New Future

Washington, DC – On January 13, 2017, a week before Donald Trump was set to be inaugurated as the 45th US president, law enforcement officers from the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington, DC, sat down with three Project Veritas operatives and their lawyer, Benjamin Barr, to discuss their infiltration of a number of public planning meetings for Inauguration Day protests. A newly uncovered document from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirms the January 13 meeting and the relationship that law enforcement had with the widely discredited alt-right disinformation group. The FBI document, referred to as a “302,” was obtained through discovery in 2018, but never disclosed publicly until now. The 302 details discussions law enforcement had with Project Veritas and the information-sharing they engaged in.

A hard drive of video footage taken with hidden button-cameras that Project Veritas provided to law enforcement, including the FBI and the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), would be at the center of a lengthy legal case, and the source of significant controversy that continues today.

Project Veritas actually met with law enforcement at least twice in advance of the inauguration and provided video footage to the FBI and MPD, pointing to a working relationship or collaboration with the far-right group. Instead of being transparent about the source of the video footage, police and prosecutors hid that relationship and then lied about it to the grand jury, DC Superior Court, and defense counsel, in a legal case brought against people protesting Trump’s first inauguration.

The US Attorney’s Office (USAO) in Washington, DC, used the Project Veritas footage as key evidence to indict and prosecute more than 200 activists for numerous felonies including conspiracy to riot and property destruction, all of which could have resulted in decades behind bars. For its part, the USAO kept the existence of the FBI 302 document and the January 13 meeting with Project Veritas secret for more than 16 months, long after the first trial had concluded.

The only reason all of this has come to light over the past year is because the lead prosecutor, former DC Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, was charged with misconduct by the DC Bar for concealing and altering the Project Veritas video footage, which was central to their conspiracy prosecution.

The disciplinary case against Kerkhoff Muyskens is currently playing out in the DC Court of Appeals, and the Board on Professional Responsibility is expected to issue a ruling any day. But, the case is focused on how Kerkhoff Muyskens deceptively altered the footage and concealed it from the court and the defense, not how she obtained it. The DC Bar investigation never plumbed the depths of the relationship forged between Project Veritas, her office, MPD, and the FBI.

The FBI document disclosed by Unicorn Riot confirms a hidden web of lies that reveals not only the J20 prosecution’s willingness to break the law in order to gain criminal convictions, but also how law enforcement eagerly partnered with Project Veritas in an effort to skirt policies established to restrict police surveillance and infiltration.

Inauguration Day 2017: A few broken windows, extensive police violence, and mass arrests

For most objective observers, the story began with the protests on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, colloquially known as J20. Thousands of people protested the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington, DC and across the country. An antifascist, anti-capitalist march that started at Logan Circle that morning and snaked through the streets of downtown DC targeted corporate storefronts, resulting in a few broken windows at businesses like Bank of America, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Wells Fargo.

However, before the march even got started, MPD Commander Keith DeVille referred to the gathering crowd as “anarchists,” setting the stage for a violent crackdown. Just a few minutes after the march left Logan Circle, without issuing a required dispersal order first, DeVille declared the demonstration a “riot” and ordered the arrest of everyone present. By declaring the demonstration a riot, MPD triggered the authority to act violently and criminalize protesters.

Equipped with hundreds of thousands of dollars of riot munitions, MPD attacked the march using copious amounts of chemical and projectile weapons. After about 40 minutes, MPD officers surrounded and arrested more than 230 people, including protesters, journalists, legal observers, medics, and bystanders.

In the year and a half that followed, the Trump administration would spend millions of dollars on a politically motivated legal fight over what amounted to a few broken windows at corporate storefronts in downtown DC.

The Alleged DeploraBall “Plot”

A day before Trump’s inauguration, on January 19, 2017, police claimed to have foiled an alleged plot to disrupt the “DeploraBall,” an unofficial inaugural ball organized by alt-right Trump supporters.

