Two Trump supporters from New York have become a couple of the latest backers of the former president to get arrested and charged by federal authorities over their participation in the January riot at the Capitol. The individuals, named Zvonimir Jurlina and Gabriel Brown, have now been separately charged with “destruction of property in a special jurisdiction and committing an act of physical violence on Capitol grounds,” as a news report from a D.C. CBS affiliate explains. The charges are connected to both individuals’ destruction of equipment that was left behind by media workers who fled the scene of the Capitol riot for their safety.
#CapitolRiot: Two New York residents – Zvonimir Joseph Jurlina and Gabriel Brown – have been charged separately with destroying media equipment on January 6. Jurlina, a YouTuber by the name "Zykotik," says he wants Trump to pay his legal bills. @wusa9 https://t.co/xWWdorosSq
— Jordan Fischer (@JordanOnRecord) June 30, 2021
Brown is facing an additional charge of entering a restricted area without the authority to do so. Meanwhile, Jurlina — who is a YouTuber — apparently posted footage to a YouTube page that he runs depicting his participation in the riot. In the footage, Jurlina can apparently be seen kicking media equipment and, bizarrely, trying to set it on fire. “Investigators say those videos showed Jurlina kicking and trying to set cameras and other equipment on fire,” as that CBS report says.
A clear implication of his actions seems to have been a threat against journalists, who have frequently been essentially demonized by ex-President Trump just for doing their jobs. The ex-president’s anti-media rhetoric can have serious, real-world consequences, with journalists and others who work in the field ending up in physical danger. At the Capitol during the January violence, someone even wrote “murder the media” on a door.
Notably, via a video on his YouTube channel, Jurlina issued a call for former President Trump himself to pay for his legal fees. Although Trump did once say that he’d pay the legal fees of his supporters if they faced legal proceedings over assaulting protesters, there’s no indication that the former president has any intention of actually undertaking such a step in this context. The riot nevertheless unfolded under the explicit pretense of Trump’s lies about the integrity of last year’s presidential election.
Recently, authorities passed 500 total arrests in connection to the riot, with 100 of those arrests accompanying criminal charges for assaulting law enforcement officers who were defending the Capitol. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that he “could not be more proud of the extraordinary effort by investigators and prosecutors to hold accountable those who engaged in criminal acts that day.” Garland added that he wanted to “assure the American people that the Department of Justice will continue to follow the facts in this case and charge what the evidence supports to hold all January 6th perpetrators accountable.”
