The Biden-era FBI made more than $100,000 in payments to informants who were members of an anonymous group of tech sleuths known as the "Sedition Hunters" to gather and analyze video evidence in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Arctic Frost probes despite the group’s significant anti-Trump fervor and known ties to foreigners, according to memos reviewed by Just the News.

The payments are due to be disclosed by FBI Director Kash Patel to Congress along with acknowledged concerns that the Christopher Wray-run bureau’s approval of certain members of the Sedition Hunters as confidential human sources may have violated bureau policies in the Domestic Investigation and Operations Guide (DIOG) concerning informant bias, informant secrecy, foreign influence, and contracting transparency, officials said.

Government officials said group members were first engaged in January 2021, just days after the Capitol riot, to assist making arrests in the January 6 case by identifying potential defendants using facial recognition software. The group members received at least $150,000 in payments for that work and other work related to the Arctic Frost probe into whether Trump supporters violated the law by promoting alternate electors to be considered for the certification of the 2020 election.

Biden-era FBI knew paid foreigners were using spyware to identify J6 arrestees

One of the earliest emails from the FBI’s Washington field office that oversaw that work showed the FBI was clearly aware the group had foreign connections and may actually be using software from overseas to identify American citizens for arrest, according to a copy of the email reviewed by Just the News.

The late January 2021 email from the FBI's Washington field office stated that “we have a sedition hunter from the United Kingdom running facial recognition software” with the tipster telling the bureau that this UK-based so-called sedition hunter “just found this possible match” to an alleged January 6 suspect a few minutes prior, sharing the picture with the FBI.

FBI Director Kash Patel told Just the News on Tuesday night he is concerned that the paid informant relationship with Sedition Hunters members was inappropriate, and he was committed to working with Congress to develop rules to avoid such entanglements in the future.

"The American people deserve the truth about how the FBI was weaponized against them. Paying openly anti-Trump activists to identify Americans using questionable technology is a stunning abuse of bureau authorities and a clear violation of longstanding informant rules," Patel said in a statement to Just the News.

"Under my leadership, the FBI will fully disclose these actions to Congress and ensure the bureau never again serves partisan or political ends instead of the Constitution," he added.

Officials said the FBI believes it has fired all supervisors who were involved in the informant relationship, but is doing an audit to make sure he didn't overlook any players.

Officials said a Sedition Hunter member also was engaged as an FBI confidential human source in summer 2023, receiving $20,000 in payments in the Arctic Frost probe. The source was specifically tasked with looking for video evidence tying Trump supporters who attended the president’s Jan. 6, 2021 speech on the Ellipse to the subsequent riot at the Capitol.

That footage was being sought as the FBI and prosecutors sought to tie Trump in a criminal conspiracy to the violence that happened at the Capitol even though the president never went there himself, officials said.

Payment approved by Jack Smith

That $20,000 payment, according to documents obtained by Just the News, was approved by a top deputy to then-Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is set to testify in a high-profile hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

An electronic communication "documents prosecutorial approval, in the form of emailed concurrence from Counselor to Special Counsel Raymond Hulser on 06/02/2023, of a payment for information in the amount of $20,000.00 to [name redacted] for information provided in support of [the] captioned investigation," one memo read.

"The payment was discussed by Raymond Hulser and Assistant Special Counsel Julia Gegenheimer with Special Counsel Jack Smith," the memo added. The memos showed the chain of approval with an FBI agent who wrote to Smith's office on June 2, 2023.

"As discussed, request your office's concurrence in our proposed payment of $20,000 for CHS' provision of information in support of the investigation," the agent wrote. Hulser wrote back succinctly, "Concur, thank you."

The documents are redacted and the names of the paid informants are not visible in the copies that Just the News reviewed.

The Sedition Hunters' assistance to the FBI has been well known, though the amount of money handed to its members in return for acting as confidential human sources will likely be a major revelation to Congress. 

Ryan Reilly, a DOJ reporter at NBC News, wrote a 2023 book titled Sedition Hunters which effusively praised the online sleuths, and also made it clear that some of them had entered into formalized informant relationships with the bureau. The publisher's website for the book does not disclose that some of these informants were paid, or even if Reilly knew about the financial incentives.

Trump haters still at it

The Sedition Hunter's political sentiments are also clear on its X account, where numerous contemporary posts mock or attack Trump or his administration or repost comments from other Trump haters.

Just last week, it reacted to the Trump Homeland Security Department's warning not to assault ICE officers in Minnesota with this retort: "If you don't see the problem, then you are part of the problem."

Last February it praised a post from Illinois Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker that called Trump "incompetent." 

"Love this guy!" the account wrote.

And a few days into the second administration, the group's account tweeted this: "After renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the next on the list is the Dept of Justice New Name: Dept of Trump's Agenda."

The revelations of source payments are certain to revive FBI concerns among Republicans that date to the now-discredited Crossfire Hurricane probe, where agents used a former MI6 British spy named Christopher Steele to pursue unsubstantiated allegations of Trump election collusion with Russia despite Steele’s foreign connections, his clear anti-Trump bias and his work as a contractor for the campaign law firm of Trump’s main 2016 rival Hillary Clinton.

