An 'Insurrectionist' Who's Running for Congress Shares His January 6 Videos

When GOP Arizona congressional candidate Jeff Zink needed a videographer to accompany him to a rally in support of President Donald Trump in the nation's capital on January 6, 2021, he hired his 32-year-old son Ryan.

It made sense given that Ryan, the owner of a small energy-services business in Lubbock, Texas, was on a break from earning his media degree at Texas Tech University after an auto accident had sidelined him, and he had experience as a part-time broadcaster of local sports.

The Zinks didn't enter the Capitol building that day and say they never left each other's side. Jeff has not been charged; Ryan faces up to 22 years in federal prison, convicted in September of a felony (obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting) and two misdemeanors (entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds and disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds).

They claim they behaved the same way—except that Ryan broadcast their eyewitness accounts on social media.

"I'm a terrorist?" Ryan said. "For words?"

'YOU CAN'T STOP US'

Roger Roots, the Zinks' attorney, said the case challenges the limitations of free speech. His firm, John Pierce Law in Woodland Hills, California, is defending more than 20 January 6 defendants. He called Ryan's case "one of the weakest we've ever dealt with" given that, in his opinion, it was almost entirely based on what Ryan said rather than what he did.

"He was just walking around outside the Capitol and speaking into his device. On that basis, he was convicted of a serious crime."

But prosecutors argued, and the jury agreed, that the language Ryan used proved his intent to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.

"We knocked down the gates. We're storming the Capitol. You can't stop us," Ryan said while broadcasting on social media. Turning his camera toward himself, he added: "We're about to bum-rush this s***."

During phone interviews with Newsweek from his home in Lubbock, Ryan said he was out of his element while covering the Capitol riot and used the same verbiage he used many times before while broadcasting sports.

"I was drawing people into the story, saying what already happened and using the language I used in sports. 'We're going to win. We're going to do this and that.' It was the wrong terminology, but I drew on the experience I had," he says.

But prosecutors said that a day after the riot, Ryan persisted: not in the heat of the moment while broadcasting live but in social media posts after he had time to reflect on the previous day's events.

"They are trying to charge us with sedition they will have to kill me I'm not coming quietly," he posted on Facebook on January 7 that year. The following day, he posted: "I'm afraid the time for rioting is over better clean those guns and invest in some level 4 armor."

As menacing as it sounds in retrospect, it should have been protected free speech, the Zinks and attorney Roots maintain. "The only difference between Ryan and myself is I didn't post anything on social media," Jeff says.

'POLITICIANS ARE SUPPRESSING EVIDENCE'

A former salesman for an energy firm and ordained minister who has taught and worked in curriculum development at Grand Canyon University, a Christian college, Jeff is running as a Republican in Arizona's District 3 and is considered a long shot to unseat Democrat Ruben Gallego, who defeated him in 2022.

He's positioning himself as a political outsider who believes there were irregularities in the 2020 election, a conclusion drawn from the work he did for the Republican-led Arizona Senate audit of Maricopa County. He claimed he found suspicious ballots that weren't the proper weight or color, though state officials disagreed.

FBI agents visited him and his wife, Stephanie, for 90 minutes after the riot but never arrested him, instead setting their sights on Ryan due to his online posts, says Jeff. The FBI has declined to comment.

So this time around, Jeff is focusing his campaign on what he calls a "political prosecution and persecution scheme" that he says was coordinated by the Department of Justice and the Biden administration.

"I'm going after the judicial system that has gone after my son and hundreds more like him," Jeff told Newsweek. "It's horrifying what's happening to him. He was with me 100 percent of the time. I testified to that under oath. I just didn't say anything live on social media."

At his campaign website he posted a quote from President John F. Kennedy that he says relates to his son. It reads: "The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened."

"It used to be," the elder Zink told Newsweek, "that Democrats and Republicans weren't far apart; they both wanted to hand power back to the people. Now I'm fighting a uni-party and the January 6 defendants prove it—politicians are suppressing evidence and sticking to the narrative."

WHO REMOVED THE BARRICADES?

Ryan and Jeff arrived early January 6 and the former took photos for a few hours. When they attempted to move close to where Trump was speaking, security stopped them because Ryan carried a backpack full of recording gear. They had lunch; his father was interviewed by the Epoch Times; and they stood behind barricades for much of the day.

When they moved beyond the barriers and eventually to the Capitol steps, they thought they had permission to do so, Roots argued in court.

