PENNSYLVANIA — Doug Mastriano’s connections to Q-Anon, the Big Lie and the January 6th insurrection are well-documented. It’s no surprise, then, that a prominent Capitol insurrectionist who attacked police officers with pepper spray and used a giant Trump sign as a battering ram is a big Mastriano fan who felt right at home at the state Senator’s fundraiser with Rudy Giuliani.
From HuffPost:
Samuel Lazar, who is Capitol suspect No. 275 on the FBI website, posed for photos alongside right-wing Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) at the May 15 event headlined by Giuliani. A tipster sent the photos to HuffPost after spotting them on Facebook.
Both Mastriano and Lazar were at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, though Mastriano claimed he left when he realized the protest was no longer peaceful. Mastriano, whose campaign spent thousands of dollars on buses to bring people to D.C. on Jan. 6, later issued a statement saying those who violated the law must be prosecuted. Mastriano’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Online sleuths know Lazar as #FacePaintBlowhard, and circulated images and videos of him as they traced his actions during the assault on police outside the Capitol. The FBI eventually posted an image of him online, looking for tips about his identity. What the bureau apparently didn’t realize at the time was that the suspect’s name was already public information: Lazar was featured in his local paper days after the Capitol attack after making extensive posts about his activities on Facebook.
A Jan. 10 story on Lancaster Online chronicled some of Lazar’s trip in D.C., sometimes relying on the videos he posted. The story highlighted his military-style outfit and his patch, which read “Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle.” In a Facebook post after the Capitol attack, the news outlet reported, Lazar wrote that there was “a time for peace and there’s a time for war. Our constitution allows us to abolish our [government] and install a new one in [its] place.”
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Members of an online community working to identify Capitol offenders spotted the man they knew as #FacePaintBlowhard as being among the first to storm through the barricades, yelling in an officer’s face, trying to grab a bike rack away from an officer, using a megaphone to direct the mob to push forward, holding a can of what looks like pepper spray, and then spraying the can at a police line. He also helped the mob use a giant Trump sign as a battering ram against a police line.
In a video shot down the street from the Capitol, Lazar told onlookers that they “maced ’em [law enforcement officers] right the fuck back.”
“Fuck the tyrants,” Lazar said. “We need to hang these motherfuckers.”
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