EXCLUSIVE: Trump DOJ’s Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Marched With Crowd on Jan. 6

On Jan. 6, 2021, a man approached the Capitol who looked like many others in the crowd that day: white, with a Trump 2020 hat on and a shirt marking his service to the country in Afghanistan. 

But this one was different. Brian W. Lynch was months into a new job as a federal prosecutor in Maryland when he attended the march on the Capitol. Yet, somehow, Lynch’s presence at the Capitol that fateful day has not been publicly reported until now, more than five years later. In the meantime, Lynch remained at DOJ and, under the second Trump administration, received a big promotion: He’s now running a national task force to prosecute left-wing political violence. 

A DOJ official confirmed to TPM that Lynch “was present but never entered the capitol, left the grounds after a brief period, and did not commit and was never accused of any violation of law.”

The prosecutor, Brian W. Lynch, did not return TPM’s requests for comment.

Michael Romano, who was a deputy chief in the DOJ’s since-disbanded Capitol Siege Section, described Jan. 6 to TPM as an act of massive political violence. He told TPM that he had never heard of anything like a federal prosecutor having been present at the march and continuing to work and be promoted years on. 

“People were trying to stop the certification of the electoral college vote on January 6th,” he said. “They were trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power between one presidential administration and the next.”

In the images, Lynch is wearing a Trump 2020 baseball hat. He has on a black shirt emblazoned with a map of Afghanistan that reads, “Afghanistan 2012-2013.” A LinkedIn profile for Lynch that was removed after an earlier TPM story about him said that he deployed to Afghanistan from 2012 to 2013 as part of a legal assistance program.

One image that the DOJ confirmed to be of Lynch shows him in front of a green crane. Romano told TPM that it is “definitely in the restricted area,” and that “the boundaries were streets. Anyone that close to the building was inside the restricted area.”

In March, Lynch became co-director of Joint Task Force Vanguard, which DOJ has described as central to its effort to prosecute alleged left-wing political violence cases, including last month’s indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis. Lynch reports to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general currently serving as acting attorney general while the Senate considers his nomination to the permanent position. 

Lynch’s presence at the march on Jan. 6 puts him at the center of the highest-profile example of political violence in the U.S. this century and the first break in the country’s streak of peaceful transfers of power since the country’s founding. After more than a month of trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 election through legal wrangling, pressure on state legislatures and pressure on the courts, President Donald Trump directed his supporters to march on Congress as members voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The march culminated in hours of spectacular violence in which rioters broke down barricades, assaulted law enforcement officers, and stormed into the heart of the Capitol, forcing members of Congress to flee.

There’s no evidence that Lynch entered the Capitol building itself or that he engaged in violence.

Romano, the Jan. 6 prosecutor, described the scale of the task facing DOJ as “huge.” 

“We knew that there had been thousands of people, um, who entered the Capitol and should not have, and who took part in disrupting the certification of the Electoral College that day,” he said. “And so we had the task of identifying as many of those people as possible.”

Romano added that charges largely depended on the person’s conduct that day – limited investigative and prosecutorial resources went to those who committed acts of violence or who made it deeper into the Capitol. Those strayed into restricted areas were often overlooked out of resource constraints.

“We took a lot of care and a lot of deliberation to really assess what people did and whether there was good evidence that they understood they were doing something wrong or something illegal before we charged,” he said. 

The attack on Congress prompted widespread condemnation, led to Trump’s second impeachment, and resulted in the largest investigation in the DOJ’s history. 

Several people that TPM spoke with expressed disbelief that Lynch was not identified during the Jan. 6 investigation. The DOJ assigned hundreds of prosecutors and FBI agents from across the country to pore through footage and identify the rioters; a small army of online sleuths dedicated their lives to tracking down the identities of the people who breached the Capitol that day. More than 1,500 people were arrested in the course of the probe; several law enforcement officials and military personnel were identified and prosecuted over their involvement. The FBI said in 2023 that it revoked the security clearances of three agents in relation to the attack. 

Through all of that, Lynch does not appear to have ever been identified. 

In his final report, Special Counsel Jack Smith described Trump’s coup attempt as an effort “to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process.” After Trump won the 2024 election, he pardoned nearly all of the rioters and commuted the sentences of a small few.  

When the Capitol insurrection took place, Lynch was serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Maryland. He had moved there in November 2020 after spending years as a state prosecutor in Cleveland and, before then, in Ohio’s Wayne County. In Maryland, Lynch prosecuted violent crime, weapons, and drug cases. He was three months into his tenure as a federal prosecutor when he appeared in a Trump 2020 hat among the crowd on Jan. 6.

TPM reviewed a video of people marching down Pennsylvania Avenue on Jan. 6. It briefly shows a man resembling Lynch; several former colleagues of Lynch’s told TPM that they recognized him as the man in screenshots of the video that TPM shared with them. 

By 2022, Lynch had changed offices to DOJ headquarters for a position in what’s now known as the Violent Crime and Racketeering Section. There, he took charge of organized crime cases in Ohio and in Minnesota, where he lived for a time, and became a presence in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

TPM first reported last month that the DOJ created Joint Task Force Vanguard to pursue political violence cases across the country. That, a DOJ official told TPM, means implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. Issued after the killing of Charlie Kirk, NSPM-7 directs federal law enforcement to treat “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as indicators of political violence.

Lynch appeared at a press conference in Minneapolis last month announcing the new conspiracy indictment brought against 15 anti-ICE protesters who took part in demonstrations against the Trump administration’s surge of federal immigration enforcement into the city. The indictment dubbed the group “Antifa.” Though he did not speak there, he was quoted in a DOJ press release saying that Vanguard’s purpose is “to counter groups that use violence and the threat of violence to achieve political ends.” 

“Acts of political violence are priority matters for federal law enforcement and will be zealously investigated and prosecuted,” he said.