- A criminal-defense attorney began tracking Donald Trump's base online before the 2020 election.
- He has turned over information to a committee investigating the January 6 siege on the US Capitol.
- His monitoring has made him concerned about the safety of school board members, he told Insider.
Ron Filipkowski, a criminal-defense attorney in Sarasota, Florida, who has been monitoring right-wing extremists online says he's now helping the House Committee investigating the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol.
Filipkowski, a former longtime Republican, on Friday tweeted that he and his team have compiled "hundreds of very obscure interviews and podcasts from the planners, leaders and participants" of the siege on the US Capitol, most of which they've never posted.
"At their request, today we turned over all of them to the J6 Select Committee, catalogued and organized," he wrote.
—Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 4, 2022
The news that Filipkowski is helping the committee comes the same day as the Republican National Committee voted to formally censure Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois for their participation as members of the committee and criticism of Trump's role in the Capitol siege.
Neither Filipkowski nor committee staff could be reached on Friday for additional comment.
Filipkowski thanked his team of "two patriotic moms," who he keeps anonymous, on Twitter for their hard work. "We don't self-promote, ask for money, or sell things," he wrote. "We volunteer this time just because we want to preserve this Republic for our kids."
The former Marine and state and federal prosecutor and two researchers monitor live-streamed events, podcasts, radio broadcasts, social media, and dark chat rooms. Every day, Filipkowski watches streamed video of the "War Room" podcast with Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist in the White House, whom Filipkowski described in a December interview with Insider as a "chaos agent."
He said then that his main concern moving forward was the safety of school board members, who have dealt with rowdy protests at meetings across the country over mask mandates, COVID-19 policies, and race and gender education.
Filipkowski is prolific on Twitter, but he said in December that he shares only some of what he sees. The majority of it can't be shared because it includes "violence, conspiracies, you know, crazy theories," things that would get him barred from Twitter, he said.
"For everything I post, I've seen 99 things worse," he said.