Attorney Roots shared a video with the jury (not taken by Ryan) showing a man with a megaphone on one side of the metal fence where the Zinks and a large crowd had gathered, speaking to a police officer on the other side.

"We understand it's your house. We have a job to do as well," the officer tells the protester. "We'll push it up to our leadership; see what we can do about getting you upstairs."

The protester then tells the crowd that the officer is requesting permission to allow them to the Capitol steps "for the purpose that we don't want violence, we don't want harm, we don't want destruction, and we don't want you going to jail if you don't have to."

Roots argued that the metal barrier was then removed by someone unknown, leading to the Zinks arrival in the restricted area that led to Ryan's conviction.

"The Zinks did not have a perfect view but they reasonably assumed the barricades were removed with the approval of the cops," said Roots.

The attorney also showed the judge and jury video inside the Capitol of protesters, including Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, casually speaking to police officers in order to further make the point that it was ambiguous as to whether or not their presence was in violation of the law.

"It has to be peaceful," Chansley shouts to the crowd as police officers observe him and the others.

While the Zinks weren't inside the Capitol (and prosecutors dropped an initial charge claiming that Ryan was), they testified that they were close enough to hear snippets of the conversation between the protesters and the officers.

Therefore, Roots argued, when people began moving forward, the Zinks assumed they had permission to do so, and none of the officers told them they were in a restricted area.

Ryan said that, at one point, he shot video of rioter Hunter Ehmke breaking a Capitol window and that he asked U.S. Capitol Police Officer Benjamin Fluke how he could help, and was told he could do so by continuing to take photos and video.

Officer Fluke agreed when prosecutors described the Zinks as "part of the problem," but he also corroborated Ryan's story. "All I remember saying was to record us, because we were kind of in the corner, in the corner on the north side of the top of the steps there, to record us as well as the crowd," Fluke testified.

According to video shown at the trial, Ryan said to protesters, "Just leave them alone, they're just doing their jobs," referring to police. "He's breaking the law," Ryan says of Ehmke, who eventually pleaded guilty to destroying public property and was sentenced to four months in prison.

CONVICTION AND A DELAYED SENTENCING

Ryan was convicted of entering and remaining on restricted grounds and engaging in disorderly conduct while there, and of obstruction of an official proceeding, known as 18 U.S.C. 1512(c), a felony.

That the defense mounted by Roots wasn't persuasive to jurors was no surprise to the attorney, who tried unsuccessfully for a change of venue outside of Washington.

"The jury pool in D.C. is so pro-government and anti-Trump that they'll pretty much convict anyone who was there," he said. "These are the government's jurors. If they were in any other jurisdiction they'd not be convicted on the same evidence."

Three years after the riot, the DOJ said at least 1,265 defendants have been charged. The vast majority pleaded guilty and at least 139 were found guilty at contested trials, as was the case with Ryan. Reportedly, just two have been acquitted thus far.

Ryan's sentencing had been scheduled for this month, but with the U.S. Supreme Court expected to rule by the end of June in a case alleging the 1512(c) charge was improperly used against a different January 6 defendant, his sentencing has been delayed. Roots believes prosecutors haven't yet made a sentencing recommendation, though he added that it's "extremely unlikely" Ryan will receive the maximum of 22 years.

Ryan and his attorney also attempted to have the case retried on the grounds that he had stored about 1,000 photos and bits of video on his camera, the bulk of which was deleted after it was confiscated by the FBI. The prosecution used what was left—a few dozen images—to make its case against Ryan. Ryan says the deleted media showed him in a better light and might have been used to exonerate him.

"Ultimately, that's one of our best issues on appeal because we don't even know what we're missing," said Roots, who plans to appeal Ryan's conviction after sentencing.

Newsweek reached out to the three prosecutors on the case and was referred to the DOJ's public affairs office, which supplied Chief Judge James Boasberg's denial of the request for a retrial.

While the document doesn't disclose who allegedly deleted the bulk of Ryan's photos and video or why they may have done so, it states that what the jury saw and heard was enough to "undermine the notion that he was there as a campaign photographer."

The same memorandum also addresses the free-speech argument by saying: "Zink's real problem is that he had no right to create a security risk by entering the restricted area of the Capitol grounds, whether he was speaking or not."

That, says Roots, raises the question of why Jeff Zink, the father, wasn't arrested or charged when his actions basically mirrored those of his son, minus the play-by-play over social media and follow-up posts on Facebook?

"That's just it. There were hundreds, or thousands, of people that were in that area who weren't prosecuted," said Roots.