MPD said it had obtained video footage secretly recorded by Project Veritas at a December 18, 2016, meeting with three inauguration protest organizers. The video shows protest organizers discussing plans to use a stink bomb to disrupt the DeploraBall. But, on January 16, three days before the DeploraBall, protest organizers with the Antifascist Coalition publicly announced they knew they were being infiltrated and recorded, and that everything said in the December 2016 meeting was a ruse.

The location of the meeting itself should have signaled to Project Veritas and the police that the plot was contrived. Protest organizers suggested meeting at Comet Ping Pong, the same “Pizzagate” location that had been shot up just weeks earlier by a man who believed the debunked online right-wing conspiracy theory that the pizza shop doubled as an underground child exploitation ring run by Democratic Party officials.

Despite the public statement by the Antifascist Coalition, police still arrested the three protest organizers caught on film and, most notably, the USAO used the Project Veritas footage to prosecute them. One Antifascist Coalition organizer was arrested on January 19, and their arrest warrant affidavit stated that an unnamed “witness” approached MPD on January 17 with “audio and video recordings” from the December 2016 meeting. Project Veritas was never mentioned in the affidavit, but it was already public knowledge that the video footage was from Project Veritas, based on reporting by the Washingtonian.

The newly disclosed FBI document, which details the alleged DeploraBall plot, also confirms that Project Veritas had relayed all of this information to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies as early as January 13.

Although they pled guilty to misdemeanors less than two months later, the three organizers and the alleged plot were quickly forgotten in the wake of Trump’s inauguration and the early days of his presidency.

The Prosecutor and Police Lie to the Grand Jury

Soon after the inauguration and mass arrest, a grand jury began hearing evidence from AUSA Kerkhoff Muyskens and her witness, lead MPD detective Greggory Pemberton. Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton wove a story that would convince the grand jury to indict more than 200 people, initially on a single count of felony riot, but eventually on at least eight felonies each.

Grand juries are supposed to act as a barrier against overzealous prosecutors, but in reality they are designed to be the perfect prosecutorial tool. Ostensibly, federal grand juries investigate whether there is enough evidence to indict people for federal crimes, but the normal rules of evidence do not apply and the entire process is deliberately shrouded in secrecy. Prosecutors get to pick and choose what evidence is shown to the grand jury, there is no judge, and grand jurors only hear from witnesses chosen by prosecutors.

With vast subpoena powers, prosecutors are able to demand documents, physical evidence, and witness testimony. It was in this context that the J20 grand jury heard claims made by Kerkhoff Muyskens and testimony from Pemberton and a handful of other police witnesses.

Saying it’s easy for a prosecutor to obtain an indictment from a grand jury would be an understatement, but Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton went beyond the already-loose grand jury rules by lying to jurors in order to secure a sweeping indictment.

Because of their secretive nature, grand juries and their proceedings are almost always kept behind well-locked doors and transcripts are hardly ever revealed to the public. The J20 grand jury was no different. The transcripts were kept not only from the public, but also from multiple trial juries and scores of defense lawyers who were part of the case. Government prosecutors even defied a court order to turn over the grand jury transcripts to the defense and never did comply.

Earlier this year, however, in an extremely rare disclosure, the DC Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) published a 7,500-page list of exhibits, which included grand jury transcripts used to investigate the misconduct allegations against Kerkhoff Muyskens. (NOTE: The set of grand jury transcripts from the ODC’s list of exhibits contained duplicate transcripts, which have been removed in the redacted version linked above.)

A grand jury was convened by the government on two separate occasions to investigate the J20 cases—once in January 2017, then again in April 2017.

On January 30, 2017, early in their investigation, grand jurors were quick to question the source of the video footage that would eventually be used as trial evidence by the prosecution. Kerkhoff Muyskens downplayed the significance of the video and the role of Project Veritas.

“To the extent we would use any video — we’d be requesting unedited video,” Kerkhoff Muyskens told the grand jury. “But they can’t be trusted to provide unedited video,” replied one of the jurors. “[W]ill you provide any — any kind of other confirmation that [it] hasn’t been edited or distorted or biased, given their past credibility and problems with that?”

The following day, Pemberton testified to the grand jury that the Intelligence section of MPD was monitoring publicly available information about the inauguration protests as far back as early December 2016 and, without any reason why, Pemberton claimed that MPD believed the march from Logan Circle was “more than just a First Amendment assembly, that individuals were actually planning and conspiring to commit crimes.”

When Pemberton was questioned about the Project Veritas video, he told the grand jury that the footage was “recovered by the Metropolitan Police Department from the internet regarding some activities, some sort of recruiting activities about [Disrupt J20],” the DC-based organization that planned protests against Trump’s inauguration. When asked about any additional Project Veritas footage, Kerkhoff Muyskens told the grand jury that, “This is all we’ve been able to find on social media one way or the other.”

It’s now known that Kerkhoff Muyskens not only lied about possessing additional videos from Project Veritas, she and Pemberton also lied about how they acquired the footage.

In early February 2017, prosecutors went through a process of identifying for the grand jury each of the more than 200 defendants, their images, what they were wearing, any property allegedly taken from them, and any social media profiles the police could compile. “Obviously, if there is any social media that we identify that we think is exculpatory, we will of course present it to you and let you know about it,” AUSA John Borchert told the grand jury. “That would be our obligation.”

While these kinds of assurances from the prosecution make it seem like the grand jurors received all of the evidence, prosecutors can and do withhold exculpatory evidence from grand juries, and have no legal obligation to share it with them, despite what AUSA Borchert said.

Unsurprisingly, and in spite of the strong skepticism some jurors had about the Project Veritas evidence, the grand jury returned a “true bill,” finding probable cause for an indictment.

The grand jury issued its first set of indictments in February 2017, charging 214 people with felony riot. Soon after, the DC Office of Police Complaints published a Report and Recommendations for the Police Complaint Board on February 27, 2017. The report raised questions about police conduct on Inauguration Day, and criticized the mass arrest and lack of warning before it happened.

The grand jury issued a second, superseding indictment on April 27, 2017, but three weeks earlier, on the morning of April 3, 2017, MPD raided the home of a Disrupt J20 organizer and seized thousands of dollars’ worth of personal property from their home, including computers, cell phones, art supplies, and personal items of sentimental value. Even though the organizer was not present at the antifascist, anti-capitalist march, they would be indicted with hundreds of others for their role in planning the protest. Because the organizer appeared in one of the protest planning meetings recorded by Project Veritas—the same key footage the prosecution would use in the J20 trials—the organizer would later be accused by the government of being one of the defendants at the center of the alleged conspiracy.

The superseding indictment charged the same 214 people with a minimum of eight felonies each: rioting, conspiracy to riot, inciting a riot, and five counts of property destruction. Approximately 100 people were also charged with assault on an officer. The maximum sentence, if convicted on all counts, would have been 70 years in prison.

Jury Acquits Six Defendants Despite Law Enforcement’s Lies and Manipulation of Evidence

Once the superseding indictment was filed by the USAO in April 2017, jury trials started to be scheduled, with the first one beginning on November 15, 2017.

None of the six defendants in the first trial were accused of damaging any property, but Kerkhoff Muyskens used conspiracy allegations and a novel legal approach called “Pinkerton liability” in an attempt to criminalize mere association and make all of the defendants equally culpable for the same broken windows.

Much of Kerkhoff Muyskens’s legal strategy rested on the fact that most demonstrators wore black clothing, a feature of black bloc demonstrations, and efforts to convince the jury of a criminal conspiracy by characterizing the protest as a “sea of black masks,” a phrase she used five times in her opening statement.

More than three weeks into the trial, on December 11, 2017, Pemberton was asked by Kerkhoff Muyskens, on direct examination, how he acquired the Project Veritas video footage, and they both continued their charade.

“Part of the initial process of this investigation was trying to obtain and collect and download and preserve whatever evidence existed, much of which you’ve seen,” Pemberton told the trial jury. “It was obtained from the Internet or open sources,” continued Pemberton, who explained how part of his investigation was to locate individuals who had posted anything online that was “relevant or probative.”

