How a documentary film-maker became the January 6 panel's star witness [View all]

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When the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack on Thursday got to the witness testimony at its inaugural hearing, it heard from an individual with first-hand knowledge about how the far-right Proud Boys group came to storm the Capitol.

The panel’s star witness, Nick Quested, is an Emmy award-winning British documentary film-maker who founded the indie film company Goldcrest and embedded with the Proud Boys in the weeks after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election as part of a project about division in America. “We chose the Proud Boys because they’ve been so vociferous in rallies and protests around America, and they’ve emerged as a political voice and force, particularly in the summer of 2020,” Quested told the Guardian. “We felt they were a group worth following.”

Quested spent much of the post-2020 election period following around the Proud Boys and is considered by the select committee as an accidental witness to the group’s activities and likely conversations about planning to storm the Capitol on January 6.

The documentary film-maker shot footage of some of the most crucial moments connected to the attack, starting with rallies in November and December 2020 which the Proud Boys attended alongside other militia groups including the Oath Keepers and the 1st Amendment Praetorian.Quested then managed to capture on camera a late-night rendezvous between Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, in an underground parking garage near the Capitol the day before January 6. The US justice department has referenced that encounter in indictments for seditious conspiracy against Rhodes and other militia group members, though Quested has told the select committee he does not believe that was a meeting to coordinate storming the Capitol.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/09/proud-boys-capitol-attack-nick-quested

Its really amazing that an actual film-maker was at the scene of this horrible crime.