A federal grand jury member pleaded guilty to obstructing justice on Tuesday after he allegedly filmed himself in the courtroom while serving on a Washington, D.C., panel and posted the videos to his public Instagram feed.
Prosecutors said the 28-year-old Washington resident, Alexander Hamilton, admitted to posting the videos to his Instagram story after he was sworn in on Sept. 9, 2022.
One of the videos allegedly documents his oath-taking. With his right hand raised, Hamilton looks down at his iPhone to say, “I’m about to lie,” according to court records.
He was arrested in November after submitting to an interview with FBI agents the month before.
Prosecutors said that Hamilton had some 10,400 followers on his Instagram page. As is typical, he was instructed to keep secret everything he saw and heard on the grand jury until a judge decided otherwise. The grand jurors were told they could only talk about the cases among themselves.
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But Hamilton posted videos surreptitiously taken of the proceedings anyway, using one of two phones that he owned, according to prosecutors. Jurors are supposed to put their phones in lockers before arriving at the grand jury rooms.
“Sometimes you have to give out false information…Just to see who talks too much,” Hamilton wrote in a text post, per court records. Another post showed a video of the proceedings overlayed with images of rats.
Prosecutors said in a statement that Hamilton “demonstrated an awareness in numerous messages” that he knew what he was doing was not allowed. They asked a federal judge to dole out a prison sentence in the range of six months to three years at a hearing scheduled Nov. 29.
HuffPost reached out to the Justice Department for clarity on whether Hamilton’s behavior affected any of the cases heard by his panel, but did not immediately receive a response.
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