Rachel Powell, a Pennsylvania woman sought by the FBI in connection with her prominent role in the violent attack on the Capitol that left five dead, has been identified as a participant in the July 4, 2020 “militia” occupation of Gettysburg. Powell, sometimes described as “Bullhorn Lady” or “Woman in the Pink Hat,” can be seen in video of the assault on the Capitol shouting out orders on a bullhorn as the mob stormed to building. She is also visible using a battering ram to smash the windows of the People’s House. (She can be seen in the feature photo for this article in the pink hat.)
Powell, who is now a fugitive from the FBI, spoke to New Yorker journalist Ronan Farrow. In an article out today, Farrow says that she joined the “militia” occupation of Gettysburg on July 4, of last year. The armed occupation brought together the Ku Klux Klan, the Three Percenter “militias,” and various right-wing biker groups and paramilitaries. A video of them confronting a local Methodist minister wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, as well as confrontations with Gettysburg College Africana Studies Professor Scott Hancock went viral afterwards.
According to Farrow:
On July 4th, she drove for four hours to join members of several far-right groups, some of them armed, who gathered at the Gettysburg National Military Park, purportedly to protect Civil War monuments from desecration. At the rally, a man wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt was surrounded and aggressively questioned by about fifty demonstrators. In a video posted online, Powell is among the group, holding an iPhone with the same Kate Spade Hollyhock Floral case that she was later photographed carrying at the Capitol.
The article says that she became increasingly radicalized in the months following the occupation. According to Farrow:
She said that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, had been a significant source of information, and that she had watched remarks he gave in Gettysburg, on November 25th, during a widely discredited state-senate committee hearing in which he and several witnesses made baseless claims of voter fraud. “That was pretty moving to me,” she said. “I learned a lot from Giuliani and people’s testimonies.”
Powell traveled to Washington for the January 6 insurrection with Kevin Lynn, a man she had met during the Gettysburg occupation. Farrow describes a video taken during the storming of the Capitol:
Videos show her, wearing a pink hat and sunglasses, using a battering ram to smash a window and a bullhorn to issue orders. “People should probably coördinate together if you’re going to take this building,” she called out, leaning through a shattered window and addressing a group of rioters already inside. “We got another window to break to make in-and-out easy.”
You can watch video of the Gettysburg occupation, videoed by the pastor who was repeatedly threatened and insulted by the armed white supremacists in the player below.
You can watch a video here from January 6, in which a woman identified as Powell can be seen giving detailed instructions for those inside the Capitol on how they can “take this building.”
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