RFK Jr.'s new hire who downplayed Jan. 6 appears to have been at the Capitol during the attack

WASHINGTON — A right-wing social media influencer hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign who previously said Jan. 6 was “Democrat misdirection” appears to have himself been on the restricted grounds of the U.S. Capitol during the attack.

NBC News first reported that Kennedy’s campaign hired Zach Henry’s firm, Total Virality, for “influencer engagement” in March. Henry had worked as deputy communications director for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, as well as for Blake Masters during his Senate run in Arizona.

Henry, as NBC News reported, had posted that Jan. 6 was “no MAGA insurrection Just more Democrat misdirection” and appears to have embraced conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack, including posting that “antifa” was behind it, which is false.

But photos and videos uncovered by NBC News and online “sedition hunters,” who have aided the FBI in hundreds of cases against Capitol rioters, appear to show Henry among the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, beyond the previously established police lines, although it is unclear whether any of the barricades and “restricted” signs remained by the time he arrived.

There is no indication that Henry entered the Capitol or that he engaged in assaults on police officers or in destruction of property. Federal prosecutors have almost entirely focused their resources on Jan. 6 participants who either went inside the building or committed violence or destruction outside it, so there is little chance that Henry would be charged; the few nonviolent Jan. 6 defendants who were charged solely for going on restricted Capitol grounds were generally charged with misdemeanors.

But Henry's presence on Capitol grounds would be significant given his previous social media posts about Jan. 6 and his new position on Kennedy’s campaign as Kennedy runs for president as an independent against former President Donald Trump.

Henry acknowledged in a phone call that he was in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but declined to discuss his precise location. “I was in D.C. on January 6, but I’m not going to confirm where I was on the day or, you know, how close I got to the Capitol,” he said.

Henry asked to see images of himself outside the Capitol before he would comment further, and NBC News provided him with screenshots. He stopped responding to further messages or phone calls.

Kennedy's campaign also did not respond to a request for comment.

Henry was the communications director for the Arizona Republican Party from 2019 until late January 2021 and appears to have been behind the party’s official Twitter account, including when it posted tweets in early December 2020 asking followers whether they were ready to give up their lives to keep Trump in office, reposting a tweet by “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander. Henry largely defended those @AZGOP tweets in response to media coverage at the time, saying in a statement that the party “condemns all forms of violence in the strongest terms”; though he did not say who posted them.

Days later, when another Twitter user called the person running the @AZGOP account “one of the funniest posters in the state,” Henry retweeted it from his personal account, adding: “No comment.”

On Dec. 14, 2020, the @AZGOP account posted a video titled “The Signing,” featuring then-party chairwoman Kelli Ward and other Arizona “fake electors” signing paperwork falsely saying Trump won Arizona, which was sent to Congress and the National Archives. A state grand jury recently indicted Ward and other fake electors, as well as Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, in relation to the alleged scheme. It is unclear whether Henry himself posted the video of the signing event, which took place at Arizona Republican Party headquarters and is mentioned in the indictment.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Henry appeared to be posting to the @AZGOP accounts, this time from Washington. The account posted an image of Raheem Kassam, a far-right influencer who posted misinformation in the aftermath of Trump’s election loss. Kassam was livestreaming at the time the photo was taken, and a man whom online sleuths identified as Henry by running known images of Henry against a database of videos from Jan. 6 is seen on Kassam’s livestream talking about the @AZGOP account. Kassam encouraged his followers to follow the account, which he called “spicy.” The man the sleuths identified as Henry was wearing a brown hoodie that matches one Henry wore in a photo posted to his own Facebook account a few years earlier.

Later, the man identified as Henry was captured in photos and on video on the restricted grounds of the Capitol. That night, the @AZGOP account posted video from the restricted grounds of the Capitol and also posted video that shows the mob taking over the inauguration platform and using police barricades to climb a staircase leading to the place where the Capitol was first breached. Online investigators found another open-source video that shows the man identified as Henry recording the same moment that was posted to the @AZGOP account.

The video posted by the AZGOP account syncs up with the third-party video of the man who appears to be Henry: First he pans slowly to the right, then abruptly to the left, and then he does a clockwise 360-degree spin.

Sleuths also identified Capitol surveillance video, previously released in connection with a Jan. 6 case, that features the same man. Other open-source videos show the man identified as Henry still wearing the brown hoodie and an American flag mask leaving the Capitol grounds.

In the early days of the Jan. 6 investigation, federal prosecutors charged a handful of nonviolent defendants who were on the grounds of the Capitol but never entered the building. That is no longer a focus for prosecutors; hundreds of people who entered the building have still not been charged.

“We have used our prosecutorial discretion to primarily focus on those who entered the building, on those who engaged in violent or corrupt conduct on Capitol grounds,” U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said this year. “But if a person knowingly entered a restricted area without authorization, they had already committed a federal crime. Make no mistake, thousands of people occupied an area that they were not authorized to be present in in the first place.

Henry posted that he had left the Arizona GOP job on Jan. 23, 2021, just days after Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president, passing through the lower west tunnel where pro-Trump rioters had viciously assaulted officers just days earlier.

In 2022 he posted on his own account a shortened version of the video that was originally posted by @AZGOP. The post echoed the conspiracy theory that “antifa” was behind the pro-Trump mob’s attack.