Pemberton told the jury he “located individuals that had posted what appeared to be undercover video…of a meeting of individuals that appeared to be planning what occurred that day.” Pemberton said the video was posted by Project Veritas, and he learned about it in February or March 2017. Because the online footage appeared to have been edited, Pemberton told the jury he pursued the raw, unedited footage.

“They provided me with a hard drive which contained hours of video that they had obtained through their investigation,” said Pemberton. But when asked by defense counsel about his source, the lead detective couldn’t recall the name of the Project Veritas operative who gave him the hard drive, even though the footage would be central to his conspiracy investigation.

Kerkhoff Muyskens confirmed that the raw footage from Project Veritas was unedited, although she never offered the raw footage to the defense. Pemberton told the jury he had made only two edits to video of a January 8 protest planning meeting, which was evidence crucial to the government’s case. According to Pemberton, one edit was to remove the identity of the person who took the footage, and another edit was to obscure the identity of an undercover MPD officer at the same meeting as the Project Veritas operative.

It would be revealed months after the first trial had concluded that Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton made additional edits to the footage in order to remove comments by the Project Veritas operative, indicating that a discussion of violence or property destruction did not happen at the January 8 planning meeting. These edits, meant to deliberately exclude exculpatory evidence, along with hiding the existence of additional hours of Project Veritas footage, would eventually form the foundation of Kerkhoff Muyskens’s ethical violations charges from the DC Bar.

Despite concealing evidence that would have helped the defense, Kerkhoff Muyskens was still unable to convince the trial jury that the six defendants were engaged in a criminal conspiracy and, on December 21, 2017, they were acquitted of all charges. Signaling a significant defeat for the Trump administration, the USAO summarily dismissed 129 cases shortly after the first trial.

The Government’s Deception Unravels and Subsequent Trials Collapse

The next three trials — one that started on May 14, 2018, another that started on May 29, 2018 and a final trial scheduled to start on June 4— would overlap and each, in their own way, would cause the prosecution’s case to further fall apart.

Defense lawyers for the May 14 trial defendants convinced DC Superior Court Judge Kimberly Knowles to allow them to depose “Matt,” the covert Project Veritas videographer who recorded the January 8 protest planning meeting. A number of important revelations would stem from that deposition, which was attended by defense lawyers from the May 14, May 29, and June 4 trial groups.

According to one of the defense lawyers who met with “Matt” and the lawyer for Project Veritas, the group had rented a house to use as an operations center in DC. “There were eight undercover individuals and members of management living and working out of that house covering the J20 events,” said defense attorney William Coffield, recounting the deposition at a pretrial hearing for the May 29 trial group.

“Between January the 8th of 2017 and January 20th of 2017, individuals with Project Veritas had at least two meetings with the FBI,” continued Coffield. “One at the house that was used as their operations center, and one at the Washington Field Office [of the FBI].”

Coffield went on to say that “Matt” told him Project Veritas provided the FBI with recordings of several planning meetings he infiltrated. Yet, in the interview with defense lawyers, “Matt” said he did not recall anyone talking about property destruction in any of the meetings he attended.

At the same hearing, a different lawyer startled DC Superior Court Chief Judge Robert Morin when she said that Project Veritas had also met with MPD in advance of the inauguration. To make her point, defense lawyer Rebecca LeGrand read from American Pravda, a book published that same year by Project Veritas founder and far-right activist James O’Keefe.

“’As the inauguration approached, we had gathered a ton of material, disturbing enough to warrant sharing it with the authorities. Our attorney, Ben Barr, set up a meeting with the FBI for January 13th,’” LeGrand read from O’Keefe’s book in court. According to the Project Veritas founder, there were four law enforcement officials in the meeting that day, “three FBI and one D.C. Metro, all casually dressed.” O’Keefe said they “greeted us like brothers in arms.”

A week before the hearing, defense lawyers for the June 4 trial group had demanded, then obtained through a court order, the uncut Project Veritas video, which the government had never before revealed to the court or turned over to the defense in discovery.

