One of the four people detained for possession of weapon at the Saturday’s J6 rally near the US Capitol is an officer with US Customs and Border Protection, who showed up at the gathering with a concealed handgun, Newsweek repots.
The article also quotes the prosecution as saying that the brush with the Capitol police is, nevertheless, unlikely to land the 27-year-old New Jersey native CBP agent in any legal trouble.
The man’s arrest, one of the four rare incidents involving police that marred an otherwise uneventful and peaceful rally in support of those on trial for participating in the January 6 riot, was captured on video.
The video shows multiple Capitol police officers encircling the man and asking him, upon finding his badge and weapon, if he was undercover or part of the event but was later being escorted away after dodging the question without being handcuffed or disarmed at the scene.
It triggered much speculation about whether he was an undercover fed, an off-duty cop, or if the badge was even real at all.
Though some critics suggested that Capitol police might have detained the man by mistake and due to the lack of real offenders, it was later said that the officer was not acting in his official capacity at the rally.
CBP, stressing it expects its officers to adhere to the oath they take to uphold the US laws, confirmed that the man is one of their own, but claimed he was fully cooperating with the investigation.
Law enforcement officers, under federal law, are given reciprocity to legally carry their weapons in other states, even those with restrictive gun laws with the exemption of government property or military bases where it is illegal to carry a gun, like the US Capitol.
However, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington informed it’s not moving forward with charges against the officer without providing additional information about the decision.
Some of the Twitter critics, mocking the over-the-top security measures at the rally with the small crowd of demonstrators vastly outnumbered by law enforcement officers, said there were so many undercover cops they were arresting each other by accident.
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