House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's laptop went missing during the Jan. 6 insurrection – ensuing an FBI raid of an Alaskan home and ending with the arrest of New York mother and son.
Maryann Mooney-Rondon, 55, and her son, Rafael Rondon, 23, of Watertown, New York, were arrested Friday in connection with the stolen laptop, according to reporting by KTVU.
Both also face other charges related to the riot at the Capitol and Rafael Rondon faces possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun charge.
Mother and son were released from federal court in Syracuse, New York, pending further proceedings, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of New York.
Mooney-Rondon allegedly admitted to being in both the Capitol the day of the riots and Pelosi's conference room and providing gloves or a scarf to a man stealing Pelosi's laptop.
"He asked, he said, give me - I don't know if it was gloves or a scarf I was wearing - and like I said he scared me," she said, according to the statement.
The man put the computer in his backpack, she said. According to the document, the son said he might have pushed the computer "in his bag a little bit using a glove 'cause he didn't want to get his fingerprints on it."
"So I assisted him a little bit, and that was probably stupid of me," he said.
After Pelosi's office, mother and son entered the Senate Gallery, but left the building altogether after seeing it overrun with protestors.
Both confirmed they were pictured in photos of the riot to the FBI
An Alaskan couple, Paul and Marilyn Hueper were also in Washington for then-President Donald Trump's rally before the Capitol riot but said they didn't take part in that. Based on similarities between Marilyn Hueper and Mooney-Rondon, the FBI raided their Homer, Alaska, business in late April.
According to Hueper, it was a case of mistaken identity.
An FBI statement said the search warrant was obtained for the business "based in part on evidence showing that residents (a married couple) trespassed on the ground of the U.S. Capitol." Two people in Homer identified Marilyn Hueper as being the person seen in photos taken inside the Capitol during the riot, according to the document.
But "there is probable cause" to believe the mother and son are the two people shown in the photographs.