It quickly became apparent that the prosecution had edited the footage to conceal exculpatory evidence, which was likely done to improve their chances of getting convictions at trial.

In response, defense lawyers filed a motion seeking sanctions against Kerkhoff Muyskens and a dismissal of charges against the six defendants in that trial group. Lawyers for the May 29 trial group filed a similar motion, and a combined hearing was held before Chief Judge Morin on May 31, 2018.

At Morin’s hearing, it was discovered that the government had also failed to disclose 69 additional video and audio clips supplied by Project Veritas which were relevant to the case. This new information combined with the deceitfully edited footage caused Morin to sanction the prosecution team for failing to disclose evidence the defense was entitled to.

As a result, all charges against the ten defendants in both trial groups were dismissed. Although Knowles refused to dismiss the charges against the four defendants in the May 14 trial group, the jury returned one acquittal and deadlocked on the remaining three cases, which resulted in mistrials.

Another outcome of the May 31 hearing was that Morin prevented the prosecution from applying conspiracy charges against any of the remaining J20 defendants, which essentially knee-capped the government’s case.

“The evidence concerning conspiracy and the conspiracy charge, because the Government did not disclose these videos and allow proper investigation, I’m sanctioning the Government from proceeding on that count or on that theory,” Morin told the prosecution. “You still have aiding and abetting,” continued Morin. “I’m not precluding that. But the conspiracy and Pinkerton liability flowing from that, the Government is prohibited from going forward.”

By July 2018, the government had dismissed all charges against the remaining J20 defendants and, in the end, no one was found guilty at trial. Defendants rightly considered this a victory, but hundreds of people still endured untold harm—the trauma of decades in prison hanging over their heads, as well as the financial and social costs that come from dealing with criminal cases, like loss of employment, education, and housing—forever changing their lives.

Doxxing and Right-Wing Bias by MPD Witnesses Revealed in Court

Soon after the Inauguration Day arrests, MPD communications officer Rachel Schaerr provided a spreadsheet of defendants’ personal information to the far-right website GotNews.com, resulting in online harassment and other problems for defendants, including at least one defendant who was fired from their job.

This type of exposure of personal information, known as doxxing, is fairly common today but we don’t typically see evidence of police instigating the exposure. Nor do we typically see collaboration between the police and far-right groups which was exposed during the J20 cases.

In his investigation, Pemberton not only coordinated with Project Veritas. He also gathered footage from other right-wing groups like Rebel Media, Oath Keepers, and Media Research Center, whose “sole mission is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left.” Testimony from Pemberton and other police witnesses during the first J20 trial in November 2017 further exposed their political biases and connections between MPD and right-wing groups.

Pemberton was cross-examined about numerous white nationalist and far-right groups he followed on Twitter, or X, including the account of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. It was also revealed that Pemberton followed Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump Jr., Breitbart, 4chan’s /pol/, and other alt-right accounts.

The defense also asked Pemberton about his affinity for Trump and his antipathy toward Black Lives Matter, exemplified by Pemberton “liking” a social media post calling the movement “Black Lies Matter.” In a social media post from April 2017, Pemberton said, “You know what I haven’t heard in a while? Police shootings of unarmed black youth,” then asking rhetorically, “Did they run out of funding for their false narrative?”

But Pemberton was not the only MPD witness with right-wing views. MPD Commander DeVille, who declared the J20 protest a riot, made derogatory comments about Holocaust survivors and LGBTQ police officers, for which he was disciplined by MPD Internal Affairs. In May 2018, during the second J20 trial, MPD witness William Chatman wore a t-shirt in court, displaying an image of a nightstick enlaced with a pair of handcuffs which read, “Police brutality…or doing what their parents should have?”

Then-Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, DC MPD Detective Greggory Pemberton and MPD Officer William Chatman leaving DC Superior Court on May 29, 2018 while the second J20 trial was underway.

Police watchdog group Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) sued the District of Columbia seeking public disclosure of the nature and extent of MPD collusion with right-wing organizations. The lawsuit demanded records that would show “whether the MPD has undertaken actions to illegally skirt its requirements under the law, including through use of proxy forces” that violate laws restricting police surveillance and infiltration of political groups in DC.

