John Carl and other rioters surrounded police officers near a set of stairs leading to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a recent criminal complaint. When officers tried to move Carl back, he resisted and grabbed an officer’s baton, federal prosecutors said.

Carl breached the Capitol that afternoon and entered the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the complaint said. He told a friend that police officers prevented further entry into the building, prosecutors said, so he exited the Capitol and later returned to his North Carolina home.

A few years later, Carl became a police officer in Pinetops, N.C., about 50 miles east of Raleigh.

However, Carl was suspended from his job after his arrest Thursday for his alleged actions during the Jan. 6 insurrection, Pinetops’s outside attorney, J. Brian Pridgen, said in a statement to The Washington Post. Carl, 41, was charged with a felony count of civil disorder and misdemeanors of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building; and parading, picketing and demonstrating in a Capitol building. If convicted of the felony, he could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

Carl declined to comment on the allegations when reached by The Post, saying in a text message that “someday hopefully” he can share his side of the story. A public defender will represent him, according to court documents, but Carl said he hasn’t been assigned representation yet.

He isn’t the first person to work in law enforcement and be among the more than 1,488 people who have been charged in relation to the Jan. 6 riot. A former California police chief was sentenced to 11 years in prison in December on felony charges related to his involvement in the riot, and a former North Carolina police officer was sentenced to more than a year in prison in September for her role in breaching the Capitol.

The FBI investigated Carl after his friend reported himself to authorities for his involvement in the riot, according to the criminal complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for D.C. His friend, whom the U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. declined to identify, told investigators on Jan. 25, 2021, that he had picked up Carl to drive him to D.C. earlier that month, prosecutors said.

After attending President Donald Trump’s rally near the National Mall on Jan. 6, 2021, Carl’s friend told investigators that he and Carl walked to the Capitol, where people were entering the building through windows they had broken, the complaint said.

In February 2021, the FBI spoke with Carl, who said there wasn’t much “swinging or throwing” where he was standing near the Capitol but that there were “guys putting their shoulder in” as police officers holding riot shields pushed back the crowd, according to the complaint. It’s unclear why Carl wasn’t arrested at the time.

Body-camera footage from the D.C. police later showed Carl, wearing a maroon and gray jacket and a mask, standing in front of police officers with other rioters on the west side of the Capitol, prosecutors said. The footage showed Carl raising his arms to push back against officers’ attempts to move him and grabbing an officer’s arm and baton.

Footage from the Capitol Police showed Carl and his friend entering the Capitol’s Senate wing entrance door about an hour later before Carl walked farther into the building, prosecutors said. Carl’s friend told investigators that he and Carl ultimately exited through the same door they had entered.

More than two years later — in November — Carl, who said he had previously worked in real estate, graduated from an eastern North Carolina community college’s basic law enforcement training, according to a news release from the college at the time. Later that month, Carl was introduced at a board of commissioners meeting in Pinetops as a “recently graduated Trainee/Cadet,” according to the meeting’s minutes.

The Pinetops Police Department and Pinetops Mayor Brenda Harrell directed requests for comment to Pridgen, who said in a statement that Carl was hired by the department June 5, 2023.

“At the time of his hiring and during his employment, the Town of Pinetops had no knowledge of Officer Carl’s possible involvement” in the riot, Pridgen said. “Based on the charges brought by the FBI, Officer Carl has been suspended pending an investigation.”

For as long as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been running for president, Democrats have cast him as a stalking horse for Donald Trump. But Kennedy has consistently denied playing the role of spoiler. When a Kennedy campaign official gave a detailed presentation laying out how he could help Trump, the Kennedy campaign distanced itself from her.

But now Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan, has dropped any pretense. She indicated in a new podcast interview that the Kennedy campaign would prefer to help Trump than see Vice President Kamala Harris win the presidency. And she even floated the idea that she and Kennedy could drop out of the race to assist in that outcome.

Speaking on the “Impact Theory” podcast, Shanahan laid out two paths forward for the Kennedy campaign: trying to get enough votes to form a more robust third party, or dropping out to help Trump.

“There’s two options that we’re looking at,” Shanahan said. “One is staying in, forming that new party. But we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and [Tim] Walz presidency, because we draw … somehow more votes from Trump.

“Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump, and … explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”

Kennedy’s campaign didn’t directly comment on whether it agreed with Shanahan’s comments. It instead pointed to an X post from Kennedy that said he was “willing to talk with leaders of any political party to further the goals I have served for 40 years in my career and in this campaign.”

Shanahan’s unvarnished comments are the latest indicator of a fading and potentially dying campaign. But as much as that, they feed into Democrats’ longstanding allegations about Kennedy’s true motivations.

Shanahan’s comments also come, it bears emphasizing, shortly after it became evident that Kennedy was suddenly hurting Trump.

Shanahan said generally positive things about Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, despite Kennedy’s having said back in April that he “oppose[d] Donald Trump and all he stands for.”

She also played up the idea of Kennedy serving in the Trump administration and even of her falling back on a run for office in California. (Trump responded to Shanahan’s comments by telling CNN that he would entertain giving Kennedy a job in exchange for Kennedy’s dropping out and endorsing him.)

Needless to say, these are not generally the kinds of things you hear from a serious campaign that is full speed ahead. Merely airing them publicly is likely to give would-be supporters pause; one donor set to hold a fundraiser for Kennedy told ABC News he is now canceling the event.

Kennedy’s campaign has seen its support wane in recent months. And he was dealt a sharp blow when Harris joined the race, reducing the ranks of voters who dislike both major-party nominees (“double haters”). While Kennedy once polled in the mid- to high teens — some of the best numbers for a non-major-party candidate since Ross Perot in the 1990s — he’s now averaging about 5 percent.

The other big shift has been in who he is pulling from. He previously drew about evenly from the Democratic and Republican tickets, despite his and his family’s ties to the Democratic Party and his earlier Democratic primary campaign.

But more recent surveys suggest the third-party factor has shifted against Trump. Harris actually gains ground when you include third-party and independent candidates, and Kennedy in particular draws significantly more from Trump.

One survey showed Kennedy supporters preferred Trump to Harris more than 2-to-1 when asked to choose. Another showed Kennedy pulling 23 percent of Republican-leaning independents, compared to just 8 percent of Democratic-leaning ones.

All of which suggests that if Kennedy does drop out, it could help Trump on the margins by pushing those Trump-inclined voters toward him.

(It’s worth noting that most major polls now are straight head-to-heads between Trump and Harris, so we have a pretty good sense for what a Kennedy-less race looks like.)

Shanahan, for her part, suggests that the motivation to help Trump has come about relatively recently. She blamed Democrats for stifling Kennedy’s campaign by keeping him off the debate stage and launching legal action against his campaign. More conspiratorially, she suggested they were “manipulating polls” somehow and “even planted insiders into our campaign to disrupt it and to create actual legal issues for us.”

“They have, unfortunately, turned us into a spoiler,” Shanahan said. She added that “we are taking a very serious look at making sure that the people that have corrupted our fair and free democracy do not end up in office in November.”

That stated reason would be easier to square if not for the fact that Trump tried to overturn an election based upon lies and distortions. And just two weeks ago, Kennedy reached out to this supposedly nefarious and underhanded Harris campaign to discuss trading an endorsement of her for an administration job.

The Kennedy campaign seems to realize that it is listing badly, and they’re suddenly in the bargaining phase.

The Harris campaign had almost no motivation to cut such a deal. But Trump suddenly does.

CHICAGO — Shelia Smoot runs the Alabama delegation sign choreography operation like a drill sergeant.

“Jill is coming up — the ‘Jill’ signs please,” Smoot said, turning toward her state’s delegation in seats of the United Center and flashing a forest green sign bearing a single word — “JILL” — in honor of the first lady. “The ‘Jill’ signs! Give it the ‘Jill’ signs!”

Then, as Jill Biden took the stage at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, Smoot and her fellow Alabama delegates joined the entire arena in a massive display of sign-waving and waggling.

“JILL.” “JILL.” “JILL.”

As the Democratic convention opened in Chicago this week, placards emblazoned with various slogans appeared, seemingly effortlessly, as the backdrop to a long procession of speakers.

Pro-America talk? Blue-and-red “USA” signs flooded the arena. A surprise appearance by Vice President Kamala Harris? Her “We Fight, We Win.” slogan materialized, lofted high. And when United Auto Workers chief Shawn Fain took the stage? A sea of “UNION YES!” signs appeared.

