Zip-Tie Guy and Other Paramilitary-Style Occupiers of the Capitol

Mick West

Administrator
Staff member
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The guy jumping over seats in the Senate Chamber is one of the more ominous images from the Capitol occupation.In one hand he has a bundle of zip-tie handcuffs. There's a taser in a holster at his side. His gear looks military, or at least militia. His tactical gloves have reinforced knuckles for punching. His cap has a badge of a US flag with a gun, and on his chest it a Punisher badge. He's got a chest mounted phone "body camera". Gold-rimmed "aviator" sunglasses.
Image source: https://www.syracuse.com/us-news/20...ther-congress-member-calls-for-expulsion.html HD
HD image: https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/advancelocal/PWPOOO4OIZENVHCGJ6KYDA5HQM.jpg

There's two photos of him, the above, and then another in the same place.
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Source: https://www.everythinglubbock.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2021/01/GettyImages-1294932405.jpg

Not much more detail, but white skin, Apple Watch.


Other examples of similar gear

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Source: https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/...33c-407e-92a4-b3f416ca2576-AFP_AFP_8YB2YU.jpg


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source: https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/advancelocal/OR4BFNEOPZHLZAC4RDGFCAJD2M.JPG
 
I believe that the first zip-tie guy, with the pocketed vest and the smartphone holder, would have stowed the flexi-cuffs away on his person to keep his hands free if he had brought them with him originally. He seems like an organized guy. I'm convinced he acquired the handcuffs later.

Of it course, it still raises the question what he planned to use them for.
 
would have stowed the flexi-cuffs away on his person
maybe he took them out and is walking over to secure a door so capitol police cant come in. in the original pic there are people fiddling with the door behind him.
do we have pics ..the blue seats are the House? ..
 
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1. its teh senate not the House
2. i dont recall this photo in the PDF, his face shows better tahn hanging off the balcony
3. New Yorker thinks they are playing
 
maybe he took them out and is walking over to secure a door so capitol police cant come in. in the original pic there are people fiddling with the door behind him.
do we have pics ..the blue seats are the House? ..
yea the doors go all the way around
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1610133098099.png

1. its teh senate not the House
2. i dont recall this photo in the PDF, his face shows better tahn hanging off the balcony
3. New Yorker thinks they are playing

That's Josiah Colt.
Article:
CBS2 News has been in contact with Colt and received the following statement:

“I love America, I love the people, I didn’t hurt anyone and I didn’t cause any damage in the Chamber. I got caught up in the moment and when I saw the door to to the Chamber open, I walked in, hopped down, and sat on the chair. I said my peace then I helped a gentlemen get to safety that was injured then left.
...
In a video posted on Instagram, Colt said “I just got in the Capitol building, I hopped down into the chamber.” Colt also went to say he was in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chair. However, Colt was actually in the Senate Chamber in a seat reserved for Vice President Mike Pence.

Colt has since deleted his Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Colt also tells CBS2 that he is speaking with his lawyer to see what his next steps should be.
 
do we have pics ..the blue seats are the House? ..

Blue seats in the gallery are the Senate, the House has patterned gold/yellow seats in the gallery. On the floor, the Senate has desks at each seat, the House only has a few desk near the center row of seating.
 
Another guy with Zip-ties
He seems to have been identified as an Air Force Veteran. As to the zip-ties, he "found" them, intended to hand them over to the police but then forgot that he still had them in his hand.

Article:
In an interview, Brock confirmed that he was the man in the photos and videos. He denied that he held racist views and echoed Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, saying that he derived his understanding of the matter principally from social media. He told me that he had gone to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate peacefully. “The President asked for his supporters to be there to attend, and I felt like it was important, because of how much I love this country, to actually be there,” he said. Brock added that he did not identify as part of any organized group and claimed that, despite the scenes of destruction that day, he had seen no violence. When he arrived at the Capitol, he said, he assumed he was welcome to enter the building.
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Brock denied that he had entered Pelosi’s office suite, saying that he “stopped five to ten feet ahead of the sign” bearing her title that insurrectionists later tore down and brandished. However, in the ITV video, he appears to emerge from the suite. Brock said that he had worn tactical gear because “I didn’t want to get stabbed or hurt,” citing “B.L.M. and Antifa” as potential aggressors. He claimed that he had found the zip-tie handcuffs on the floor. “I wish I had not picked those up,” he told me. “My thought process there was I would pick them up and give them to an officer when I see one. . . . I didn’t do that because I had put them in my coat, and I honestly forgot about them.” He also said that he was opposed to vandalizing the building, and was dismayed when he learned of the extent of the destruction. “I know it looks menacing,” he told me. “That was not my intent.”
 
