RFK Jr.’s new hire, who downplayed Jan. 6, appears to have been at the Capitol during the attack

WASHINGTON – A right-wing social media influencer hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign who previously said Jan. 6 was a “misdirection by Democrats” appeared to be in the restricted area during the attack to have stopped the US Capitol.

NBC News first reported that Kennedy’s campaign had hired Zach Henry’s company Total Virality for “influencer engagement” in March. Henry had worked as deputy communications director for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign and for Blake Masters during his Senate run in Arizona.

As NBC News reported, Henry posted that January 6 was “not a MAGA riot, just another misdirection by Democrats” and appeared to have embraced conspiracy theories about the attack on the Capitol publication this “Antifa” was behind what was wrong.

But photos and videos uncovered by NBC News and online “riot hunters” who have assisted the FBI in hundreds of cases against rioters at the Capitol appear to show Henry standing apart among the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021 The previously established police However, it is unclear whether any barricades and prohibition signs were still in place at the time of his arrival.

There is no evidence that Henry entered the Capitol or that he was involved in attacks on police officers or destruction of property. Federal prosecutors have focused their resources almost exclusively on the Jan. 6 participants who either entered the building or committed violence or destruction outside the building, so there is little chance that Henry will be charged; The few nonviolent Jan. 6 defendants who were charged only with entering restricted Capitol grounds were generally charged with misdemeanors.

But Henry’s presence on the Capitol grounds would be significant given his previous social media posts on Jan. 6 and his new position in Kennedy’s campaign, as Kennedy is running for president as an independent against former President Donald Trump.

Henry admitted in a phone call that he was in Washington on January 6, 2021, but declined to give his exact location. “I was in DC on January 6th, but I will not confirm where I was that day or how close I came to the Capitol,” he said.

Henry asked to see pictures of himself outside the Capitol before commenting further, and NBC News provided him with screenshots. He stopped responding to further messages or phone calls.

Kennedy’s campaign team also did not respond to a request for comment.

Henry served as communications director for the Arizona Republican Party from 2019 until late January 2021 and appears to have been behind the party’s official Twitter account even as it posted tweets in early December 2020 asking her followers if they were ready to give up their lives quitting to stay Trump in office, reposting a tweet from “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander. Henry defended these @AZGOP tweets largely in response to media coverage at the time, saying in a statement that the party “strongly condemns any form of violence”; However, he did not say who posted it.

Days later, another Twitter user called the person running the @AZGOP account “one of the funniest posters in the state,” Henry retweeted it from his personal account, adding: “No comment.”

On December 14, 2020, the @AZGOP account Posted a video titled “The Signing,” in which then-party leader Kelli Ward and other Arizona “fake voters” sign papers falsely claiming Trump won Arizona that were sent to Congress and the National Archives. A state grand jury recently indicted Ward and other fake voters, as well as Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, in connection with the alleged scheme. It is unclear whether Henry himself posted the video of the signing event, which took place at the Arizona Republican Party headquarters and is mentioned in the indictment.

Henry was released on January 6, 2021 publication to the @AZGOP accounts, this time from Washington. The account I posted an imagician by Raheem Kassam, a far-right influencer who posted misinformation after Trump’s election loss. Kassam was on the livestream at the time the photo was taken, and a man who online detectives identified as Henry by comparing known images of Henry with a database of videos from Jan. 6 can be seen on Kassam’s livestream, broadcast via the @ AZGOP account speaks. Kassam encouraged his followers to follow the account, which he described as “spicy.” The man the sniffer dogs identified as Henry was wearing a brown hoodie that matched the one Henry wore in a photo he posted on his own Facebook account several years earlier.

The man, identified as Henry, was later captured in photos and video on the cordoned off Capitol grounds. That night the @AZGOP account Posted Video from the restricted area of ​​the Capitol and also Posted Video It shows the mob taking over the inauguration platform and climbing a staircase with police barricades leading to the site where the Capitol was first breached. Online investigators found another open-source video showing the man identified as Henry recording the same moment, posted to the @AZGOP account.

The video posted by the AZGOP account syncs with a third-party video of the man who appears to be Henry: first he slowly pans to the right, then abruptly to the left, then does a 360-degree clockwise turn.

Detectives also identified Capitol surveillance video previously released in connection with a Jan. 6 case that shows the same man. Other open source videos show the man identified as Henry, still wearing the brown hoodie and an American flag mask, leaving the Capitol grounds.

In the early days of the investigation on Jan. 6, federal prosecutors filed charges against a handful of nonviolent defendants who were on Capitol grounds but never entered the building. This is no longer a focus for prosecutors; Hundreds of people who entered the building still have not been charged.

“We used our prosecutorial discretion to focus primarily on those who entered the building, those who engaged in violent or corrupt conduct on Capitol grounds,” U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said this year. “But if a person knowingly entered a restricted area without authorization, they had already committed a federal crime. Make no mistake: thousands of people occupied an area where they were not allowed to be at all.

Heinrich posted that he had resigned the Arizona GOP post on January 23, 2021, just days after the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president, as he walked through the Lower West tunnel where pro-Trump rioters a few days earlier Officers were brutally attacked.

In 2022 he posted a shortened version of the video originally posted by @AZGOP at my own expense. The post reflected the conspiracy theory that “Antifa” was behind the pro-Trump mafia attack.