The synchronized sign-waving was the result of a meticulously planned operation that started weeks before the convention — when preapproved designs needed to be sent to a single longtime vendor — and continued up until the very end of the first evening, as nearly 300 volunteers marched through the aisles of the United Center, passing out the appropriate signs at the correct moment.

A “Floor Visibility” team helped to coordinate the use of signage throughout the convention hall, from printing, assembling and distributing the signs to coordinating just which signs the delegates would lift — and when, said one person familiar with the operation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share private details about the convention’s inner workings.

The same person has been leading the signage effort for Democratic conventions for nearly three decades — since Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996 — and this year’s operation features tens of thousands of signs, including some that were assembled by union workers at IUOE Local 399 in Chicago, this person added.

“It comes from the back, floats to the main floor, then it comes to each delegation and we pass them out,” Smoot explained, gesturing at volunteers clad in neon yellow safety vests making their way down the floor of the United Center, with the latest placards discreetly concealed in large plastic bags.

Smoot then pointed to the white landline phones that are attached to each delegation’s signpost, adding that the delegation will periodically get a call on “the Bat Phone,” explaining which speaker is on deck and which sign to wave.

“We don’t know who is coming up until the Bat Phone rings,” she said.

Other delegations were slightly less organized, relying more on instinct than official directive.

“There’s no directions or anything like that,” said Ryan Middleton, a delegate from Maryland who is running for Prince George’s County Council, early in the evening as he flipped through the roughly half-dozen cardboard signs in front of him. “It’s kind of intuition.”

Middleton explained that when Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr — who just led the U.S. men’s basketball team to an Olympic gold medal victory over France this month in Paris — took the stage, the crowd simply knew the moment called for the “USA” signs.

“He won a gold medal, so we did ‘USA,’” Middleton said. “‘USA’ has been the default one.”

Similarly, Washington state delegate Heather Young said she chose from her heap of signs based on “whatever mood I’m in, whatever feels right for the moment.”

“I like the ‘UNION YES!’” Young said, explaining that both her father and grandfather were longtime union members and railroad workers. “I like the ‘We Fight, We Win.’ And I like the ‘USA.’”

Another benefit, she added: “We get to keep them. A lot of people back home would love to be here but can’t, and they say, ‘Bring me something.’”

As Monday evening wore on, however, the sign choreography became more elaborate, complete with surprise signs.

A little before 10 p.m., right as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear was set to take the stage, the Alabama “Bat Phone” rang. A delegate picked it up, listened carefully and then whispered a message to Smoot, who relayed it to her entire delegation.

“If there is a protest when Joe Biden comes out, we do the ‘USA’ sign,” she told the group. “Only if there is a protest, we flip this sign.”

Then, turning to a reporter, she added, “We’re supposed to be discreet.”

In fact, a different set of signs did come in handy a bit later in the evening in a another part of the arena: When protesters unveiled a homemade “Stop Arming Israel” banner, the crowd quickly blocked them with their pro-Biden signage.

Of course, even the most carefully laid plans can go awry, and the convention’s inaugural day brought a few hiccups. There were rumors that a large number of the night’s final batch of signs — “WE JOE” lollipop signs on sticks — were still stuck on the East Coast as of Monday morning and might not make it to Chicago in time.

And as President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, began introducing her father as the evening’s final act, the volunteers were a little slow blanketing the arena with the lollipop signs.

“There’s been a snafu,” Smoot said, glancing down into the crowd already bouncing their “WE JOE” signs up and down. “We don’t have our signs.”

But volunteers, carrying bushels of signs in their arms, raced up and down the United Center steps, passing them out as if running with the Olympic torch.

“Here we go! Here we go!” Smoot said as the sticks made their way to her delegation and she helped disperse them. “Go! Go! Go! C’mon, Alabama — Let’s do it!”

Lowering her voice, she explained: “I was like, ‘Where the hell are our signs?’ We’ll let you slide on the other ones — this one we’re not skipping.”

Then, as if to make up for lost time, Smoot grabbed two lollipop signs for herself — one for each hand — and hoisted them high.

Kara Voght contributed to this report.

CHICAGO — Patriotism is cool at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

Delegates wear suits adorned with stars and stripes, dresses with American flag patterns, and blouses featuring bald eagles or the Pledge of Allegiance. As attendees waved red, white and blue signs from their seats and chanted “U-S-A” on Monday night, country musician Mickey Guyton sang: “We got the same stars, the same stripes. Just wanna live that good life. Ain’t we all, ain’t we all American?”

