Consider This from NPR - Tensions Are Rising Among Jan. 6 Defendants In A D.C. Jail

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

A U.S. House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is entering its final phase before lawmakers' findings become public later this spring.As that probe continues, prosecutions are running on a parallel track. Dozens of defendants are now awaiting trial and being held in together in a single unit at a Washington, D.C. jail.While corrections officials have said the accused insurrectionists are being kept from the jail's general population "for their own safety and security," that decision has come with some unintended consequences, including a bitter divide among the defendants.Tom Dreisbach of NPR's Investigations team spoke to some of the defendants.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

People are still trying to piece together what exactly happened that day. USA! USA! USA! January 6th. How it unfolded, who was involved, what role former President Donald Trump and his closest allies played in citing the violence at the Capitol. It's now been nine months since a House committee formally began investigating the attack. We have interviewed more than 800 people. We have more than 100,000 documents. It's an intense, wide, professional investigation. That's Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren of California. She spoke to NPR Thursday morning about the decisions the panel needs to make in the coming weeks

and whether or not the committee will ask Trump to testify. We're looking very seriously at that. Obviously, he's a central figure in this. I am mindful, however, that his track record of truthfulness is a bit squishy. We've not made a final decision. I personally believe we should invite him in. That's just my view. The committee has not yet made a decision on that. The panel has entered the final phase of its investigation before it starts making findings public later this spring.

While the investigation at the federal level continues, the prosecution is running on a parallel track. Some of those charged in the insurrection have already been sentenced. To the verdict in the first federal trial related to the January 6th attack on the Capitol, Guy Reffitt, seen here on the Capitol steps, found guilty in all five felony counts, including obstruction of the jury. Others have not even gone to trial yet, like Edward Jake Lang, who allegedly beat a police officer with a bat on January 6th. He posted videos on his Instagram live from the

Capitol that day. Or defendant Brandon Fellows. Both Both Lang and Fellows have pleaded not guilty. And both have been housed in the same section of the same jail in Washington, D.C., away from the general population. But consider this. The decision to jail January 6th defendants in the same unit has come with unintended consequences. A bitter divide is growing among the accused rioters inside the jail. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, April 14th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. More than 800 people have been charged with crimes in connection to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. A few dozen of those defendants are now awaiting trial at a jail in Washington, D.C. This is a free call from an incarcerated individual at Correctional Treatment Facility. All of the riot defendants are housed in just one section of the jail. It's a unit called C-2B.

D.C. corrections officials say the decision to pack all of these defendants together in one section was, quote, for their own safety and security. But that has inflamed divisions among January 6th inmates, just as criminal trials in their cases are getting underway. Tom Dreisbach from NPR's investigations team takes it from here. First off, could you just say who you are and what you do? What's the best way to identify you? My name is Brandon Fellows.

I owned a chimney business and tree business outside of here, but now I would best describe what I do as I am a political prisoner. Brandon Fellows is one of the lower-level January 6th defendants, charged with breaching the Capitol and putting his feet up on a senator's desk, not the violence that injured about 140 police officers. And he was only locked up in C-2B after a judge found he violated the terms of his pretrial release by harassing his probation officer. The FBI refers to January 6th as an act of domestic terrorism. Fellows calls it the best day of his life. And when he first got to the jail, he said the inmates had bonded.

This scratchy recording was made over a jailhouse telephone. It's the inmates singing the Star Spangled Banner, something they do every night at nine. For long chunks of the last year, pandemic protocols meant inmates were kept in their cells alone for 23 hours a day. Many inmates refused to get vaccinated against COVID, which limited access to things like the barbershop. When they have gotten rec time, they used it to work out, using trash bags filled with water as weights or compare notes on legal cases. Troy Smock spent about a year in the jail for posting violent threats against elected officials online and recently finished his sentence.

Smock says at one point, the group put on a kind of jailhouse show they called the Hopium Den. You know, they would put on little skits and things like that. You know, it was our own comedy show. It was to relieve pressure. Some thought the jokes could be brutally mean, but it did build camaraderie. Experts on extremism and some defense attorneys started worrying that the decision to put these inmates together was just hardening their views. But interviews and messages with a dozen current and former inmates suggest something more complicated has happened. Over the past year in this confined pressure cooker environment, the inmates have actually divided into different cliques.

