The day after the January 6 riot at the United States Capitol, an anonymous informant from Finland alerted the FBI to a video on the website of a Finnish newspaper. It showed a man with a bloody forehead outside the Capitol building wearing a black ballistic vest and an American flag as a cape.
“There were people fighting with the police and that’s when I was hit by a projectile – I’m not sure what it was,” said the 33-year-old man, Kevin Cordon, from Alhambra, to a US correspondent for the Finnish publication Ilta Sanomat.
“And then, from there, we proceeded to the broken windows and the Capitol building. We were walking down the halls and Trump supporters were all going crazy. “
On Tuesday, Cordon and his brother, Sean Carlo Cordon, 35, of Los Angeles, were arrested and charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on the Capitol and other crimes stemming from the attack on the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters, said the authorities. The crowd broke into the building in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
“It is clear that this election has been stolen, there is so much overwhelming evidence, and the system, the media, the big technology are simply ignoring all of this – and we are here to show them that we are not having it,” Kevin Cordon told the Finnish reporter Mikko Marttinen in the video. “We are not just going to accept that.”
More than 300 people have been charged with federal crimes in the Capitol riot, including more than a dozen from California. Many of them posted videos of themselves on Capitol on social media or openly discussed being there in television interviews, giving prosecutors a rich treasure trove of evidence now being used against them in court.
In a criminal complaint filed on Tuesday, FBI agent Shane Anderson described the weeks of investigation that led to the arrest of the Cordon brothers after Finland’s initial complaint. The two men featured in the newspaper’s video seemed to match the photos on the Cordon brothers’ driver’s licenses, Anderson wrote.
Surveillance footage from the Capitol showed the brothers outside the building near a police meeting, then climbing through a window to enter the Capitol 10 minutes later, according to Anderson.
Cameras inside the Capitol captured the brothers walking through the Crypt below the Rotunda, and then outside the building while Kevin Cordon spoke to reporter Ilta Sanomat sometime later, Anderson said.
At 3 pm, he added, Cordon was seen making a call, and records confirmed a call at that time from his cell phone in Washington to a person sharing his California home.
Verizon’s records obtained through a search warrant showed that Kevin Cordon’s phone number connected to a cell phone site that serves the interior of the Capitol building, the complaint said.
And flight records showed that the Cordon brothers purchased tickets on January 5 from Los Angeles International Airport to Washington, then returned on January 7. Surveillance video of a United Airlines boarding area in LAX showed a man who looked like Kevin Cordon wearing an American flag cape, according to the FBI agent.
Sean Carlo Cordon’s Twitter feed includes a post showing his admiration for Trump and his belief in the former president’s lies about winning an election he actually lost by 7 million votes.
In December, Sean Carlo Cordon posted complaints about vote recounts in Georgia, one of the states that Trump narrowly missed. “Not auditing the vote is another criminality,” he wrote.
The Cordon brothers were arrested in their homes around 6 am, and both homes were searched, according to FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller.
In his first appearance at the United States District Court in Los Angeles, United States Magistrate Michael Wilner ordered each of them to be released on $ 50,000 bail. Both will be under electronic location monitoring pending trial, and have been forced to hand over any firearms.