FBI searches an alleged Jan. 6 rioter's home as clock ticks on Capitol attack cases

WASHINGTON — With less than 50 days until President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House again, the Justice Department continues to prosecute and arrest Jan. 6 rioters, even as Trump has said he’ll pardon an unknown number of the more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the attack.

There are still more than 90 people on the FBI’s Capitol Violence page, which features photos of the bureau’s most wanted rioters, who have been identified to the FBI but not yet arrested, online sleuths told NBC News. And the sleuths, who have aided in those cases, have identified hundreds more rioters who weren’t featured on the Capitol Violence page and may never face justice.

With little time left, the Justice Department plans to focus on arresting and prosecuting the “most egregious” cases, particularly those of people who would be charged with felony assault on law enforcement, a law enforcement official told NBC News last month.

Among them is a man whom online sleuths say they long ago identified as a rioter, who assaulted police officers and has gone unarrested for years. The FBI searched a residential address associated with the man in recent weeks, NBC News has learned.

The rioter is known to online “sedition hunters” as “Old Double Shot,” a nickname he earned because he can be seen on video of the Jan. 6 attack “double-fisting spray canisters” that he appeared to use to assault police officers with chemical spray on the west front of the U.S. Capitol. Video later emerged showing someone who appears to be the same man, wearing a Trump camo hat and a T-shirt he wore on his back like a cape, attacking police with a pole as the mob forced its way up the stairs and closer to the Capitol.

Numerous rioters have been charged with felonies and convicted of using either pepper spray or bear spray against officers during the Capitol attack, many of whom have received prison sentences.

When online sleuths ran the images of “Old Double Shot” through publicly available facial recognition software in the weeks after the Capitol attack, they told NBC News, they found an old video of a person who looked strikingly like the same man at a Tea Party rally and then a more recent video of someone who appeared to be him outside a Trump rally. Facial recognition software also led them to the website of Koetting Insurance in Germantown, Illinois, and to a man named Michael Koetting.

“Old Double Shot” is one of the sleuths’ earliest identifications; they say they gave it to the FBI more than 3½ years ago. His image did appear in another Jan. 6 affidavit, NBC News reported in February, but “Old Double Shot” has never been arrested.

In recent weeks, however, the FBI searched a residential address that public records show is associated with Koetting, NBC News confirmed. A BBC reporter first posted that a Jan. 6-related search took place in a small town in southern Illinois, and an FBI spokesperson confirmed to NBC News: “FBI Springfield conducted a search warrant at the address in question.”

Koetting didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article or for previous reporting in 2021. Under standard practice, the FBI doesn’t comment on cases in which charges haven’t been brought, and it confirmed only that it executed a search warrant at the address associated with Koetting.

In the nearly four years since the Capitol attack, Michael Koetting has been wiped from the Koetting Insurance website, and an employee who answered the phone said he was no longer associated with the firm and that the employee didn’t have any contact information for him and was “not sure” whether he was still in the country. The employee did confirm knowing that the FBI searched Koetting’s home — which is next door to the insurance company — but said the insurance company itself wasn’t.

Images of “Old Double Shot” never appeared on the FBI’s Capitol Violence website, which typically features photos of persons of interest who haven’t yet been identified to the FBI. Because the website was built to generate new public tips, people haven’t typically been added to it when the FBI already has names or solid leads in hand.

Of the more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants the FBI has arrested to date, federal prosecutors have secured the convictions of more than 1,100 people on charges ranging from misdemeanor unlawful picketing or parading to seditious conspiracy against the U.S. More than 600 people have been sentenced to periods of incarceration that have ranged from a few days in prison all the way up to a record-setting 22 years in federal prison for former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com