FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 27, 2025
Newly Revealed FBI Document Confirms Collaboration Between DC Police and Project Veritas Ahead of 2017 Trump Inauguration
A Federal Prosecutor and a DC Police Detective Conspired to Alter and Conceal Key Evidence Used to Prosecute More than 200 People, then Lied About It
WASHINGTON, DC – A newly disclosed document issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirms law enforcement’s collaboration with the widely discredited far-right group Project Veritas in order to arrest and prosecute more than 200 people protesting the first inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017, or J20.
The FBI document, known as a “302,” was published yesterday by Unicorn Riot and details how members of the Washington Field Office of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) met with three Project Veritas operatives and their lawyer to discuss their infiltration of public planning meetings for Inauguration Day protests. The 302 was obtained through discovery in 2018, but never disclosed publicly until now.
Video footage secretly recorded by Project Veritas operatives was used by the US Attorney’s Office (USAO) in DC to prosecute 234 people. However, the lead prosecutor, Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens and her star witness, then-Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) detective Greggory Pemberton, not only hid the existence of the JTTF meeting, but also deceptively edited the Project Veritas footage to omit exculpatory evidence and concealed hours of additional footage from the court and the defense.
The withholding of exculpatory evidence by the government, such as what occurred in the J20 cases, is a common practice, but seldom revealed in routine court proceedings. Despite prosecutors’ obligation under the 1963 US Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland to disclose exculpatory evidence in advance of trial, it’s often difficult to prove when a prosecutor is in violation of Brady and, even when it is proven, it’s rare for a court to impose sanctions. It’s even rarer for legal ethics boards to charge and punish prosecutors for those violations. A study published last year of over 800 cases from state and federal courts found Brady violations had occurred in ten percent of the cases, and prosecutors were almost never referred to the Bar for discipline.
“The criminal legal system prides itself on an ability to correct imbalances of power,” said Kimberly Logan, a former federal and District court investigator and researcher who covered the J20 cases. “It’s a major breach of the social contract to have prosecutors, who hold all the power of the state and have unlimited resources, willing to cheat to win cases,” continued Logan. “Withholding exculpatory evidence and lying about it is indefensible and undermines whatever legitimacy we have conferred to the criminal legal system.”
Despite the Brady violations that favored the prosecution’s inauguration cases, the USAO was unable to secure a single conviction at trial. Ultimately, the USAO was forced to dismiss the vast majority of cases after being sanctioned by the court. Eight years later, Kerkhoff Muyskens is at the center of a disciplinary process led by the DC Bar.
In July 2024, the DC Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility charged Kerkhoff Muyskens with misconduct for her role in hiding key video evidence and lying about it. According to Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton P. Fox III, who filed the charges against Kerkhoff Muyskens, the prosecutor violated the DC Rules of Professional Conduct in half a dozen ways, including “making false statements, offering false evidence,” “obstructing the defense’s access to evidence and altering or concealing evidence,” and “reckless or intentional dishonesty, misrepresentations, deceit, and fraud, which misled the grand jury, the defense, the court, the government, and disciplinary authorities.”
Photo credit: Kimberly Logan
Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens (L) and Greggory Pemberton (R) seen leaving
the DC Superior Courthouse during the second J20 trial in May 2018.
The Bar investigation and charges were the result of ethics complaints filed in 2018 by multiple Inauguration Day defendants. After several days of hearings, the DC Office of Disciplinary Counsel (ODC) filed its post-hearing brief in April, summarizing its arguments against Kerkhoff Muyskens. The former federal prosecutor could be disbarred and prevented from practicing law, but the ODC only recommended a six-month suspension of her license. The Board is expected to issue a judgment at any time.
“A six-month sentence for Kerkhoff Muysken sends the wrong message to countless prosecutors who skirt the rules of evidence and largely get away with it,” said former J20 defendant Alexei Wood, who went on to successfully sue the District of Columbia and MPD. “A slap on the hand for Kerkhoff Muysken would allow these kind of Brady violations to continue to occur unabated,” continued Wood. “A six-month sentence would also fail to hold her accountable for the harm she caused hundreds of people as a direct result of her deception and lies. Kerkhoff Muysken deserves to lose her law license.”
Also at the heart of the disciplinary case is Kerkhoff Muysken’s and Pemberton’s lies to the grand jury. Grand juries are lesser known instruments of the prosecution that only hear testimony from witnesses the prosecution chooses to call. The normal rules of evidence do not apply, allowing prosecutors to exclude crucial evidence from grand jury investigations. The process is deliberately shrouded in secrecy and the public hardly ever gets to peer inside the grand jury room. The J20 cases were no exception.
Earlier this year, however, in an extremely rare disclosure, the ODC published a 7,500-page list of exhibits, including grand jury transcripts used to investigate the misconduct allegations against Kerkhoff Muyskens. From the outset, the grand jury questioned the veracity of the Project Veritas evidence, and in order to avoid divulging their collaborative relationship with the far-right group, Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton lied about how they acquired the footage, saying that it was discovered online.
In April 2017, the grand jury voted to indict more than 200 people for a minimum of eight felonies each: rioting, conspiracy to riot, inciting a riot, and five counts of property destruction. Approximately 100 people were also charged with assault on an officer. The maximum sentence, if convicted on all counts, would have been 70 years in prison. Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton would use the deceptively edited video footage in multiple trial juries before the cases fell apart.
In May 2018, once it came to light during the second and third J20 trials that the prosecution had altered and concealed footage, the USAO was forced to admit the existence of the JTTF meeting. Yet, the misconduct case against Kerkhoff Muyskens does not address how her office obtained the footage, and how she and Pemberton lied about it at every step of the way.
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