Take, for example, politics. Three inmates told me they were pretty much done with politics and definitely done with Trump. After all, they said that's how they got locked up in the first place. The opposite happened to Brandon Fellows. He compares the Department of Justice to terrorists. They made an enemy, for sure. You know, I didn't like them before, but now they made an enemy. He said he even rejected a plea deal from the government, which would have gotten him out of jail. But another conflict has bitterly divided C2B with claims of bullying and discussion of lawsuits. That conflict is about money. Brandon Fellows says he was struggling financially when word got around in the jail about a big donation the pro-Trump writer Dinesh D'Souza gave to a group supporting the defendants called the Patriot Freedom Project.

Dinesh D'Souza, I hear he donates $100,000 to us. I calculate, I divided it by the amount of people in C2B and I said, oh, I got all excited. And then somebody informs me that's not actually how that works. Fellows asked around about how to get the money, found out the group would pick and choose different cases. They claimed it was based on need, but Fellows said the criteria were not clear. The leader of the Patriot Freedom Project is a woman named Cynthia Hughes. She's become a regular on Steve Bannon's podcast. We need somebody to drop us $500,000 today.

Today, Steve. Because we need to have our own attorneys on these cases. The group says it has now raised almost $1.2 million and spent a little more than half of that. Hughes says she's fighting for all of the January 6th, quote, political prisoners. But Brandon Fellows says he hasn't gotten a dime from the group. Jake Lang has pleaded not guilty to charges that he assaulted police with a shield and a bat during the Capitol riot.

He said he didn't need the money, but others did and were frustrated. That's going to create some kind of, you know, problem because we're dealing with people's lives here and years of their lives on the line. For a while, those problems simmered quietly. Several people did receive thousands of dollars and were thankful. Others hoped they were next in line. Then NPR investigated and found what charity experts called red flags with the nonprofit. The group even changed their board of trustees in response. And around that time, Cynthia Hughes acknowledged the complaints about transparency. People are asking for transparency. There was a statement of facts up on our website. We're doing the best we can to provide the information that people need. We just need a little bit of time to put things together. Then a group of inmates organized and started reaching out to me.

Most were not willing to go on the record because they were worried about retaliation from a rival group inside. Brandon Fellows said that has to do with a conflict with another inmate. His name is Timothy Hale Cusinelli. Because he's here, and because of the friends that he has accumulated, I think less people are willing to go public. Cynthia Hughes calls Hale Cusinelli her adoptive nephew. And inmates told me they were concerned that they had to, quote, suck up to Hale Cusinelli and side with his clique

to get money from the Patriot Freedom Project. One told me life in the jail started feeling like a middle school lunchroom. He compared it to Nazi mean girls. And Troy Smocks, who is black, said this about Hale Cusinelli. He would sit at the table closest to his cell and draw anti-Semitic characters on the table. Like the Nazi type cartoons. Right. Like from Nazi propaganda.

That's it. Seven other inmates backed this up. They described cartoons depicting Jewish people as pigs or dropping an atomic bomb on Israel. Prosecutors also call Hale Cusinelli a white supremacist who once went to work with a Hitler mustache. He's pleaded not guilty and denied those allegations. Hale Cusinelli's attorney denied the drawings were anti-Semitic. Inside the jail, accusations have flown that the people who talk to NPR are snitches. And several told me they were worried the jail grievance system might be used to punish rivals. Outside the jail, Cynthia Hughes has pushed back

on her own podcast. There's people that have done interviews and they've said some negative things about me or about Tim, you know, or about the project. And you have to have thick skin. I'm not fazed by those people. They don't affect me because my work speaks for itself. Still, three people told me that she had discussed bringing legal action against the January 6th defendant for criticizing the Patriot Freedom Project. Hughes did not answer any specific questions for this story. People close to the group have suggested that their critics are just trying to raise their own money. Brandon Fellows, for example, has raised more than 30 grand crowdfunding online. But he says that big $1.2 million pot of money has made life in C2B toxic. There's a disease in the pod, and I think it's a Patriot Freedom

Project, and it needs to be taken out. It's like a cancer. You have one minute left. Good grief. It needs to be taken out. All this jailhouse drama has blown up just as people are headed to trials that will determine whether they stay locked up. January 6th defendants have been told they were put in the separate unit of the D.C. jail for their own safety. But after a year together, several inmates said the conflict had reached a boiling point. When NPR contacted the D.C. Department of Corrections to ask how

they were handling the situation, they did not respond. That was Tom Dreisbach from NPR's investigations team. And earlier in the episode, you heard reporting from Morning Edition host A. Martinez. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.