Personally I believe, and I think the evidence shows this, that there were three categories of people in the crowd that invaded the Capitol: (1) a small hardcore group of true insurrectionists, numbering in the low hundreds at most, who had been consciously planning to disrupt the government, up to and including using murderous violence, and were coordinating their efforts to that end; (2) a somewhat larger group of people, maybe up to a quarter of the mob, who weren’t included in that planning and weren’t enacting a step-by-step strategic operation like the first group, but they hoped something big would happen and cheerfully joined to assist when the shit went down; and (3) the remainder of the crowd, agitated and excited in a general way, but otherwise just mindless sheep following the flow.
The people in (1) are the ringleaders, who, if they are identified, are charged with and prosecuted for insurrection and conspiracy. The people in (2) get more of a patchwork of charges, depending on the degree to which they collaborated and cooperated with the ringleaders once things got rolling. The people in (3) get the generic trespass charges, if they’re charged at all, unless they can be identified on video doing something particularly heinous.
But this hierarchy of criminal offense shouldn’t overlook one key fact: The active and deliberate insurrectionists in (1) may be, in the abstract sense, the most dangerous group, but they are able to be dangerous specifically because they have the backup bodies in (2) and the camouflage of (3). In other words, the people in (3) may not be consciously engaging in an insurrection attempt, but their presence en masse is what enabled the core group to act, and constitutes a danger of its own.
