Seattle police at Jan. 6 Trump rally told investigators they witnessed no violence, records show

After years of legal battles, the city of Seattle has disclosed the names of all its police officers who attended President Donald Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021.

The city has also released records including photos, video stills, and interviews where those officers tell investigators they knew nothing of the violent siege going on inside the U.S. Capitol until they saw an emergency alert from the mayor that afternoon declaring a curfew.

All six Seattle police officers said they attended at least part of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House that day, in which he falsely claimed the election had been stolen by President-elect Joe Biden and concluded by telling those in attendance, “We are going to the Capitol,” where electoral votes were being counted and certified by a joint session of Congress.

At Trump’s rally, Officers Alexander Everett and Caitlin Rochelle, a married couple, said they posted a photo of themselves and former SPD Officer Ricardo Martinez that was spotted and reported by a colleague, triggering SPD’s investigation. (The other four officers self-reported their trips to Washington, D.C. )

In Everett’s subsequent interviews with Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability, an independent office within the Seattle Police Department that investigates complaints of officer misconduct, he told investigators he was aggravated because he’d been the subject of media attention and death threats.

“I have had to spend hours scouring the internet, stupid websites that have your personal information, sit there and scrub that stuff off because my family’s listed on there, my wife’s listed on there," he said. "I have to worry about my family potentially being attacked from this!”

Everett said he and his wife were facing punishment for nothing more than wearing MAGA hats in public. He described walking toward the Capitol that afternoon and seeing peaceful crowds waving flags and singing the national anthem.

OPA Assistant Director Mark Grba asked Everett repeatedly where he was standing and what he saw and heard outside the Capitol.

“The reason why there’s repeated questions is to try to reconcile how you can be that close and not know anything about what’s going on,” Grba said. “When the Capitol Police themselves have said that if you were a police officer and you were in that area you would have absolutely had some understanding that there was problems.”

Other people outside the Capitol at that time described hearing explosions and smelling tear gas as rioters forced their way into the building.

The FBI later provided still images from a video clip in which Everett and Rochelle can be clearly seen with people scaling the Capitol walls behind them. The person making the video asks them, "Well fuck, [are you] doing it?" before turning the camera back to the wall.

Off camera, a male voice responds, "Thinking about it."

OPA concluded that the two officers' accounts were “not credible" and were "directly contradicted" by the photos. Former Police Chief Adrian Diaz fired the two in August 2021 for trespassing and undermining public trust. A separate investigation later sustained findings of dishonesty against them as well.

Investigators said their findings against another officer, Sgt. Scotty Bach, were “inconclusive” and the OPA said his “culpability is the most difficult to assess.”

Bach told investigators he walked with Everett and Rochelle in a grassy area near the Capitol, but saw no signs indicating that it was restricted. He said he left them and was in a restaurant buying takeout when he got the emergency alert that told him something was wrong.

“I take my food back to my hotel room and I watch in horror what’s happening at the Capitol," Bach said. "I’m disgusted and I did what I thought was right which was book the next flight out, so I’m online like, 'I’m outta here, I do not want to be part of this, this is not what I’m here for.'”

Investigators obtained video in which two more SPD officers — Detective Michael Settle and Sergeant Jacob Briskey — were identified standing together with former SPD officer Adley Shepherd near the Peace Monument, just minutes before a group of Proud Boys surged past, and pushed through barricades on the way to the Capitol.

But in his interview, Briskey tells Grba, assistant director of OPA, his group had turned the other way to find food. Grba called that decision surprising.

“That group gets a lot larger and shortly thereafter it kind of explodes,” Grba said. “From a people-watching perspective it seems like a lot of people would be drawn to a, ‘Just what is going on here?’ type of scenario, versus, ‘Let’s go to lunch.’”

Sergeant Briskey suggested that he intentionally walked away.

“Seeing those crowds from a police officer’s perspective,” he said, “I don’t want to be anywhere around those groups of people, to watch what they’re doing or get caught in the middle of anything they may or may not do.”

Detective Michael Settle declined to provide the documents requested by investigators, including travel records, text messages, photos, and transaction records. Speaking with investigators, Settle tried to explain that decision.

“This has been really frustrating,” he said. “And I don't want it to be looked at like, 'Hey, look at this. He's got something to hide. He's not cooperating.' But to be honest, there's a part of me that says, 'You know what? I'm sitting here having to defend myself over something that ... I did nothing wrong.”

Settle’s refusal led to him being named in new case for insubordination and failure to cooperate with an OPA investigation. He is no longer employed by SPD.

(Adley Shepherd, the third person in Briskey’s group on Jan. 6, waged an unsuccessful legal battle to win his own SPD job back. He was fired in 2016 after punching a handcuffed woman, then reinstated in a move that led a federal judge to find Seattle's police accountability system “out of compliance” with its consent decree, and more recently Shepherd's termination was upheld.)

Investigators did visit Washington, D.C., and found evidence that Briskey and Settle spent the afternoon in a nearby restaurant.

Briskey is one of two officers in this group still employed by SPD. The other is Officer Jason Marchione, who told investigators he went back to his hotel room after Trump’s speech.

The six officers sued unsuccessfully to keep these records from being disclosed.

The Washington Supreme Court found the officers did not have a right to privacy and should be identified in court proceedings.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to put that decision on hold — however, Justice Samuel Alito said the Washington Supreme Court “sidestepped” officers’ concerns that the records contained questions about officers’ political views, which they were compelled to answer in order to keep their jobs.

RELATED: SCOTUS deals setback to Seattle police officers seeking anonymity in Jan. 6 inquiry

In light of those decisions, King County Superior Court Judge Sandra Widlan dismissed the officers’ case last month and their names were released.

In the transcript of an OPA interview, Officer Derek Norton, acting as a representative for the Seattle Police Officers Guild, told investigators they were concerned that officers were under investigation simply for having unpopular political views in a Democratic city.

“SPOG is concerned that this investigation could be then designed to retaliate against officers who do not hold the same majority political views of the citizens of Seattle, and that this investigation could discourage, intimidate, or encourage officers into not feeling free to exercise their political freedoms," Norton said.

The officers said they traveled on their own time and showed no SPD affiliation while in D.C.

After the officers' case was dismissed, Seattle attorney Neil Fox issued a statement on behalf of his client Sam Sueoka, who sought the investigation records and was then named in the police officers’ lawsuit to prevent disclosure.

It reads: “When I initially filed this request 4.5 years ago my main concern was for my community members in Seattle that are disproportionately surveilled and policed by SPD. That is Black, Brown, Native, queer, and immigrant communities. The public should always have a right to know who is policing them. That right is even more important as we see every day dozens of videos of masked-anonymous federal law enforcement officers taking people off the streets.”