WASHINGTON — A federal judge agreed Tuesday to allow prosecutors to search the cell phone of a conservative influencer charged in the Capitol riot, saying a California magistrate judge had erred when she blocked a warrant in March.
In a short order signed Tuesday, D.C. District Chief Judge James Boasberg said the Justice Department had shown there was probable cause that evidence relating to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol would be found on a cellphone seized from Isabella Maria DeLuca. Boasberg’s order reversed an earlier decision by Magistrate Judge Autumn Spaeth in the Central District of California, who found that, because of the time passed since the riot, any evidence on DeLuca’s phone would be “impermissibly stale and tenuous.”
“Because the government established that the digital data is transferable across the defendant’s devices, including the Target Device, via the defendant’s iCloud account, the passage of time does not render the evidence stale,” Boasberg wrote.
A copy of the warrant, filed earlier this year in a D.C. magistrate judge’s court, lists dozens of categories of evidence investigators sought on the phone, including call logs, emails, texts, direct messages, social media posts, photographs and “other writings from November 3, 2020 to March 31, 2021.” Investigators also sought evidence that could prove DeLuca’s state of mind on Jan. 6, including evidence of awareness that the Capitol was closed to the public that day. The categories of evidence listed in the search warrant are typical among those filed in the nearly 1,500 cases now charged in connection with the riot.
DeLuca, of D.C., was arrested in California in mid-March on the standard four misdemeanors used in Capitol riot cases as well as a fifth misdemeanor count of theft of government property.
According to charging documents, DeLuca can be seen climbing through a broken window into an unoccupied congressional office. Once inside, investigators say DeLuca assisted other rioters in passing a table out of the window. Investigators said the table was later used as a weapon against police – including one of the legs, which may have been used by another riot defendant, Timothy Desjardins, who faces felony charges of assault and civil disorder in connection with Jan. 6. Desjardins was sentenced last year to 18 years in prison on unrelated assault and firearms charges connected to a shooting at a Walgreens in Rhode Island.
Investigators say DeLuca posted multiple times about being at the riot, including acknowledging she was maced and saying she felt she was allowed to be there.
“I was there on Jan. 6. I have mixed feelings,” DeLuca wrote on social media a week after the riot. “People went to the Capitol building because that’s Our House and that’s where we go to take our grievances. People feel, as do I that an election was stolen from them at it was allowed.”
At the time of her arrest, DeLuca, a conservative influencer with approximately 350,000 followers on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, was listed as a media fellow on the website of the Gold Institute for International Strategy. As of Tuesday, DeLuca no longer appears on the institute’s website. According to her profile, she previously served as an ambassador with the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA and worked as an intern for Republican Reps. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ).
In the 41 months since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, more than 1,400 people have been charged with crimes ranging from entering a restricted area to seditious conspiracy. More than 1,000 defendants have now pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial.