Crafty Trump Official Changed Hats During MAGA Riot To Fool The FBI. He's In Jail Now.

The truth is these are not very bright guys, and it got out of hand.

Surprising exactly no one, a Trump administration official has been arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6. Perhaps the only shocking thing is that it took so long. But someone had to be first, so ... STEP RIGHT UP Federico Guillermo Klein, today's the day you become famous!

 Politico was first to break the story that Klein, a former Trump campaign staffer who was still employed at the State Department on January 6, was arrested by the FBI yesterday in Virginia. Klein, 42, has been bumping around Republican politics for ages, with stints volunteering for the McCain and Romney presidential campaigns and Ken Cuccinelli's 2013 gubernatorial run in Virginia, according to his LinkedIn page. With a record like that, you'd think this guy would know how to lose an election without losing his shit, but apparently not.

This morning, the New York Times published the FBI affidavit in support of Klein's arrest, with a bunch of photos of Klein, easily identifiable by his green jacket with the ripped shoulder and his "distinctive teeth." That's Klein holding a riot shield stolen from an officer, which he used to assault Capitol police and prevent them from closing the doors on the mob. Klein seemed to think that a baseball cap was all the disguise he needed to evade detection by blocking the wall mounted security cameras, even going so far as to pick one up off the floor when he lost his own in a scuffle.

New hat, who dis? 

Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten that every goddamn idiot in the place was livestreaming the event for posterity. Plus all those cops he was assaulting were wearing body cams. DOH!

Just a day after the FBI published this photo array, the first tipster flagged Klein's Facebook account to the FBI. And four days later, a second tipster alerted Johnny Law to Klein's LinkedIn page .

Hi, Freddie!

Say CHEESE.

Pretty surprising that a guy who had top secret clearance showed his ass all over DC in the middle of a riot. But our Fred may be just a couple tacos short of a combo platter.

"Fred's politics burn a little hot, but I've never known him to violate the law," his mother Cecilia Klein told Politico, confirming that her son was at the Capitol on the 6th. "While I believe, as he said, he was on the Mall that day, I don't have any evidence, nor will I ever ask him, unless he tells me, where he was after he was on the Mall."

Which was probably not news to the cops, since Klein's phone pinged the Capitol's interior cell tower, but still ... OMG, MOM, STOP.

Klein's mother says he served in Iraq, which might have trained him to remain calm as he organized the mob to break through the police line in the Lower West Terrace tunnel, shouting, "We need fresh people, we need fresh people!" while Capitol officers were being assaulted. Or perhaps these skills were honed in the War on Big Gay when Klein worked at the Family Research Council. In any event, it was all caught on video and immediately posted to YouTube, so he can 'splain it to a judge later.

The Times didn't publish the charging documents, but the affidavit says there's probable cause to arrest him for unlawful entry into a restricted building with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions and engage in an act of physical violence in the Grounds or any of the Capitol Buildings.

So, looks like poor Freddie might be losing that clearance. And his liberty. But not his mind, because ... too late.

[ Politico / Affidavit / NYT ]

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