"THE PROCESS IS PART OF THE PUNISHMENT"

Ryan told Newsweek that at one point during his trial, which concluded in September, he overheard someone on the prosecution's team say that "the process is part of the punishment" for January 6 defendants.

That "process," says Ryan, began with his arrest in February of 2021.

He says that at about 4 a.m. dozens of FBI agents "blew my door off the hinges. They got on a loudspeaker and blasted to the neighborhood, 'You're under arrest.' They flash-banged me and my dogs and broke every door in the house. There are burns in every room."

Newsweek reviewed photos of the destruction and reached out to an FBI spokesperson who declined to comment.

Ryan Fink spent the next seven weeks at four separate jail facilities; at two of them, he says guards rarely addressed him by name. "Shut up, terrorist," he'd hear after asking routine questions. "You're a fuc*ing terrorist," one staffer told him during questioning, he claims.

During a flight from Texas to a holding center in Oklahoma, he says, a U.S. Air Marshall warned him that he'd continue to be treated as if he were an enemy of the country, and the warning proved accurate, he says, especially at his final stop: the Washington D.C. jail.

His biggest complaint is that during the roughly three weeks he spent there, much of the food he was served smelled of bleach and made him horribly ill; he took to cleansing his meals by stuffing them into a sock and running water over them.

Others prior to Ryan's arrival similarly complained of poor treatment at the D.C. jail and an investigation had already been launched. On November 2, 2021, the U.S. Marshals Service concluded that sewage facilities, food, water and other necessities fell far short of standards in one section of the jail, but that standards were met in the section housing the January 6 defendants.

By the time he returned to Lubbock, word had spread of his arrest at what many in the press were calling an "insurrection" and customers had abandoned him. He shut down his business and took a job as a safety officer for a government contractor. He lost the job after his conviction and asked Newsweek not to reveal his new employer for fear he'll lose that job, as well.

He said his mother took an $85,000 loan against her home in order to help him manage $300,000 in debt, accrued via legal bills, the collapse of his business, moving to a new home and racking up credit card bills.

"I've lost everything. It's like I'm not human anymore. There's no quality of life. These people are sadistic," he said of his jailers and his prosecutors.

FROM THE CAPITOL TO A CAMPAIGN

Ryan, like his father, is now running for Congress, vying for a seat in Texas' 19th District. He told Newsweek that he was motivated to do so by a system that has trampled on his First Amendment rights.

Ryan is running for the Republican nomination against incumbent Jodey Arrington, who he says refused to help him after his arrest.

Ryan and Jeff met with Arrington for an hour several months before Ryan's trial, they told Newsweek. "He told me he's not a lawyer and it wouldn't be a 'good look' to publicly defend me," said Ryan.

A spokesman for Arrington, though, told Newsweek that after the congressman met with the Zinks he called Members of the House Judiciary Committee to reinforce the need for oversight hearings to review cases involving January 6 defendants.

The spokesperson said it would be inappropriate for Arrington to participate directly in Ryan's legal matters but added that the congressman "is concerned that the justice system was punitive towards many of these individuals for political reasons."

Ryan says he's the small-government congressional candidate while Arrington, the incumbent, is a "Republican in name only."

While he said his friends initially abandoned him for his role in the riot, many returned after learning he defended cops that day and some are now helping with his campaign.

He also received an endorsement from Dan Rogers, a GOP county chairman in Amarillo, just outside of Ryan's district. Rogers acknowledges it's an uphill climb for Ryan, given the March 5 primary gives him a short window to make his case, but he says he'll help the young candidate raise campaign funds.

"He's a kid who was done wrong by our government. Most people will cower under those circumstances. The fact he won't, gives me hope," said Rogers. "We need more like him."

And Ryan said he's leaning into his status as a January 6 defendant who says he assembled peacefully on the steps of the Capitol and was prosecuted for protected online speech.

"We have too many unelected bureaucrats in three-letter agencies that are destroying the American way of life. The Biden administration has allowed the FBI to become an arm of political persecution," he said.

Ryan, who says he has received multiple emailed death threats, has other supporters as well, including Senate candidate Kari Lake, who posted on X, formerly Twitter: "Please pray for Jeff and his son, Ryan. I know Jeff Zink. He is a very good man. Our Federal Government is fully weaponized against the people. Two-tiered justice system."

Besides focusing on his newly launched congressional campaign, Ryan says he spends several hours nightly poring over some of the estimated 44,000 hours of footage that House Republicans began releasing in small chunks in November.

"I was not at a riot; I was at a protest," he said. "January 6 was not how it is being reported."