Right-wing group fires organizer after his arrest on Jan. 6-related charges: report

Brandon Prenzlin is among the many Donald Trump supporters who is facing charges in connection with the January 6 insurrection. And he has been fired from his position as a grassroots organizer for the right-wing group FreedomWorks because of his arrest, according to HuffPost reporter Ryan J. Reilly.

Prenzlin, Reilly reports, was arrested by the FBI in Arlington, Virginia on September 17, and he is facing four misdemeanor charges — which include disorderly conduct on the grounds of the Capitol, entering a restricted building without authority, disorderly conduct inside a restricted building, and parading inside the Capitol.

Reilly notes that Peter Vicenzi, a FreedomWorks spokesman, confirmed that Prenzlin has been fired but did comment on his case.

According to Reilly, an "FBI affidavit lays out Prenzlin's alleged activities inside the Capitol on January 6, and shows how they were able to build a case against Prenzlin by citing his presence on social media."

"The FBI affidavit doesn't explicitly say it," Reilly reports, "but it suggests that online sleuths known as the 'Sedition Hunters' played a role in the case against Prenzlin. The sprawling community of open-source investigators, often working under the #SeditionHunters hashtag, has been working to identify the hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. The Sedition Hunters website, where a photo of Prenzlin was labeled as No. 640 on a list of 'Sedition Insiders,' noted before Prenzlin's arrest that he had been identified."

Reilly adds, "It's unclear precisely when the identification was made, but an image of Prenzlin included in a tweet from the @SeditionHunters Twitter account indicated that Prenzlin had been IDed by early July. That's about the same time, according to the affidavit, that the FBI investigation got underway thanks to a tip."

FreedomWorks has been aggressively promoting voter suppression with its "Election Protection Initiative," which features far-right attorney and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell. In a video posted on FreedomWorks' website, Mitchell falsely claims, "The 2020 election was chaotic and deliberately overwhelmed the elections systems in many places in our country. It's no wonder that people across this country believe that there was really something wrong in the 2020 election. There was."