A top federal prosecutor investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol said his office is “still somewhere in the middle” of its probe.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told The Washington Post in an interview published on Monday that his office is “certainly not at the end in terms of charges,” adding that “The million-dollar question is: How close are we to the end?”
More than 725 defendants had been arrested in connection to the Capitol riot at the end of December, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Of those, more than 225 have been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employers, including more than 75 of whom were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
The office, however, said the FBI is still working to identify more than 350 people who are believed to have committed violent acts on Capitol grounds.
Graves told the Post that “it’s really hard to predict what the final number will be, given that we’re still somewhere in the middle — using that term very broadly — of the investigation phase.”
President Biden nominated Graves to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in July, a post he assumed in November following Senate confirmation. D.C. has the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, according to the Post.
Graves would not discuss details of specific cases related to the Jan. 6 riot, but he did tell the newspaper that there were roughly 2,000 individuals in restricted areas during the attack.
“We know that there were … probably somewhere around 2,000 people, depending on how you count it, who were in a restricted area” of the Capitol when the riot was underway, Graves said.
“Now, how much we’ll be able to identify the individuals who have yet to be identified, we’ll just have to see,” he added.
Graves said Congress could strike a deal for an omnibus spending bill that would permit his office to hire more individuals “who would work exclusively” on Jan. 6-related cases as part of a reorganized, separate “Capitol siege section.”