Daily Wire
@realDailyWire
On January 6, 2021, the FBI explicitly chose to abandon a sting on a child pornographer in Virginia who was messaging with an undercover agent about having sex with a nine-year-old boy, opting instead to focus on prosecuting Donald Trump's supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Less than three years later, the FBI discovered the same man living in Alaska where he appears to have been performing sex acts on a 10-year-old boy, according to court documents.
On December 2, 2020, an internet user with the screen name "gayboy69freak" messaged an undercover agent with the FBI's Washington Field Office, who was posing as a father pimping out his 9-year-old son, and told him that he wanted to travel to D.C. to have sex with the boy.
You can see why Christopher Wray decided this should be a low-priority case. He looks like the kind of guy with his own history of exotic screennames.
The man also sent the agent a video of "a prepubescent minor male being anally penetrated by an adult male's erect penis." His IP address led the FBI to Brogan Welsh of Glenn Allen, Virginia.
What appears to be a slam-dunk case against a child predator was abruptly abandoned just one month later.
"On January 6, 2021, FBI, Washington Field Office, [decided] this investigation was halted due to events that occurred at the United States Capitol Building that day," court documents say.
The man was only arrested, and the court documents only filed, because Welsh moved to Alaska and crossed the Anchorage FBI's radar in an unrelated perversion investigation. On October 24, 2023, after coming across troubling chats from Welsh on a phone they seized from a different alleged pervert, Alaska FBI agents went into his house and "located items including sex toys that are very small in size and apparently consistent with the body size of an approximate 10-year-old boy," as well as children's underwear.
"The investigation has revealed that a 10-year-old boy was, in fact, residing at the residence belonging to Welsh," the agents wrote.
In other words, because the FBI called off the dogs even after Welsh sent child porn to an FBI agent, he appears to have gone on to molest a 10-year-old.
It was as FBI agents worked through the Alaska case that they realized that the bureau's Washington Field Office had slam-dunk evidence that it had never bothered to do anything with, and added it to charging documents filed November 6, 2023. The Alaska arrest of Welsh was made based on the initial child pornography crime in Virginia, not even his apparent crimes in Alaska.
The Washington Field Office wouldn't say how many other ordinary criminal investigations were put on hold because of January 6, but it did acknowledge that resources were diverted.
"In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, WFO resources were surged to support the FBI's response and investigation," the office told The Daily Wire in a statement.
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,000 defendants in what they call the "Capitol Breach," and more than 65,000 legal documents have been filed in the cases, according to a Daily Wire database. Investigators and prosecutors have limited time, so it turns out that all that work likely comes at the expense of the cases they'd normally be handling.
Full story by Luke Rosiak at the Daily Wire.
FBI whistleblower Steve Friend talked about being pulled off of sensitive child-exploitation cases to join Christopher Wray's "Insurrectionist" dragnet squad.