A QAnon influencer who claims to be from the future was released after spending 225 days in prison
A QAnon influencer who claims to be from the future was released after spending 225 days in prison.
Austin Steinbart, 30, pleaded guilty last year to one count of interstate communications with intent to extort, a felony. Steinbart was sentenced to "time served," meaning the judge determined that Steinbart's time spent awaiting a sentence satisfied the punishment of the charge, the Department of Justice announced Monday.
In early March 2020, Steinbart released a video to his personal YouTube channel where he said he hacked "famous peoples' medical records" at a facility while receiving treatment. Steinbart could be seen in the video showing the records of several former NFL players' brain scans and medical records.
Weeks after posting the video, the medical facility confirmed that the authenticity of the records. The medical company's lawyers also contacted him and his parents to remove the video, angering Steinbart.
"Unless you guys want NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON to rain on all of your heads, you will IMMEDIATELY APOLOGIZE to my parents," Steinbart texted the attorneys.
According to the DOJ, FBI agents visited Steinbart's home soon after his threats to the attorneys where Steinbart said he received orders to hack the company "from messages that were sent from himself in the future" and claimed he had also illegally transported marijuana across the US-Mexico border.
Two days after FBI agents visited Steinbart regarding the leaked medical records, Steinbart posted another video to YouTube accusing a data storage company, Datto, of deleting an archive of files that Steinbart described as "curated wikileaks." According to court filings, Datto told investigators that some of the files were labeled "CIA Documents."
Steinbart threatened Datto in the video, saying, "if they do not give us our archive back by Monday, we will start flooding their phone lines and their billing email system as well," court documents show. The company said it received thousands of fake support emails.
According to The Daily Beast, Steinbart was originally granted pretrial release but was arrested after he failed to follow several court restrictions, such as smoking marijuana. Authorities also found Steinbart in possession of a "Whizzinator," a fake penis used to fool urine drug tests.
In a few short years, Steinbart has used the baseless QAnon conspiracy to grow his online presence. Known as "Baby Q" by his followers, he claimed to be a time traveler from the future who arrived in the current timeline to leave clues as "Q".
Steinbart's YouTube and Twitter pages have both been removed from the platforms but QAnon researcher Logan Strain, who uses the pseudonym Travis View, reported that Steinbart circumvented the YouTube ban while in prison and continued to post content to the site.
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