Steele was eventually terminated in November 2016 as an FBI informant for violating his confidentiality requirements as a confidential human source, disclosing his role with the bureau, and making unauthorized disclosures to the media.

Government officials said a half decade later, the bureau may have entered into another troubling relationship by treating members of the Sedition Hunters as informants in a new Trump probe when, in fact, they were essentially performing computer analysis contract work identifying Jan. 6 defendants around the Capitol and clearly expressed dislike for Trump.

Boasting about information meant to be confidential

Similar to Steele, Sedition Hunters openly acknowledged on its website that it was assisting the FBI even though confidential human sources are supposed to maintain secrecy about their work for the bureau.

“Sedition Hunters is a global community of open-source intelligence investigators (OSINT) who worked together to assist the US FBI in Washington DC capitol police in finding people who allegedly committed crimes in the January 6th capital riots,” the group boasted on its website in a screenshot captured by the FBI.

“As we looked for those wanted by the FBI we identified other crimes and passed that information along to law enforcement officers,” the group added.

The Sedition Hunters group did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent through the email listed on their website.

Potential foreign links to Sedition Hunters effort

A number of key Sedition Hunter leaders or people aligned with them appear to be either foreigners or living in foreign countries.

Forrest Rogers, whose X account says he is based in Switzerland, describes himself as an “open source / visual investigations reporter” at NZZ, a German-language newspaper published in Switzerland. His LinkedIn profile claims that he was “trained in investigative reporting” by a “journalist” at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The profile says Rogers “studied journalism, international business, and German studies in the U.S. and Germany” and that he previously “advised governments and multinational corporations on matters related to corporate intelligence and foreign direct investment.”

Rogers is reportedly a German-American who lives in Switzerland and helped run the so-called sedition hunting group called Deep State Dogs. NPR reported in January 2022 that “Rogers' group has focused on rioters who were violent and hard to identify, perhaps because their faces were obscured.”

“We want these people brought to justice,” Rogers told Bloomberg News in 2021. “And we don’t want a random sampling of them, a token group.”

"The FBI, of course, was overwhelmed with this mammoth task of identifying these individuals, the Sedition Hunters community, everyone started individually reviewing all of the footage," Rogers told NPR the same year.

Reilly’s book’s acknowledgments section specifically thanked Rogers “for luring me into the wildest story of my career.”

Rogers did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him through his newspaper.

Tommy Carstensen is described as being from Denmark in the press, and his website describes himself as a “bioinformatician and data scientist” and says that “I build interactive dashboards and research tooling that make messy data usable.” Among the “pages I've created” are “jan6attack.com” and “jan6archive.com” — which were both used by Sedition Hunters.

It was reported by NPR in 2021 Carstensen “said he's watched thousands of videos since January.” The outlet wrote that “some of these volunteer sleuths, such as Carstensen, have also turned to facial recognition software to aid their efforts” and that “it's a controversial tool that he acknowledges has broader shortcomings.”

"I don't really like facial recognition when it's put in the hands of [a] government, say, China monitoring the Uyghurs," Carstensen said. "But in this case, it's all public video, from a public location."

NBC News reported in November 2021 that “from his home in Denmark,” Carstensen “said he spent several months working full time on that effort, motivated by seeing what he described as ‘democracy deteriorating’ in both Europe and the U.S.”

"I've always looked at it like a terrorist attack like 9/11," Carstensen said, with the outlet pointing to the two websites he created. “I never envisioned that I would spend so much time on it,” Carstensen told NBC that month.

The outlet reported that “right after January 6 he began one of a series of projects aggregating photos and videos of alleged participants on open-source platforms.”

Carstensen did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to him through a GoFundMe page for one of his January 6-related websites.

A woman known only by her first name of “Mary” also reportedly engaged in so-called sedition hunting from her house in The Hague in The Netherlands.

“Mary has been working with a group called "Capitol Terrorists Exposers" from her home in The Hague,” NPR reported in January 2022. “For security concerns, NPR has agreed only to use her first name. She says she's amazed at how quickly the sedition-hunting community organized itself.”

The outlet reported that “Mary's crew is investigating all Oath Keepers who showed up that day, regardless of whether they entered the Capitol or committed a crime.”

Reilly’s book said that “especially early on, there were several sleuths living outside the country, including a meme-making grandma from the Hague who made TikToks with her granddaughter.”

Chris Sigurdson, another person allegedly sleuthing J6, was repeatedly described in the press as an out-of-work actor in Canada. 

It was reported by Bloomberg that Sigurdson “had been growing obsessed with the riot, spending 40 hours a week poring over photographs and videos” and that, after posting some of his findings on Twitter at the end of January 2021, a suspect was arrested by the FBI two weeks later, and that “an affidavit cited Sigurdson’s tweet as evidence.”

“If someone tried to design the whole system in which all of these Sedition Hunters are operating, you couldn’t create it,” Sigurdson told Reilly. “It emerged organically, not just out of this event, but from Charlottesville and that whole experience of trying to identify people involved with that.”

Just the News was unable to find a way to contact him.