The debate over which political party is more patriotic goes back decades. Republicans have often claimed the American flag as their own and argued that it represents conservative America, or signals alignment with conservative beliefs. But as they rally for the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democratic speakers and delegates are sporting Old Glory and other national symbols in what they say is a display of their patriotism and values — and a counterweight to former president Donald Trump’s use of the flag as a partisan symbol.

As delegates made their way to the convention floor at the United Center on Monday, Washington state delegates Ted Jones and Lora de la Portilla wore bright white cowboy hats as well as red, white and blue sashes that read “Cowboy Harris” — outfits created as a nod to the “Cowboy Carter” sash that Beyoncé wears on the cover of her recent country music album. Jones and De La Portilla said they were looking forward to seeing Democrats take “back the flag, the patriotism.”

“We’re taking back rural. We’re taking back country. They can’t claim it,” Jones said of Republicans. “Just cause a truck goes by with an American flag, we’ve got to stop going: ‘There goes a Trumper.’”

In 2023, a Gallup poll found that although 60 percent of Republicans expressed extreme pride in being American, only 29 percent of Democrats did. An April poll from Ipsos found that 92 percent of Republicans had a favorable opinion of the American flag, while 77 percent of Democrats did.

But Americans’ feelings about their country have tended to fluctuate based on whether their party occupies the Oval Office. A 2019 Gallup poll, for example, found that the percentage of Democrats who said then that they were extremely proud to be American sank from 56 percent in 2013 during the Obama era to 22 percent in 2019, deep in the Trump years. That same poll found that among Republicans, pride in the country rose from 68 to 76 percent between 2015 and 2019.

Democrats in recent years have “pointed out a lot of reasons why people shouldn’t be proud of America, and shouldn’t feel patriotic,” said Peter Loge, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. But Democrats in Chicago are “making the case that, for whatever its flaws, there is a lot to be proud of and that you can be both a proud Democrat and a proud American,” Loge added.

Also in the arena, Umi Grigsby, an Illinois Democrat, walked around with a handful of “USA” posters. Democratic convention staffers handed them out to audience members throughout the program, papering the hall in red, white and blue. The Liberian immigrant, who became a citizen in 2017, said those three letters represent her, and the symbolism of her carrying them around during the Democratic convention doesn’t escape her.

“It’s interesting how there’s one party that seems to feel like they own patriotism and own the U.S. flag, when actually there’s another party that’s saying, like, ‘You can all come here and we can all, you know, succeed here and it’s for all of us,’” she said.

Across the hall, Suzi Larson, a South Dakota delegate, waited in line fully decked out in red, white and blue. Her shawl was emblazoned with the American flag. Her shirt read, “In God We Trust.” Her fingernails were painted red, her toenails blue with stars. Larson said that while many Democrats shied away from showing their patriotism during the Trump administration, the love for country “has always been there.”

“It’s been tarnished, but it didn’t go away,” she said.

The Democratic Party is presenting a message that there is “nothing more American than freedom,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said.

“There’s no reason for us to be afraid of using those symbols, because those symbols are our symbols and there’s nobody that’s more proud to be American than we are,” Rahman said.

Democrats at the convention have sought to claim other symbols as their own, too. Michael Welsh, an alternate delegate from Alaska, walked around the convention Monday wearing a red hat that looked like Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” cap from afar. His, however, read: “Make Lying Wrong Again.”

Welsh, an Army veteran, said he was horrified to see symbols and messaging often associated with the military be misused on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a pro-Trump mob — some of whom Trump has glorified as “patriots” — broke into the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win. That, he said, was “a real affront to our service.”

“It’s time for veterans, especially Democratic veterans, to reclaim that mantle of patriotism, especially in light of the appalling statements Donald Trump has made” about veterans and service members, Welsh said.

Democrats have also sported camouflage-patterned hats around the convention arena. Almost immediately after Harris announced Walz — a lifelong hunter, fisherman and gun owner — as her running mate, the campaign began selling camo hats with the Harris-Walz logo in bright orange.

Camouflage patterns have a long history in the U.S. military, hunting culture and Republican campaign merchandise. The Harris-Walz hats — which sold out in 30 minutes, according to the campaign — bear a striking similarity to merchandise sold by “Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” pop star Chappell Roan.