“Outsourcing illegal surveillance of political organizations doesn’t make it legal,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of PCJF and a constitutional rights attorney. “The MPD cannot deputize right wing organizations to function as surveillance agents for the MPD,” continued Verheyden-Hilliard. “When people are engaging in First Amendment protected activities, they should have confidence that the police are not functioning in collaboration with their political opponents. The public has a right to know.”

The District stonewalled PCJF in its efforts to uncover evidence of MPD collusion with far-right groups and, in March 2024, the case was dismissed. However, as evidence mounts that collusion was happening in advance of the inauguration, questions about unlawful police use of surveillance and infiltration, and even perjury, must be addressed.

Brady Violations and Disciplinary Actions Against AUSA Kerkhoff Muyskens

The USAO deliberately kept secret the existence of the newly disclosed FBI document and the January 13 meeting between law enforcement and Project Veritas for over a year, and more than five months after the first J20 trial had concluded.

It wasn’t until a hearing for the third trial group in late May 2018 that the USAO admitted to the meeting, once it was clear that the prosecution had withheld evidence. Despite Chief Judge Morin directing the prosecution, at that May 30 hearing, to provide defense counsel with a copy of the FBI 302, it has remained hidden from the public until now.

Contrary to the story Pemberton told under oath, that he had just stumbled upon the Project Veritas video, we now know that MPD and the USAO were aware and in possession of the footage in advance of the inauguration and long before Pemberton said he discovered it online.

Kerkhoff Muyskens supported and relied on that fabricated version of events to prosecute hundreds of people, at the same time as concealing crucial evidence helpful to the defense.

Still image from Project Veritas footage taken on January 13, 2017, in front of the Washington Field Office of the FBI, and posted to YouTube on January 16, 2017. Project Veritas founder James O‘Keefe (second from right), and Project Veritas lawyer Benjamin Barr (far right) are shown entering the building. In the *video*, O’Keefe claims they met with **“the FBI, the Secret Service, and the DC Metro Police to report our findings.”**

Withholding exculpatory evidence by the government is a common practice, but rarely revealed in routine court proceedings involving the people who are processed through the criminal legal system on a daily basis.

Despite prosecutors’ obligation under a 1963 US Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland to disclose exculpatory evidence in advance of trial, it’s often difficult to prove when a prosecutor is in violation of Brady and, even when it is proven, it’s rare for a court to impose sanctions. It’s even rarer for legal ethics boards to charge and punish prosecutors for those violations. A study published last year of over 800 cases from state and federal courts found Brady violations had occurred in ten percent of the cases, and prosecutors were almost never referred to the Bar for discipline.

But in July 2024, the DC Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility charged Kerkhoff Muyskens with misconduct for her role in hiding and surreptitiously altering key video evidence. But in July 2024, the DC Bar’s

According to Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton P. Fox III, who filed the charges against Kerkhoff Muyskens, the federal prosecutor violated the DC Rules of Professional Conduct in half a dozen ways, including “making false statements, offering false evidence,” as well as “obstructing the defense’s access to evidence and altering or concealing evidence,” and “reckless or intentional dishonesty, misrepresentations, deceit, and fraud, which misled the grand jury, the defense, the court, the government, and disciplinary authorities.”

The Bar investigation and charges were the result of ethics complaints filed in 2018 by multiple Inauguration Day defendants. At the time Kerkhoff Muyskens was charged, she worked as a federal prosecutor in Utah, but she eventually left her job over the controversy.

After multiple days of hearings earlier this year, the ODC filed its post-hearing brief in April, summarizing its arguments against Kerkhoff Muyskens. The former federal prosecutor could be disbarred and prevented from practicing law, but the ODC only recommended a six-month suspension of her license. The Board is expected to issue a judgment at any time.

