortion for pregnant women. Firestone last surfaced intimidating Rodriguez’s anti-masking activists who were taking on the United Teachers of Dade. Miami Against Fascism promoted Firestone’s legal support fund after his vandalism arrest.
Balmaseda took a job at a criminal defenders’ firm and minimized her socializing, since, when Balmaseda went to events with the Miami Young Republicans, pictures would surface online which Miami Against Fascism would then use to attack the group. Diaz kept following the attacks on Balmaseda and quietly talked to her lawyer, Nayib Hassan, and did research about what to expect if Balmaseda was arrested.
The shoes dropped almost three years after January 6, 2021, at 6:00 am on December 14, 2023, 2 days after Balmaseda had graduated from Florida International University (FIU).. Balmaseda and Diaz were in bed when she noticed three calls from the same unfamiliar number. Diaz knew from his conversations with January 6 defendants what it likely meant. He told her to call the number back, and she did. It was an FBI agent informing her of her arrest; he was outside their condo, and wanted her and her fiancé to come out immediately. As the Justice Department reported in a statement soon after, Balmaseda had been charged with:
A felony offense of obstruction of an official proceeding and misdemeanor offenses of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building or grounds, and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.
. . . and the FBI Returns
According to Balmaseda, in an exclusive recounting to Restoration News, the rest of the day was a blur, with occasional crystallizing moments illuminating her weird new reality. To pick up a 23 year old woman charged with a non-violent felony who had no criminal history were 5 marked or unmarked police vehicles; 1 ATF officer; 2 Miami-Dade police officers; and about ten FBI agents. Each of them wielded sub-automatics (the FBI’s standard for SWAT teams is an M4 Carbine) and two of them had spotlights which hit Balmaseda’s and Diaz’s faces. It took thirty minutes for the officers to search the house, confiscate Diaz’s guns, and put the unarmed college student in handcuffs and then in a squad car., The FBI agent in charge, a new arrival to Miami from Virginia, confided to Balmaseda that her arrest was because of office politics. “The guy who didn’t return your lawyer’s call a few years ago left, and I replaced him.” Then this mid-career civil servant, notching an office win by bringing an armed task force to arrest a 23 year old woman, asked if she wanted to go for McDonalds.
Twelve hours later, when Balmaseda was processed in Court after spending most of the day in a cell at the Federal Detention Center downtown, her lawyer and Diaz were waiting for her. So were her employers, the criminal defenders’ firm, which kept her on after her arrest. Online, Sedition Hunters, Miami Against Fascism, the Miami New Times, and national papers with similar politics packaged, and repackaged, the story. “Far-Right Activist Connected to Ron DeSantis Indicted for January 6,” said the New Republic. “Proud Boys-trailing Miami Young Republicans director with ties to Rubio, DeSantis, indicted for Jan. 6,” said Law and Crime News. “Former Miami Young Republicans director indicted on Jan. 6 charges,” said Axios. “Former Miami Young Republicans director arrested over Jan. 6 charges,” said Politico. Not surprisingly, all of the stories linked Balmaseda to her political work with DeSantis, Rubio, and Republican State Senator Illeana Garcia. Even compared to many other J-6ers, she received an extraordinary amount of coverage. The leftist media wanted to smear prominent Republicans like DeSantis, Rubio, and Garcia using Balmaseda.
The Miami Herald, the most venerable newspaper in Miami-Dade, ran two pieces on Balmaseda over the next year, accepting the Miami New Times’ spin on the story on its face (one headline read “Miami GOP up-and-comer arrested and charged in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6”) without a word on the aggressive local politicking quite clearly at play. For the next 13 months, these media reports kept cropping up, and the X attacks by Miami Against Fascism and The Miami New Times were a regular feature of life. (In June 2024, the Miami New Times ran a “Best of Miami” edition and featured Balmaseda as “Best Local Girl Gone Bad,” beginning the piece by explaining that “This Barby is not like the other Barbie. This one is an accused insurrectionist.”) They continued through Balmaseda’s negotiations with the Justice Department; the Supreme Court ruling which removed her felony charge; her refusal to cop a plea because the Department added another misdemeanor to her arrest; President Trump’s election; and Balmaseda’s pardon on January 20, 2025.
Politicized Justice . . .
What got lost in all of this was that the case against Balmaseda was slender, and sometimes defied logic.
