Taranto also told followers on his YouTube live stream that he was looking to get a “good angle on a shot,” prosecutors said.
A federal defender representing Taranto did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment. But in a motion seeking to have him released pending trial, the lawyer wrote that Taranto was not a flight risk, had a family in Washington state and had served in Iraq before being honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy.
“Mr. Taranto has been available and in plain sight for the last two and a half years,” wrote the lawyer, Kathryn D’Adamo Guevara.
According to the Justice Department’s detention memo, Taranto’s wife told investigators that he had come to Washington this time because of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s offer earlier this year to produce unseen video of the Jan. 6 attack. Taranto already faces four misdemeanor counts related to the Capitol assault, when prosecutors say he joined the crush of rioters who broke into the building and made his way to the entrance of the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House chamber.
Since then, prosecutors say, Taranto has been active online, posting a Facebook video of himself in the Capitol that day and endorsing a conspiracy theory that the death of Ashli Babbitt — who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she began to climb through the broken part of a door leading into the Speaker’s Lobby — was a hoax.
The FBI had been monitoring Taranto’s online activities because of his involvement in the riot, and began searching for him last Wednesday after he asserted on his YouTube livestream that he was in Gaithersburg, Maryland on a “one-way mission” and intended to blow up the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The following day, he continued his livestream from the Washington neighborhood where Obama lives — an area heavily monitored by the U.S. Secret Service — and said that he was looking for “entrance points” and wanted to get a “good angle on a shot,” according to the detention memo.
Officials said he was spotted by law enforcement a few blocks from the former president’s home and fled, though he was chased by Secret Service officers.
AP