Read Unicorn Riot’s blow by blow ‘live tweet’ coverage of Kerkhoff Muysken’s March 11-14, 2025 disciplinary hearings/ethics trial: Day 1: [Mastodon] [Bluesky] [Twitter/X] | Day 2: [Mastodon] [Bluesky] [Twitter/X] | Day 3: [Mastodon] [Bluesky] [Twitter/X] | Day 4: [Mastodon] [Bluesky] [Twitter/X]

“A six-month sentence for Kerkhoff Muysken sends the wrong message to countless prosecutors who skirt the rules of evidence and largely get away with it,” said former J20 defendant Alexei Wood, who went on to successfully sue the District of Columbia and MPD. “A slap on the hand for Kerkhoff Muysken would allow these kind of Brady violations to continue to occur unabated,” continued Wood. “A six-month sentence would also fail to hold her accountable herself for the harm she caused hundreds of people as a direct result of her deception and lies. Kerkhoff Muysken deserves to lose her law license.”

A Lack of Consequence Ensures a Repetition of History

As light as the recommended punishment may seem to J20 defendants, Pemberton has faced even less accountability for his role in the misconduct, and has been able to steadily advance his career in law enforcement. In 2020, Pemberton was elected as Chair of the DC Police Union, and has been re-elected twice since then, a role he currently serves in.

An online biography of Pemberton from March 2024 even boasts about his record of being “selected to be the lead detective on a mass arrest of rioters that were arrested during the Presidential Inauguration and detailed to the US Attorney’s Office.”

Civil lawsuits based on constitutional claims were filed in earnest by former defendants following dismissal of the J20 cases and, in 2021, the District of Columbia paid $1.6 million to settle them. While this was a significant win for the defendants, settlement awards are ultimately paid by taxpayers, not the police; and these particular awards were relatively small compared to previous settlements for abusive conduct and constitutional violations by MPD and the District of Columbia.

Even when hefty sums are awarded to plaintiffs, it often fails to curb the abusive conduct, based largely on historical examples of police and cities repeating the abuse, indicating a calculus is being made to prioritize violent control of civil unrest over the inevitable costs incurred in the years following the unrest.

The forms of state control over civil unrest have evolved over time, as police tactics change in order to find the most expedient ways to criminalize social movements. Former J20 defendant Michael Loadenthal published a research article in 2019 about the use of conspiracy charges and the specter of the riot to “depoliticize political action” and “criminalize confrontational protest tactics.”

And, while conspiracy and riot charges have been used throughout history, and still today, police and prosecutors have started using racketeering charges to criminalize routine political activity, which is broadening the state’s ability to crack down on what would otherwise be considered First Amendment activity.

The Stop Cop City cases cases are a good example of this expansion of state tactics, and something to prepare for in the months and years to come. In a movement that embraces a diversity of tactics, Georgia is using its own state-level Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act along with state domestic terrorism charges against dozens of people who had little relationship to each other beyond the political goals of environmental protection and opposition to a police militarization facility.

RICO has typically been used by the federal government to prosecute “organized crime,” but the overly broad nature of the statute gives law enforcement wide latitude to go after political dissidents, among others.

The RICO indictment against 61 people reads like a manifesto on anarchism, and the Georgia Attorney General uses some of the same scare tactics about anarchists that were used in the J20 cases. But, that’s not where the commonality ends. Georgia prosecutors are also currently embroiled in evidentiary issues, which include repeatedly violating discovery deadlines and abusing evidentiary rules by sharing privileged attorney-client communication with police, prosecutors, the court, and defense counsel.

While the prosecutorial abuse in Georgia does not include Brady violations yet, it’s clear that prosecutors have skirted laws—like Kerkhoff Muyskens did eight years ago—in their zeal to convict political activists and criminalize social movements more broadly.

Read the newly released FBI ‘302’ from the January 13, 2017 meeting with Project Veritas below, or click here to download:

Kris Hermes is a West Coast-based author, freelance reporter and activist who has worked for more than thirty years on social justice issues. Hermes is an active member of the National Lawyers Guild and has been a part of numerous law collectives and legal support efforts over the years, including during the J20 prosecutions.

Unicorn Riot’s video coverage from 2017 Trump inauguration protests and the J20 case: