WASHINGTON POST: "Three Active-duty Marines with Intelligence Jobs Charged in Jan. 6 Breach"

From Spencer S. Hsu and Alex Horton's 1-20-23 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "Three Active-duty Marines with Intelligence Jobs Charged in Jan. 6 Breach":

Three active duty members of the Marine Corps assigned to intelligence-related jobs, including one at the National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland, have been charged with participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, according to court filings unsealed Thursday and military service records.

Cpl. Micah Coomer, Sgt. Joshua Abate and Sgt. Dodge Dale Hellonen were arrested Tuesday and Wednesday near Camp Pendleton, Calif., Fort Meade, Md., and Camp Lejeune, N.C., respectively, and appeared in local federal courts [...].

The sergeants’ occupations as special communications signals analysts and the corporal’s job as an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance system engineer were first reported by Military.com and were confirmed in their service records [...].

The men are the first active-duty military members to be charged in the Capitol attack since Maj. Christopher Warnagiris of the Marine Corps was arrested in May 2021. He is awaiting trial on felony counts including assaulting or impeding police and obstructing an official proceeding. About 120 of the roughly 940 people arrested in the Capitol breach served in the military, reserves or National Guard.

According to charging papers filed Tuesday and unsealed Thursday, Coomer posted photographs on Instagram taken from inside the Capitol during the breach, captioned “Glad to be apart of history.” Data provided by Facebook in connection with an August 2021 federal search warrant showed that in a Jan. 31 direct message on Instagram, Coomer allegedly “stated his belief ‘that everything in this country is corrupt. We honestly need a fresh restart. I’m waiting for the boogaloo.’”

Coomer described the term as “Civil war 2,” according to an FBI arrest affidavit. U.S. prosecutors have described “boogaloo” as a term taken up by fringe groups referring to a racially or ethnically motivated civil war [...].

Separately, another Washington-area military reservist assigned to the U.S. intelligence community and facing a charge in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was convicted Wednesday on unrelated felony weapons offenses.

Hatchet M. Speed, a Navy Reserve petty officer first class assigned to Naval Warfare Space Field Activity at the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Va., was found guilty of possessing three unregistered firearms silencers by a jury in Alexandria federal court.

Speed has pleaded not guilty to federal misdemeanor charges in Washington after being described by U.S. prosecutors as a heavily armed Nazi sympathizer with top-level U.S. government security clearance who breached the Capitol with members of the Proud Boys extremist group. A new indictment this month added a felony count of obstructing an official proceeding of Congress against Speed, who until recently worked with a U.S. defense and intelligence cyberoperations contractor based in nearby Vienna, Va.

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