Movie Where This Guy Replays the Day Over and Over Again Agaistn an Ailen Attack.
Prosecutors Open Arguments Confronting Defendant in Starting time Jan. 6 Trial
Guy Reffitt recorded himself as he entered the Capitol with zilch ties and a pistol. "Nosotros're taking the Capitol before the day is over, ripping them out by their pilus," he said.
WASHINGTON — On the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, a man believed by the authorities to be a member of a Texas militia walked from the Ellipse in Washington, where President Donald J. Trump had been speaking about ballot fraud, to the Capitol. He was wearing what he described every bit his "full boxing rattle": trunk armor, a helmet fixed with a camera, a set of plastic hand ties and a .40-caliber pistol at his hip.
Over the next several minutes, prosecutors said, the armed man, Guy Wesley Reffitt, not just helped lead a mob up a staircase of the edifice, but besides recorded himself narrating his role in the advance.
"We're taking the Capitol before the twenty-four hour period is over, ripping them out by their pilus," Mr. Reffitt said on camera. Then he made a specific threat against the Speaker of the House: "I but want to encounter Nancy Pelosi's head hitting every step on the manner out."
With a replay of this dramatic scene, prosecutors on Wednesday opened the first criminal trial stemming from the Capitol attack, saying that Mr. Reffitt was at the forefront of the pro-Trump oversupply that stormed into the building equally lawmakers were certifying the results of the 2020 election.
"He planned to light the match that would showtime the fire," Jeffrey Southward. Nestler, a federal prosecutor, said in an opening argument. "He wanted to stop Congress from doing its job."
As the trial unfolds over the next several days, the authorities intends to offer evidence that Mr. Reffitt, 41, had a collision with the police outside the Capitol after traveling to Washington from his habitation in Wylie, Texas. Prosecutors say Mr. Reffitt came to Washington with a beau member of the Texas Three Percenters, a loosely organized militia movement that takes its proper name from the supposed three percent of the U.South. colonial population that fought against the British.
Mr. Nestler said that prosecutors would introduce messages that Mr. Reffitt had sent to other members of the group in advance of the attack, saying that "the fuel is fix" and that he planned to "strike the match in DC on Jan. 6." The 3 Percenter who traveled with him to Washington, Rocky Hardy, is set up to testify nether an immunity deal with the regime.
Prosecutors also programme to arm-twist testimony from two of Mr. Reffitt'due south children, Jackson and Peyton, who were teenagers at the fourth dimension of the attack. The children plan to say their begetter threatened them afterwards he returned to Texas in order to keep them from turning him in to the authorities.
A large man with a barrel breast and a pigtail, Mr. Reffitt sat without showing much emotion as Mr. Nestler told the jury how he had led a large group of rioters upward a staircase at the Capitol, just outside the Senate chamber, brushing off attempts past the police to finish him with pepper balls and heavier projectiles. Even after he was finally subdued with a canister of pepper spray, Mr. Reffitt urged the oversupply around him to push on, Mr. Nestler said.
In his own brief opening statement, Mr. Reffitt's lawyer, William L. Welch, played downward the confrontation with police, proverb that his client had never assaulted any officers or helped anyone assail them. While Mr. Welch admitted that Mr. Reffitt was prone to "rants" and "hyperbole," he insisted that he was not aggressive.
"This case has been a blitz to judgment," Mr. Welch said, "based on bragging, based on a lot of hype."
The kickoff witness in the trial, Shauni Kerkhoff, a former Capitol Police force officer, appeared to contradict Mr. Welch's description of Mr. Reffitt. While watching a surveillance camera video of her collision with Mr. Reffitt, Ms. Kerkhoff told the jury that after he moved toward her up the staircase, disobeying her commands, she used a Tippmann PepperBall Launcher to fire 40 to l projectiles.
That did piddling to deadening him downward, she recalled. Mr. Reffitt was also undeterred past larger projectiles fired past her partner and by pepper spray used by a tertiary officer.
At that point, Ms. Kerkhoff fabricated a panicked call for help on her radio.
"Nosotros accept an individual breaching the west terrace, breaching the westward terrace up the stairs," she called out in a breathless message played for the jury. "We need backup."
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After more than than 200 guilty pleas in January. 6-related cases, Mr. Reffitt's is the outset to reach a court and marks the first fourth dimension a jury will consider the legal theory nether which the government has charged hundreds of defendants. His case is ane of several to include defendants with ties to far-right extremist or militia groups like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers.
Shortly after Mr. Reffitt's trial ended for the twenty-four hour period, a member of the Oath Keepers pleaded guilty in a dissever case to charges of seditious conspiracy — the most serious allegations to have been brought so far against any of the more than than 750 people charged in the Capitol attack.
In court papers, the Adjuration Keeper who pleaded guilty, Joshua James, told the government that the grouping'south leader, Stewart Rhodes, had instructed him and his compatriots to utilize "lethal force" against anyone who tried to remove President Trump from office, including the National Guard or "other government actors."
At the center of Mr. Reffitt'due south case is the accusation that he obstructed the work of Congress during the attack by helping chase lawmakers from the building while they were overseeing the certification of the Balloter College vote. The obstruction accuse — i of five counts lodged against him — has been used in lieu of other crimes like sedition or coup in scores of Capitol anarchism cases to describe the disruption that occurred when the mob forced lawmakers to flee.
In the months leading up to the trial, several defence lawyers — including Mr. Reffitt's — challenged the use of the police, arguing that prosecutors had stretched it far across its original design as a mode to curb activities like shredding documents or tampering with witnesses in congressional inquiries. Only 10 federal judges — including Judge Dabney Fifty. Friedrich, who is overseeing the Reffitt trial — have upheld the use of the police force. Mr. Reffitt'south case will be the get-go time a jury will go to determine whether the charge fits the crime.
There is i wrinkle, however: Gauge Friedrich ruled before the trial that she might toss the obstacle charge on her own if she does not believe the testify supports the merits that Mr. Reffitt acted "corruptly" in disrupting Congress's work, every bit required by the statute. Prosecutors will seek to convince her — and the jury — that Mr. Reffitt did deed corruptly by challenge that he meant to assail the constabulary and, perhaps, through how he planned for violence that mean solar day.
To that end, Mr. Nestler told the jury in his opening statement that Mr. Reffitt had started to prepare for the storming of the Capitol well before Jan. six. In belatedly December, he sent a bulletin to members of his family saying that "tyranny" was coming and that "what's most to happen will daze the world."
Mr. Reffitt's son Jackson was sufficiently concerned that he called the F.B.I. on Christmas Eve 2020 to warn agents about his father — "a wrenching determination," every bit Mr. Nestler put information technology.
Less than two weeks later, Mr. Reffitt and Mr. Hardy set out from Texas and drove two,000 miles across the state to Washington. They took a car, Mr. Nestler, said, and then that they could bring a enshroud of weapons — amid them, the pistol Mr. Reffitt wore and an attack burglarize.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/us/politics/jan-6-trial-opening-arguments.html
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