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I believe that the first zip-tie guy, with the pocketed vest and the smartphone holder, would have stowed the flexi-cuffs away on his person to keep his hands free if he had brought them with him originally. He seems like an organized guy. I'm convinced he acquired the handcuffs later.

Of it course, it still raises the question what he planned to use them for.
I think it's more likely they have just been taken out, ready for use.
 
They didn't know that before they entered. They were doing a sweep of the room.

Two men, both dressed in tacticals, both happened to find some of these devices, and picked them up, and retained them?

Brock's story is obviously false. He entered Pelosi's office - part of a sweep. This looks to me like a kidnap team. When he is investigated I think the other man will be identified as an associate. And I wouldn't be surprised if he were an enlisted man under Brock in the military.
 
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He's an ex-Lt Colonel and radicalized. He's not going into this situation without a plan. By that I don't mean into the room. He came to D.C. with this plan.

Malcom Nance
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/01/07/pro-trump-extremists-capitol
As you recall, a couple of months ago, there was a plot revealed by the U.S. attorneys against six men in Michigan who were planning to kidnap and try and execute the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. The plan B for that group was to take 200 men, storm the Statehouse, bring out all of the Democratic and liberal, or as they designate them, people in the Statehouse, try them and execute them by shooting or hanging them from the Statehouse. That viable plan was the first thing I thought of when I was monitoring their live streams [Wednesday] and saw them move away from the Mall and go toward the Capitol. I said, ‘This is going to turn into something bad.' ”
Content from External Source
 
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I just found this








Simple. They planned for this. There had been many, many indications. I had been reporting them on twitter, and other people have been putting them up, that these people were planning a major
action on January 6th.


Now, the place where it was most dangerous was the speaker’s lobby, and that’s where deadly
force was used to keep those rioters from getting into the chambers where there were hundreds of members inside there and possibly carrying out executions.
Content from External Source
 
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I just found this
From Wikipedia:

Malcolm Wrightson Nance (born 1961) is an American author and media commentator on terrorism, intelligence, insurgency, and torture. [..] In 2014, he founded and became the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI), a Hudson, New York–based think tank.
Content from External Source
His twitter feed is quite high-volume.

Source: https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1347921953240309760


More from the video:
“They had in their mind that they were going to take back the United States government...

The White House & the National Security infrastructure of Donald Trump’s government saw White Trump protestors as not a threat... This was a national security event.”
Content from External Source
“They built a gallows on the mall. That tells you their intent was a large hostage barricade & quite possibly the execution of government members.”
Content from External Source
“They chanted Hang Mike Pence.

What I’m afraid of as a counterterrorism specialist is that they’re going to get an Indira Gandhi situation where one of her bodyguards killed her.

All bets are off now. A full scrub of the United States government has to be done..”
Content from External Source
 
finally got around to listening to the video of zip tie guy walking up to the capitol with his mom, dont know how to link, its the first video.

Munchel is filming
convo starts like 13:53. hes with his mom (pink backpack)and another older couple walking near them. they are talking about getting in, Munchel says "it's our house. we paid for it" , some woman is saying "drag them out so we can talk to them",

this vid
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https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GwZDczZEqERhyaG0qyUW_9FIvNpPVdBT
 
To be clear, we are not debating whether some rioters had plans to injure or kill members of Congress. The mob chanted "hang Mike Pence" at some point. I'm just saying that they didn't bring these zip ties to the riot.

Two men, both dressed in tacticals, both happened to find some of these devices, and picked them up, and retained them?
Why not? If they were fighting together initially, and thereby happened on a bag of these ties used by the Capitol Police, why not?

Article:
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 07: Flex cuffs still hang from the northern entrance door from when Capitol Police attempted to secure it from a pro-Trump mob the day before at the U.S. Capitol building on January 7, 2021 in Washington, DC. [..] (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
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Article:
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 07: A duffle bag of flex cuffs remains at the northern entrance door to the U.S. Capitol building on January 7, 2021 in Washington, DC. [..] (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
gettyimages-1230468821-2048x2048.jpg

It looks like Capitol Police had a duffel bag with flex cuffs at the Northern Entrance. They used the cuffs to secure the doors; and then had to abandoned the bag when they were overrun.

