[ad_1]
The day after the January 6 riot at the United States Capitol, an anonymous Finnish informant alerted the FBI to a video on the website of a Finnish newspaper. It showed a man with a bloodied forehead outside the Capitol building wearing a black ballistic vest and an American flag as a cape.
“There were people arguing with the cops, and that’s when I got hit by a projectile – I don’t know what it was,” Kevin Cordon, of the Alhambra, told an American correspondent for the Finnish publication Ilta Sanomat.
“And then from there we walked into the broken windows and the Capitol building. We were walking the halls and Trump supporters were all going mad.
On Tuesday, Cordon and his brother, Sean Carlo Cordon, 35, of Los Angeles, were arrested and charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds and other crimes stemming from the assault on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump, authorities said. Crowds broke into the building in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
“It’s clear this election is stolen, there is so much overwhelming evidence, and the establishment, the media, the big tech are completely ignoring all of this – and we’re here to show them we don’t have it,” Kevin Cordon told Finnish journalist Mikko Marttinen in the video. “We’re not just going to strike this pose.”
More than 300 people were charged with federal crimes in the Capitol Riot, including more than a dozen from California. Many of them have posted videos of themselves on Capitol Hill on social media or openly discussed their presence in televised interviews, providing prosecutors with a wealth of evidence now being used against them in court.
In an unsealed criminal complaint Tuesday, FBI agent Shane Anderson described the weeks of research that led to the Cordon brothers’ arrest after Finland’s first advice. The two men featured in the diary video appeared to match the photos on the Cordon brothers’ driver’s licenses, Anderson wrote.
Capitol surveillance footage showed the brothers outside the building near a police gathering, then climbing through a window into the Capitol 10 minutes later, according to Anderson.
Cameras inside the Capitol captured the brothers walking into the crypt under the rotunda and then outside the building as Kevin Cordon spoke to reporter from Ilta Sanomat a moment later, Anderson said.
At 3 p.m., he added, Cordon was seen making a phone call and the recordings confirmed a call at that time from his cell phone in Washington to a person who shares his residence in California.
Verizon records obtained through a search warrant showed Kevin Cordon’s phone number was connected to a cell site serving inside the Capitol building, according to the complaint.
And flight records showed the Cordon brothers bought tickets on Jan.5, a red eye from Los Angeles International Airport in Washington, then returned on Jan.7. Surveillance footage from a United Airlines boarding area at LAX showed a man resembling Kevin Cordon wearing an American flag cape, according to the FBI agent.
Sean Carlo Cordon’s Twitter feed includes a post showing his admiration for Trump and his belief in the former president’s lies about winning an election he actually lost by 7 million votes.
In December, Sean Carlo Cordon published complaints about vote recounts in Georgia, one of the states Trump narrowly lost. “Not auditing the vote is additional criminality,” he wrote.
The Cordon brothers were each arrested at their homes around 6 a.m., and both residences were searched, according to FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller.
During their initial appearance in US District Court in Los Angeles, US Magistrate Michael Wilner ordered their release on $ 50,000 bail. The two will be under electronic whereabouts surveillance pending trial, and they have been ordered to surrender all firearms.
[ad_2]
Source link