Attempting to prove that Balmaseda been part of a concerted plan to enter the capitol building, the arrest warrant states, “on January 3, 2021, one of the participants in a Group Chat of which [Balmaseda] was a part wrote, ‘…We might need to take the capital by storm’” and “[Balmaseda] replied 11 seconds later with ‘Omg what did I miss.’” Anyone who has ever been on a group chat when someone says something extreme would not interpret Balmaseda’s response as being party to a conspiracy. There was more guilt by association as well. For example, according to the arrest warrant, a still image from capitol surveillance monitors showed that “Balmaseda was near [Gabriel] Garcia as he recorded [a] video stating ‘We just went ahead and stormed the Capitol!’” In this schema, being “near” someone when he says something is the same as sharing responsibility for his words.
The arrest warrant also, in parts, supports Balmaseda’s recounting of her time in the capital: that she was following a crowd. At one point, the arrest warrant uses surveillance footage to report:
Balmaseda joined a crowd of rioters and moved towards an area known as the “OAP Corridor” where another line of officers initially blocked a hallway. The officers eventually backed away and the rioters, Balmaseda and Garcia included, continued to move forward. After reaching the end of the hallway, Balmaseda turned around and made her way back towards the Crypt.
Had the FBI chosen to interview her before indicting her, Balmaseda surely would have supplied agents this information. But the FBI, more eager to prosecute than investigate, never did.
Nayib Hassan, a Miami attorney who has represented several January 6 defendants, including Balmaseda, pointed out another problem with the arrest warrant: The government’s wide net of prosecutions made it nearly impossible for defense attorneys to mount an effective case for their clients. According to Hassan, in an interview with Restoration News, “We were sent the evidence that prosecutors were using against our client—but when it came to finding exculpatory evidence, we were given, for every defendant, a 24 terabyte drive of all capitol footage to sort through.” As Hassan puts it, “If I had a team of 20 individuals watching the discovery all day, we would not be able to watch every single video that was in the discovery in a given year. And we don’t have the resources to hire that many people. And neither do most defense attorneys.”
What’s more, the government was so determined to make a case against each and every defendant that it was none too specific about what charges it used. When Balmaseda’s felony charge was dropped in June of 2024 based on a Supreme Court ruling that month, the government circled back and added another misdemeanor charge: theft of government property. This, too, resulted from an illogical interpretation of footage. As Hassan explains it, and a review of the footage supports,
The videos have her walking into the building empty handed. Then, she’s walking around inside the building in a few videos with a sign in her hand. When she’s leaving, she still has the sign, but by the time she’s outside the footage shows she doesn’t have the sign anymore. No one’s ever able to identify what the sign is. This is what they called theft of government property.
Hassan tells Restoration News that he isn’t sure whether this or any of the other charges against Balmaseda were based on the information from Sedition Hunters and Miami Against Fascism. But “there is no doubt in my mind that they were part of the reason exculpatory evidence was so hard to come by—they were the ones providing some of the clips for the 24 terrabytes of ‘evidence.’” What’s more, “their public focus on Balmaseda almost surely had some effect--they were spreading the word on social media, they got picked up by journalists, the journalists wrote the articles…and any FBI agent doing research online was going to see them!”
. . . and Where it Leads
NBC’s Ryan J. Reilly, the author of Sedition Hunters, puts a more positive spin on the same fact pattern. He suggests that, after January 6, law enforcement now sees an upside in relying on volunteer sleuths. What will it mean if the Sedition Hunters’ and their allies’ success becomes encouragement for the federal government, perhaps under a different administration, to cast ever-wider nets for their prosecutions, secure in the knowledge that armchair technocrats will help them succeed using vigilante tactics? Judging by Barbara Balmaseda’s experience, it will mean mob justice which jeopardizes the lives of anyone who gets crosswise with members of the mob.
Indeed, simply by leveraging people’s fear of reputational damage, a mostly anonymous cohort of Miami players were able to hound a young woman who enjoyed the regard of her community into being labeled a subversive. She was, essentially, put on public trial, but was unable to confront her accusers, because they were anonymous. What does this mean, in other contexts and when other “threats to democracy” arise, for the rest of us?
Barbara Balmaseda certainly takes this point, among others, from her experience. Her life is quieter now, her friends and acquaintances have returned, and people seem to have forgotten about what happened. But Balmaseda, though she doesn’t want the experience to define her, doesn’t want to forget it. The essay she says she plans to write for her law school application, describing what she wants her law degree to help her do, is about safeguarding civil liberties.