WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors are seeking eight years in federal prison for a Pennsylvania mother of eight who conducted "surveillance" on a lawmaker's home a few weeks before she smashed a window with an ice ax and a giant cardboard tube during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Rachel Powell, who was 40 when she took part in the 2021 attack, was found guilty in July of nine charges, including felony counts of interfering with officers performing their duties and obstruction of an official proceeding. A sentencing hearing for Powell, now a grandmother of six, is set for Oct. 17.
Powell was identified by online “Sedition Hunters,” was named and interviewed for a piece in The New Yorker that ran a few weeks after Jan. 6, and was arrested in early February 2021. She has been on home confinement since September 2022 after violating her prior conditions of pretrial release, including by visiting a brewery with her 71-year-old employer/boyfriend.
After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, prosecutors said, Powell developed an "obsession with keeping former President Trump in power," and talked about how she had "conducted surveillance at a female legislator’s home." Powell joined "caravan" protests in Washington in November 2020, where she said she walked around "with a little beater bar all weekend and wasp spray and knives in my bag."
On Jan. 6, before she smashed the Capitol window, prosecutors said, Powell was on the front lines as the mob overwhelmed police.
“Come on up, people, don’t be shy!” she yelled in one video, as she pushed against police barricades with her body. Powell, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo, had shown an "utter lack of remorse" for her conduct, which she bragged about online.
“IT WAS F--KING WAR TO GET IN. IF YOU WERE NOT HERE THEN STFU," Powell wrote the day after the attack. She said rioters "weren't f--king welcomed in" and that there was “lots of security" that "had to retreat into the building and fight back because patriots were relentless.”
Police, she said, "didn’t open the gates. The people trampled them. It was war.”
Since the Capitol attack, Powell has changed her tune, prosecutors noted, writing that she "has tried to portray herself as a victim and tried to shift the narrative from 'war' to 'police brutality.'"
But video of her actions Jan. 6, prosecutors said, left little doubt about her intentions, even if Powell now claimed — as she did in one recent interview — that she only broke the window "so that people had somewhere to go.”
A key video that went viral after the attack showed Powell using a bullhorn to organize rioters to "take the building," advising them on the layout of the suite of offices they'd entered as others plotted how to advance further into the Capitol.
"People should probably coordinate together if you're going to take the building," Powell declared, in the tone of a flustered school trip chaperone trying to corral a group of teens. Powell, her attorney claimed in a defense sentencing memo, is "remorseful for her outrageous conduct that day." Powell was "susceptible to manipulation," Nicholas D. Smith wrote, because of a brutally harsh upbringing that "was like something from Oliver Twist." Her impoverished parents "routinely engaged in violent altercations in front of the small child," Powell's mom was an alcoholic and drug addict and Powell was sexually abused beginning at age 12, he wrote. Powell has been diagnosed with "posttraumatic stress disorder; paranoid, schizoid and negativistic personality traits; and major depressive disorder," he added.
Just before the verdict was returned in her case, Powell's partner/employer Joseph Jenkins, Jr., brought three of her children to a fundraiser for Jan. 6 defendants at Trump’s property in New Jersey, where the former president posed for photos, signed a copy of his book and gave one of her children a “Make America Great Again” hat, which he wore to court for his mother’s verdict.
“Trump said he’ll be pardoning as soon as he’s in,” Powell wrote in a post on X.
Jenkins, in a letter of support, maintained his belief that the 2020 election was stolen, pointing the judge to the conspiracy film "2000 Mules."
"According to most Trump voters, the election results in Pennsylvania, where Rachel lives, appeared to be fraudulent. Trump had, and still has, huge support in our state," he wrote. "Books have been written, documentaries aired, lawsuits filed, and investigations remain pending."
Several of Powell's supporters also downplayed her conduct in letters to the court.
"If there were ever a person I know who would be brave enough to help bring order during chaos," one supporter wrote, "it would be Rachel."
