PITTSBURGH (TNS) — The federal government wants to slap a GPS monitor on the Western Pennsylvania woman dubbed the “pink hat lady” because prosecutors say she keeps defying pretrial release orders in connection with the Capitol insurrection.
The U.S. attorney’s office is asking for the extra measure to make sure Rachel Powell — who is accused of storming the Capitol in support of Donald Trump’s election lies — starts taking court orders seriously.
Prosecutors said Powell, a Mercer County mother of eight who is seen in riot videos wearing a distinctive pink hat and bellowing through a bullhorn, has repeatedly violated orders governing her work and home life while awaiting trial on felony counts.
In addition to the GPS monitor, prosecutors want Powell to list all the places she purportedly has to go for work for her employer and boyfriend, Joe Jenkins, who runs a slate roofing consulting and training company called Joseph Jenkins Inc.
The judge in the case, Royce Lamberth, has set a status conference for Tuesday.
Powell is accused of ramming a 10-foot pipe through a Capitol window and later yelling instructions at other pro-Trump rioters through her bullhorn about how best to penetrate the building. The judge has taken a dim view of her actions, saying she was an “enthusiastic” participant in federal crimes and “gleefully celebrated” the Capitol breach.
He has still allowed her to remain free pending trial on certain conditions, but the U.S. attorney’s office and pretrial services office say she hasn’t complied.
”Although the court has taken the defendant’s release conditions seriously, the defendant has not,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lucy Sun said in court papers. “At all hearings the court has emphasized the defendant’s need to comply with release conditions, and has done so as recently as the July 7, 2022 status conference. Despite such emphasis, the defendant committed two more violations of pretrial conditions.”
Powell lives on Jenkins’ property and works at an adjacent building he owns. She’s his only employee.
The pretrial services office has filed three violations against Powell since her arrest.
In the first, prosecutors said, she livestreamed herself at work wearing a mesh mask made of string in “mockery” of an order to wear a mask as a condition of her release.
In the second, she went banking with Jenkins and then to a brewery during work hours, which she isn’t allowed to do. Someone saw her at the brewery at 5:30 p.m. and reported her; when pretrial asked her what she was doing there, she said she went there for lunch.
In the third violation, she left her house early before her work window began and told pretrial that she was gardening, which she said was part of her work duties for Jenkins. When the pretrial officer noted that gardening is not part of her construction job, she said she does whatever Jenkins tells her to do, prosecutors said. She said her other duties include bank errands and hosting events with Jenkins in the evenings.
Jenkins sent a letter to pretrial services in which he described Powell’s varied duties as his office manager and also characterized the criminal case against her as “politically motivated,” describing her actions during the insurrection as participation in “election fraud protests.”
He said Powell is a good employee and that any accusations that she is a threat are “laughable and false.”
Prosecutors feel otherwise and said Powell’s current ankle bracelet only alerts pretrial as to whether she is home. Beyond that, she’s been on the honor system as to whether she’s complying with orders.
She’s also already received a break from Lamberth. After her first violation regarding the mask, the judge ordered her to show why he shouldn’t lock her up for contempt. Ultimately, he didn’t send her to jail but told her she’d better not defy him again.
Prosecutors say she has done just that and so should now be monitored full time and provide a list of all work locations because she can’t be trusted.
”GPS monitoring will ensure that the defendant is in fact traveling to the locations stated on her list and prevent further violations,” Sun said.
{p class=”krtText”}Powell faces multiple felony counts and is certain to go to federal prison if convicted.
{p class=”krtText”}In addition to smashing into the Capitol and directing others, she posted a comment on Facebook in October 2020 in which she said “the only way this is probably capable of being fixed is bloodshed because I’m not so sure our government can be fixed the political way anymore either.”
{p class=”krtText”}Powell left her children unattended to travel to Washington and later gave an interview to the New Yorker magazine while the FBI was looking for her.
{p class=”krtText”}Powell is among some two dozen people from the Pittsburgh region charged in the storming of the Capitol.
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