How a documentary film-maker became the January 6 panel’s star witness

When the Home choose committee investigating the January 6 Capitol assault on Thursday obtained to the witness testimony at its inaugural listening to, it heard from a person with first-hand data about how the far-right Proud Boys group got here to storm the Capitol.

The panel’s star witness, Nick Quested, is an Emmy award-winning British documentary film-maker who based the indie movie firm Goldcrest and embedded with the Proud Boys within the weeks after Donald Trump misplaced the 2020 election as a part of a challenge about division in America.

“We selected the Proud Boys as a result of they’ve been so vociferous in rallies and protests round America, and so they’ve emerged as a political voice and pressure, notably in the summertime of 2020,” Quested instructed the Guardian. “We felt they had been a gaggle price following.”

Quested spent a lot of the post-2020 election interval following across the Proud Boys and is taken into account by the choose committee as an unintentional witness to the group’s actions and conversations about planning to storm the Capitol on January 6.

The documentary film-maker shot footage of a number of the most important moments linked to the assault, beginning with rallies in November and December 2020 which the Proud Boys attended alongside different militia teams, together with the Oath Keepers and the first Modification Praetorian.

Quested then managed to seize on digital camera a late-night rendezvous between Enrique Tarrio, the chief of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, the chief of the Oath Keepers, in an underground parking storage close to the Capitol the day earlier than January 6.

The US justice division has referenced that encounter in indictments for seditious conspiracy in opposition to Rhodes and different militia group members, although Quested has instructed the choose committee he doesn't imagine that was a gathering to coordinate storming the Capitol.

Members of the the far-right group Proud Boys march to the US Capitol constructing in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.
Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

Quested additionally filmed the Proud Boys marching up the Nationwide Mall from the Save America rally on the Ellipse to the Peace Monument on the foot of Capitol Hill, the place the group’s members discovered themselves stopped from transferring additional by the sting of the US Capitol police perimeter.

Over a number of tense minutes, he photographed Joseph Biggs, one of many Proud Boys indicted for seditious conspiracy, having a quick alternate with one other man within the crowd, who then confronted Capitol police in a second extensively seen because the tipping level of the riot.

The confrontation sparked the gang to overturn the police barricade – regardless of Quested holding on to the fencing to maintain it upright – and Quested filmed the cost up Capitol Hill in the direction of the inaugural platform on the west aspect of the Capitol constructing.

“Why did I'm going over to the obstacles within the first place? Look, there’s two sorts of folks on this world. There’s individuals who stroll to disturbances and individuals who stroll away. I stroll in the direction of disturbances,” Quested mentioned.

“I didn’t know there was a confrontation occurring. I felt a disturbance within the crowd and I moved in the direction of that confrontation. And that confrontation occurred to be Ryan Samsel shaking the obstacles. After which the burden of the gang overwhelmed the officers on the barrier.”

Late within the day on January 6, Quested filmed Tarrio’s response to information in regards to the Capitol assault in actual time, having gone to see Tarrio in Baltimore, Maryland, the place he had retreated after being ordered out of Washington by a neighborhood choose the day earlier than.

Quested mentioned his footage and extra on the choose committee’s inaugural listening to pursuant to a subpoena, having already testified on a number of events behind closed doorways about his recollections and experiences across the Proud Boys on January 6.

The film-maker – initially from west London and educated at St Paul’s college in London – adopted the Proud Boys within the post-election interval after masking battle zones together with Afghanistan, Iraq, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Syria.

Amongst different works, Quested produced Restrepo, the 2010 Oscar-nominated movie that adopted a platoon in Afghanistan for a yr, and directed the 2018 duPont-Columbia award-winning movie Hell on Earth, in addition to greater than 100 hip-hop movies, together with with Dr Dre.