Sedition Hunters created facial recognition software to assist the FBI

The X page for Sedition Hunters says its mission is “hunting and distributing clear-face images of those that stormed the Capitol.” The “Research Tools” on the Sedition Hunters website include “Capitol Riot Maps” and a “U.S. Capitol Attack Facial Recognition App,” among others.

The online sleuths quickly got media attention, touting their facial recognition capabilities as they sought to feed the FBI information.

KHOU-11 reported in February 2021 that “a growing online movement that uses the hashtag #SeditionHunters is exposing those involved in the January attack on the U.S. Capitol” by “using GPS metadata, videos, and high-tech face recognition tools.”

It was reported by Bloomberg in June 2021 that “many of the sleuths have treated the project as a full-time job, creating infrastructure to help fellow investigators sort through the footage.” The outlet said that “a sedition hunter in California built a facial recognition database that the community has used to identify rioters” with the site’s tagline being “they should have worn some f#$!ng masks.” The outlet said that “the database’s creator … defended the tool, saying it simply automated the time-consuming process of cross-referencing Jan. 6 images.”

FBI relies on the Sedition Hunters in J6 court cases — and pays informants

An extensive review of public court filings reveals the extent to which the FBI relied upon these Sedition Hunters to build their cases, with the FBI even acknowledging in at least one instance that some of these online sleuths had been paid informants.

NPR reported in August 2021 that “Sedition Hunters are mentioned by name in at least 13 cases.”

Reilly’s book pointed to FBI affidavits from May 2022, June 2022, and January 2023 related to January 6 defendants, with the book saying that the FBI informant referenced in all three court filings was the same Sedition Hunter leader.

The first court filing said that Facebook posts, CCTV screenshots, and public videos and images were shared with the FBI from a “confidential source.” The filing said the FBI agent writing the affidavit “has consulted with federal law enforcement officials regularly working with the CI (confidential informant) and is unaware of any statements or evidence that would tend to undermine the credibility of the CI.” The FBI wrote that “the CI’s motivation for providing information is from his/her sense of outrage regarding the attacks on law enforcement during the events of January 6, 2021.”

The second court filing, an affidavit signed by an FBI agent, described a “Confidential Human Source” who provided information to the bureau. The filing continued: “This CHS was an established source who led a team of open-source researchers who collaborated shortly after January 6, 2021, to identify United States Capitol rioters. This CHS group was motivated by a desire to assist law enforcement regarding the events of January 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol.” That document did not disclose that the informant was paid.

The third filing again cited a “Confidential Human Source” who provided information to the FBI, with this affidavit stating that reported that “CHS-1 has been compensated for his/her time.”

In reference to this FBI informant, the book said that “there’s a person playing an important role in all this: a lightning rod, a ‘middle man,’ or ‘middle woman’ — the FBI has kept their gender a secret, and I’ll do so here too. They’re a confidential human source, or CHS, for the FBI. I’ll call them Chris.”

“Chris knew the sleuths were having a big impact. It wasn’t until they visited the FBI sometime in 2021 that they realized the extent of it, when they were able to meet with members of law enforcement who had served on Jan. 6 and appreciated the work of the online sleuths identifying those who had assaulted them,” the book said, adding that “when a Capitol Police officer handed them a challenge coin, they felt as if this was one of the most important things they’d ever done.”

The book added that “soon after that first meeting with the bureau [...] Chris was clearly floored by just how critical the sleuths had been to the investigation.”

“The impact we had is huge,” Chris told the author. “Huge!”

Anti-Trump cyber sleuths — some paid — cited at least 63 times by FBI

A number of court filings from 2021 and 2022 also specifically state that the FBI had received or obtained information from Sedition Hunters.

IEEE Spectrum — a magazine published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — said in January 2023 that “websites such as Jan6attack.com and Sedition Hunters provided a forum for ordinary people in the United States and around the world to analyze and speculate (sometimes correctly, sometimes wrongly) on the identity of rioters” and assessed that “the FBI cited such efforts in 63 legal documents.”

Reilly’s book largely used pseudonyms for the Sedition Hunter members, noting that one of them — named “Amy” — “worked for a large federal agency and understood how slowly bureaucracies could churn.”

The book said that one member named “Alex” created an app that “was one of the main tools of the manhunt: driving investigations, organizing information, generating new leads.”

“Mass collection and standardization, and even web scraping of data, is something that is in my wheelhouse,” Alex was quoted as saying in the book.

The book said that “some sleuths had formalized relationships with the FBI” and that “the community knew how much their work was appreciated and thought the bureau special agents they dealt with were dedicated.” The book claimed that “Sedition Hunters were building entire cases for the FBI from soup to nuts.”

“Many of the sleuths had established relationships with individual FBI special agents. Some had even signed a contract, if you will, signing up as confidential human sources to the FBI,” the book said. “The bureau came to rely on the sleuths to build their cases, not only to identify suspects they didn’t know about but to identify the actions of rioters they’d already charged and to trace their steps throughout the Capitol that day. Sleuths who were working with the FBI felt a duty to provide reliable information and took pride in making sure all the information they provided was reliable.”

The author said that one so-called sedition hunter told him that “if we screw this up, they will never trust a group like us again.”