Documentarian Jason Rink doesn’t go looking for trouble. As someone who quickly recognized the potential for problems while filming at the initial breach of the barricades at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the 48-year-old filmmaker isn’t known to take unnecessary risks.
But although he managed to stay out of any restricted grounds that day, it seems trouble has come looking for him anyway.
On September 27, 2022, Rink received a letter advising him that for the first time in his many years as an entrepreneur, the IRS wanted a closer look at his tax filings.
“They’re like; ‘We believe you owe $80,000 in taxes plus $40,000 in fines from 2019,’” Rink explained on a Saturday morning phone call, “So I looked at the documentation, and they literally just took all of my expenses — dollar-for-dollar off my return, including all the money I paid contractors and sent 1099’s — and moved every declared expense over to income and are like, ‘You owe money on this.’”
“I’m like, ‘This isn’t how taxes work, bro.’”, Rinks laughed.
The letter from Internal Revenue followed months of January 6th Congressional Select Committee and Department of Justice attempts to get Rink to turn over his proprietary video footage from two concurrent projects — one of which became the documentary, “Q Sent Me” about Jake Angeli.
On January 18, 2022, the Select Committee contacted Rink, saying they wanted to “discuss the work” he conducted on January 6th.
Rink’s attorney responded and the Committee advised that they were “inquiring about whether Mr. Rink would voluntarily agree to provide materials that he captured while documenting the rallies on January 5th and 6th.”
“Turning over to a third party proprietary material in advance of their inclusion in a documentary greatly reduces the commercial value upon release,” Rink’s attorney responded to the Committee, “In addition, the materials are protected by the First Amendment.”
In a surprise to Rink, the article also signaled awareness of precise content in communications between his attorney and the January 6th Select Committee.
“I never went out publicly and spoke about what we said to the government,” Rink explains, “And in that article, they cited the exact two items that my lawyer had said to the Jan. 6 committee. Someone from the committee had to have spoken to somebody from the Guardian to inform them of our reasons for not turning over the footage.”
Ten days after The Guardian article was published, the U.S. Attorney’s Office contacted Rink. In their email, the prosecutor provided a link to the Guardian Article, along with a request to review Rink’s footage.
Rink’s attorney advised the U.S. Attorney he would legally fight any potential subpoena for his video. Hoping to avoid an unwarranted visit from heavily armed agents at his home, Rink agreed to place the footage in escrow for safekeeping while any potential legal process evolved.
For now, Rink continues to argue the tax matter, and a certain status quo has set in. As to whether the IRS visit is connected to his failure to comply with Select Committee and DoJ Requests, Rink is left to speculate.
“The IRS comes to people for that all the time, and that’s great,” Rink explains, “But where this got weird is another individual, attached to this project that I’m working on, received an identical filing from the IRS within 30 days of when I got mine. What are the odds that both of us would get that filing within 30 days of each other?”
So why was the government so interested in the first place? Once again, Rink can only speculate.
“My assumption is that they wanted to get our footage and cherry-pick it for content that could help them build cases against various individuals,” he theorizes, “What I believe is that they were just looking to go through our tens of terabytes of footage and figure out what we have that they could flip and present as evidence of what they are trying to prove — insurrection planning meetings that didn’t happen.”
Rink remains hopeful that the U.S. Constitution will protect him from further harassment but soberly notes a disturbing reality in America today.
“In a way, what we’ve seen is the growth of a byzantine myriad of laws used to criminally prosecute regular Americans,” he remarks, “On top of that, they labeled January 6th as a domestic terrorist event which created a lot of leeway and opportunity for the government to criminally try and treat people differently than any other type of situation. It’s why they’ve gotten away with throwing nonviolent people in the J6 gulag, you know? It’s a very, very dangerous situation — a very dangerous time.”
You Can Find Jason Rink on Twitter HERE
You Can Watch “Q Sent Me” HERE
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