- Sep 13, 2002
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‘Comically Minimal Ego-Stroking’: Inside The Bumble Takedown Of A Violent Capitol Rioter
Andrew Taake was arrested for pepper-spraying and attacking police officers with a whip at the U.S. Capitol. Here’s how a Bumble dating app user reeled him in.By Ryan J. Reilly

ILLUSTRATION: REBECCA ZISSER/
Six months ago, on a cold Wednesday night, a 20-something communications professional in Washington, D.C., was watching a remarkable and disturbing scene unfold on her television screen.
Supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump, who believed online conspiracy theories and the president’s lies about a stolen election, had breached the U.S. Capitol in a brutally violent attack that police officers would later describe as “medieval.” They brought bats. They brought hockey sticks. They brought Molotov cocktails. They brought stun guns. They brought firearms. They brought pepper spray. At least one Trump fanatic was carrying a metal whip.
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A citywide curfew was in place, and she could hear the helicopters hovering in the sky. Outside her window, “Claire” could see Trump supporters streaming back from the Capitol to a hotel near her home, carrying their flags and wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.
“I was watching on the news and seeing everyone walk back,” Claire told HuffPost. “It felt kind of useless for me to be that close and not kind of do anything proactive about it.”
By that evening, before Congress had formally certified President Joe Biden’s win in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, the FBI was seeking information from the public. The bureau wanted Americans to identify the rioters.
“OK, fine,” Claire thought. “I will.”
Claire had put a pause on online dating during the coronavirus pandemic. But she decided to fire up Bumble. She’d had what she described as an “on-and-off relationship with Bumble” (she tended to prefer Hinge) but knew that Bumble would let her “endlessly scroll through these guys” based on location and political affiliation.
She deleted a few photos that showed her doing “non-MAGA things” and “clearly liberal stuff”: that image of her in the pink pussy hat at the Women’s March wasn’t going to fly. She settled on a main profile image (it may have been a shot of her on a boat, or perhaps a photograph of her engaged in a “vanilla recreational activity” like visiting a brewery, she can’t quite recall). She turned on the “conservative” filter, and she got to swiping. For democracy.
Bumble is the dating app where “women always make the first move.” Over the course of the next few days, Claire made plenty of them. Like many singles in D.C., Claire has “almost always” passed on potential suitors who lived across the river in northern Virginia. Her MAGA alter-ego, on the other hand, didn’t have any reservations about bros located in Arlington and Alexandria. So when Andrew ― a 32-year-old from Houston who was located eight miles away in Alexandria ― popped up on her screen, Claire swiped right.
“Hey how’s it going?” she wrote.
They got to chatting. She made small talk, and basically tried to get Andrew thinking they were on the same page. Eventually, Andrew told Claire he was at the Capitol.
“Were you near all the action?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “From the very beginning.”
When Andrew claimed he’d stopped “agitators” who “were clearly antifa people” during the attack, Claire stayed in character and kept pushing for more info.
“Wait wow they were in the crowd? That’s wild, how could you tell?” she asked. Andrew continued mansplaining his conspiracy theories about how undercover left-wingers had actually been responsible for the actions of the pro-Trump mob.
“Majority of the people attacking police and smashing windows were all antifa. They just threw on a Trump hat or shirt they bought on the street,” Andrew told Claire. “They have had this planned out for weeks.”
Andrew continued to open up, sending Claire an image of himself he said he’d taken about a half-hour before being “sprayed.” He was “just standing there” when an officer sprayed him, he claimed.

Claire wanted to know whether Andrew had plans to return to D.C. to interrupt Biden’s inauguration, so she kept the conversation going. When Andrew proposed a video chat, she told him she was at a beer garden with friends. (She was not.)
Still in character, she suggested she could show him the beer garden if he returned. Andrew seemed open to it: He might be headed back to D.C. soon with other “Patriots ready and willing to head back.”

Claire had picked up a skill on dating apps that ended up being very helpful for finding insurrectionists. She knew how to take the limited amount of information disclosed in a dating app profile and connect it to a guy’s real identity.
Andrew’s Bumble profile gave away plenty of details, including the name of the business he co-owned, so Claire didn’t have much trouble finding his full name — Andrew Taake — after searching around a bit on Facebook.
Claire estimates she chatted with about a dozen conservatives who attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally. With the kind of “comically minimal ego-stroking” she used with Andrew, she says, she got three of them to admit they were unlawfully present on the grounds of the Capitol. She sent all three, including Andrew, to the FBI.
“I basically just asked, ‘Wow, crazy, tell me more’ on repeat until they gave me enough,” she said. “One of my friends was like, ’You basically got all these confessions just being, like, ‘Haha! Then what?’”
About three months after the Capitol attack, an FBI special agent from Texas got in touch with Claire. The female special agent (“Let the women do the work,” Claire joked) asked a bunch of questions that made it evident they were in somewhat new territory: Not many FBI cases involve dating app stings. “Clearly, it’s not a common scenario,” Claire said.
More than six months after Jan. 6, Claire was scrolling through Instagram over the weekend when she saw a headline: “Capitol attack suspect turned in by Bumble match.” The post included a familiar name: Andrew Taake. He’d been arrested in Houston on Friday, July 23.
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