Federal prosecutors charged a former FBI agent with illegally entering the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and said he called police officers Nazis as he encouraged a mob of Trump loyalists to kill them. Former agent Jared Wise was arrested on Monday and faces four misdemeanor counts, including disrupting the orderly conduct of government and trespassing, after agents received a tip in January 2022 that he had been inside the Capitol, reports the New York Times. Wise, 50, told police they were like the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police. When violence erupted, he shouted in the direction of rioters attacking the law enforcement officers, “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Wise raised his arms in celebration after breaching the Capitol in a face mask, and he escaped through a window, said a criminal complaint.
Scores of rioters with military experience have been arrested in connection with the Capitol attack, but Wise is a rare former federal agent to be charged. Thomas Caldwell, a member of the Oath Keepers who was convicted in November of felony charges stemming from the Jan. 6 riot, had once worked at the FBI. And Mark Mark Ibrahim, an active-duty Drug Enforcement Administration agent, was charged in July 2021 in connection with the riot. DOJ’s investigation of the Capitol attack, the largest it has ever conducted, has resulted in more than 1,000 arrests, with the possibility of many more to come. From 2004 to 2017, Wise worked on counterterrorism cases at the FBI New York field office. He was detailed to Libya to help agents investigate the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, that killed four Americans. Wise left the FBI after supervisors became unhappy with his work. He joined the conservative group Project Veritas under the supervision of a former British spy, Richard Seddon, who had been recruited by security contractor Erik Prince to train operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets.
Comments