Feds Nab Texas Brothers Who Tried to ‘Unsend’ Messages Bragging About Capitol Riot
While the concept of “brotherly love” is usually confined to roughhousing on the couch, the feds allege a pair of Texas siblings extended it to the realm of federal crimes when they attended the Capitol riot together, assaulted police officers, stole a shield, then tried to belatedly cover it all up by deleting incriminating messages.
And Brian and Adam Jackson, from Katy, got more than just a dinner table scolding for it on Tuesday when they were arrested—more than 17 months after the failed insurrection—and charged with several offenses, including assaulting law enforcement officials.
According to a press release from the Department of Justice, Brian Jackson, 47, charged at a line of officers with an American flag pole, while his brother Adam, aged 42, threw a large object at the same officers and surged toward them with what appeared to be a stolen Capitol Police riot shield.
A criminal complaint accompanying the press release includes several pages of detail about incriminating evidence left on the brothers’ social media pages.
The Jacksons, whose family runs an electric car company in Katy, are relatively un-extraordinary when it comes to arrested Capitol rioters, as they fit squarely into the published statistics about known participants. According to a database of Jan. 6-related court cases compiled by George Washington University, 821 people from 46 states have been arrested in connection with the riot so far. Of those individuals, 69 are from Texas. So far, 87 percent have been men and more than 77 percent have been charged using evidence from social media accounts. As the criminal complaint explains, video footage has implicated many attendees, including the Jacksons.
Recordings taken by Capitol Police officers captured the moment the brothers allegedly attacked officers, but the brothers helped the feds as well by uploading damning evidence online, the complaint says. In one video posted to Brian Jackson’s Facebook account, a voice can be heard saying, “Adam got a god-damned shield, stole it from the fucking popo!” In a different video sent from Brian Jackson’s account, also detailed in the complaint, a man that appears to be Adam talks about wanting to enter the Capitol.
For all of his initial boasting, however, Brian Jackson allegedly tried to delete the social media evidence. Apparently not realizing that the internet is forever, he tried to “unsend” multiple messages about his participation and asked others to delete messages and videos he’d sent them, the complaint says.
In one message exchange asking a friend to delete videos, Brian Jackson not only admitted to getting into fights while in D.C. but also used the N-word multiple times, the feds say. At another point after the riot, he deleted his Facebook account altogether, sending a message to an unidentified friend later in January saying that he took the page down because he “posted a bunch pics I shouldn’t have.”
Regardless of Brian Jackson’s ardent if flimsy attempt at a cover-up, the evidence was well-documented in the digital world, prosecutors said. On January 4, Brian sent Adam a message about what to wear to the riot and discussed conspiracy theories about how antifa operatives would be dressed.
Their apparent obsession with antifa persisted beyond Jan. 6, as the complaint says Adam forwarded a message to Brian and others a week after the riot in which he predicted that “BLM & Antifa will riot and loot when Biden isn’t seated.” Adam went on to claim that if Trump didn’t stop Biden from taking office, the Republican president would “be hunted down and arrested along with his entire family by the left. That’s a fact.”
After all that, one message exchange between Adam Jackson and an unnamed individual captured what was perhaps the most salient wound: the loss of the prized Capitol riot shield. In the exchange, the unnamed person asked Adam whether he kept the precious memento, to which he responded in the negative, writing that it “cost to [sic] much to ship home lol.”
The brothers were expected to appear in federal court in Texas on Tuesday.
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