The day after the riots on January 6 at the American Capitol, an anonymous tipster from Finland informed the FBI of a video on the website of a Finnish newspaper. It showed a man with a bloody forehead outside the Capitol building wearing a black ballistic vest and an American flag as a hood.
“There were people who struggled with the police, and then I hit a projectile – not sure what it was,” the 33-year-old Kevin Cordon of Alhambra told a Finnish correspondent for the Finnish publication Ilta Sanomat said.
‘And from there we went to the broken windows and to the Capitol building. We walked around the hallways, and the Trump supporters all got the nut. ”
Cordon and his brother, Sean Carlo Cordon, 35, of Los Angeles, were arrested Tuesday and charged with violent trespassing and disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds and other crimes resulting from the assault on the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters, said the authorities. The mob broke into the building in an attempt to prevent Congress from confirming Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
“It is clear that this election has been stolen, that there is just so much overwhelming evidence, and that the establishment, the media and the big technology are completely ignoring it all – and we are here to show that they do not have it,” he said. Kevin said. Cordon told Finnish reporter Mikko Marttinen in the video. “We are not just going to take this precipitation.”
More than 300 people have been charged with federal crimes in the Capitol riot, including more than a dozen from California. Many of them posted videos of themselves on social media on the Capitol or openly discussed in television interviews that they were there, giving prosecutors a large amount of evidence they are currently using in court.
In a criminal complaint that was not sealed on Tuesday, FBI agent Shane Anderson set out this week’s death knell that led to the arrest of the Cordon brothers after the first tip from Finland. The two men who appear in the newspaper’s video match the photos on the driver’s licenses of the Cordon brothers, Anderson wrote.
According to the Capitol, the brothers showed police officers outside the building near a rally and then, according to Anderson, climbed through a window to enter the Capitol.
Cameras in the Capitol caught the brothers walking through the Crypt under the Rotunda, and then outside the building while Kevin Cordon chatted with Ilta Sanomat reporter a while later, Anderson said.
At 3 p.m., he added, it was seen that Cordon was making a call and that the recordings confirmed a call at that time from his cell phone in Washington to a person sharing his residence in California.
Verizon records obtained through a search warrant showed that Kevin Cordon’s phone number was linked to a cell phone serving the inside of the Capitol building, the complaint reads.
And flight records showed that the Cordon brothers bought tickets on a January 5 red-eye from Los Angeles International Airport to Washington, and then returned on January 7th. A video from a United Airlines boarding area at LAX showed a man looking like Kevin Cordon with a US flag cape, according to the FBI agent.
Sean Carlo Cordon’s Twitter feed contains a message showing his admiration for Trump and his belief in the former president’s lies about winning an election he lost by 7 million votes.
In December, Sean Carlo Cordon filed complaints about the version of votes in Georgia, one of the states that Trump carefully lost. “The non-audit of the vote is a further crime,” he wrote.
According to FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller, the Cordon brothers were each arrested at their homes around 6 a.m. and both residences were searched.
At their first appearance in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, U.S. Magistrate Michael Wilner ordered that they each be released on a $ 50,000 bond. Both will be under electronic location monitoring while awaiting trial, and they have been ordered to surrender firearms.