I'm not saying they took them from this exact bag; there could have been another bag, or they stole them from a cop who was intending to use them to secure another door (or that cop dropped them). But the fact is, they could well have acquired them there, and probably did.
 

Capitol siege was planned online. Trump supporters now planning the next one.

Twitter cited dangerous talk and online planning in banning Trump’s account

[I recommend a subscription to WoPo and NYT- it isn't that much]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/09/trump-twitter-protests/

The planning for Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol happened largely in plain view, with chatters in far-right forums explicitly discussing how to storm the building, handcuff lawmakers with zip ties and disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election — in what they portrayed as responding to orders from President Trump.

This went far beyond the widely reported, angry talk about thronging Washington that day. Trump supporters exchanged detailed tactical advice about what to bring and what to do once they assembled at the Capitol to conduct “citizen’s arrests” of members of Congress. One poster said, “[expletive] zip ties. I’m bringing rope!”

Such comments were not confined to dark corners of the Web. They were scooped up and catalogued by researchers who made their findings public weeks before a seemingly unprepared Capitol Police force was overrun by thousands of rioters, in an incident that left one officer, one rioter and three other people dead.
Content from External Source
 
Here's a video ZTG (Eric Munchel) posted as they were walking toward the Capitol. His mother and someone else seem to do most of the talking.
https://tuckbot.tv/#/watch/kto2gt

Woman:
"Drag them out. I want to drag them out and let us talk to them.
Content from External Source
 
So not associated with Brock.

Impressive power of the crowd.
https://www.ibtimes.sg/zip-tie-guy-...ied-by-social-media-nashville-bartender-54770

In the wake of Wednesday's events at the US Capitol, Twitter users combed through photos and videos taken before the breach and found a photo of the "zip-tie guy"
Content from External Source



This is him?
https://patch.com/georgia/sandyspri...ating-man-and-woman-at-roswell-road-apartment

Eric Munchel and Jeremy Martine are accused of going to the complex at 5555 Roswell Road and assaulting a man and woman after accusing them of a previous robbery of a female acquaintance.
Content from External Source
 
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When she and her son came across a pile of plastic restraints, Munchel grabbed a handful and Eisenhart grabbed at least one, court documents show.

Eisenhart and Munchel brought the plastic restraints they discovered inside the Capitol to Nashville, possibly as trophies, prosecutors said. Some testimony suggested that the two took the plastic restraints so they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands, but Kurtzman rejected that claim.

Content from External Source
https://amp.tennessean.com/story/ne...art-released-federal-custody-riot/4248209001/



USA today is also compiling a list of arrests to date.
https://www.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-arrests/
 
Now hold on here.

When she and her son came across a pile of plastic restraints, Munchel grabbed a handful and Eisenhart grabbed at least one, court documents show.
Content from External Source
According to their own testimony. Is there any independent evidence that this is what happened?

“The idea that those zip ties were taken in a benevolent move by (Eisenhart) is just not supported by the evidence," the prosecutor said.
Content from External Source
This isolated statement by the prosecutor is ambiguous. It doesn't support the narrative that these two simply found a pile of these things inside the building. The statement may reject part of story - that they found the pile and grabbed some in a benevolent move - or it might reject the entire story - that they found them in the building.

I'm not rejecting the possibility, but I want some more info.

What might support this narrative: Retired Lt. Colonel Larry Brock also has a handful of what look like the same kind of ties. After all, it seems there's no connection between him and Munchel. It would be quite a coincidence if they both independently brought the same model.

But what if one them brought the ties and the other asked if he could have some?
 
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Is there any independent evidence that this is what happened?
the usa today link at the bottom of my last post, has a bit of info but not much.
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there might be footage of that, but i dont recall seeing him in footage or anyone attacking 2 guards. ?? from the report:

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this reporter follows some guys up (dont know if the same path munchel took) but the only 'cabinets' i see are near the metal detector right outside the Senate room. I dont see Munchel but the other guy with zip ties is already in the Senate at this point.

Makes sense there would be zip ties in one of the cabinets near the metal detector. ?? doesnt prove anything though.
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