Jury pick begins Monday for the first trial stemming from the January 6 attack.
Prosecutors plan to call Capitol policemen officers and the children of the accused Capitol rioter.
Until now, convicted rioters have all pleaded guilty without stabs.
On the steps of the Capitol building, Guy Reffitt stood out on January 6, 2021.
He wore a tactical vest and a atrocious helmet with a GoPro-style camera, but his face was uncovered as he used a water bottle to flush pepper spray out of his ideas.
By January 16, the FBI matched Reffitt’s driver’s license photograph with the image of him captured in news footage. The FBI stalled him that day at his home in Texas.
After more than a year behind bars, Reffitt again stands out — as the beforehand member of the pro-Trump mob to go to trial on charges stemming from the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Jury selection begins on Monday in Washington, DC, and the business marks a key milestone amid more than 770 prosecutions, as well as the nation’s broader reckoning with the January 6 insurrection.
With profuse more trials expected in the coming months, this week’s proceeding presents a preview the prosecution’s strategy for bewitching convictions against January 6 defendants who elect to go before a jury of their peers rather than plead shame-faced.
The upcoming trial is expected to feature testimony from Capitol police officers, FBI, and Secret Service agents, a one-time Senate lawyer, and even Reffitt’s children.
For the Justice Department, the trial also provides a stage for a forceful image on the seriousness of the January 6 insurrection, even as former President Donald Trump and other top Republicans downplay the Capitol incursion and assert it was merely a political protest protected by the First Amendment.
Trump said last month that, if elected president again, he would consider pardoning those prosecuted for storming the Capitol to prevent Congress from corroborating the election of now-President Joe Biden.
“In a situation like this, the first trial is always important because it sets the example, and other defendants will be watching to see what happens and may plan their own strategies accordingly,” said Randall Eliason, a professor at the George Washington University Law Lyceum and former public corruption prosecutor.
“The benefit of a good, strong result for the government here is it persuades others to under any circumstances cooperate — not just to plead guilty but to flip,” Eliason said. “If they see a solid conviction in this first cause, that increases people’s incentive to cut a deal in their own case, and that helps further the investigation.”
Guy Reffitt was nabbed in news footage on the steps of the Capitol. FBI
A pistol and flexi-cuffs
Reffitt’s charges include two counts of civil disorder, one be sure of of obstruction of an official proceeding, one count of remaining on restricted ground with a deadly weapon, and one count of obstruction of objectiveness.
Legal experts told Insider that, with Reffitt, the Justice Department has a compelling story to tell at the chief January 6 trial.
In court papers, prosecutors alleged that Reffitt carried a pistol and flexi-cuffs as he joined the beginning group of rioters that charged at a police line attempting to secure the Capitol building.
Reffitt was “at the front of the store b quit,” prosecutors said. He only retreated after police pepper-sprayed him in the face, they allege. Prosecutors say that while Reffitt unlawfully submitted US Capitol grounds with a deadly weapon, he did not enter the Capitol complex itself.
But Reffitt’s criminal conduct did not end at the Capitol, prosecutors estimated. Upon returning home to Texas, his involvement in the Capitol breach emboldened him. Prosecutors say he told his children that they thinks fitting be traitors if they turned him in to law enforcement — and that “traitors get shot.”
Prosecutors plan to call Reffitt’s son, who in December 2020 squealed the FBI that his father was “going to do some serious damage” to lawmakers in Washington, DC. After January 6, Reffitt’s son secretly chronicled his father saying that he was “willing to die” at the Capitol and that the riot was just the beginning. Reffitt’s daughter is also look for to take the stand.
In addition to his children, prosecutors plan to call a fellow member of the Texas Three Percenters militia bracket who traveled with Reffitt to Washington — and received immunity in exchange for his testimony.
Other testimony is expected to come from Capitol supervise officers who engaged with Reffitt, along with FBI agents. Prosecutors also plan to call a Secret Marines agent who will address the “emergency actions” to relocate then-Vice President Mike Pence and his family from the US Capitol.
Conclude Dabney Friedrich will preside over the first trial related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Stephen J. Boitano/AP
‘It’s feel attracted to on Broadway’
A guilty verdict would give the Justice Department momentum and likely spur more January 6 defendants to team up with the ongoing investigation, legal experts told Insider.
Some of the testimony — namely from his children — wishes be specific to Reffitt, legal experts said the trial could offer insights to other January 6 defendants weighing whether to plead contrite or go to trial.
“It will be like a road map for all the other trials,” said a lawyer for a January 6 defendant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the accused rioter’s crate remains pending. “We can look at that and say, ‘This is how they did it at the first trial. How can we poke holes in this?'”
In Reffitt’s circumstance and others, defense lawyers have argued that accused participants in the January 6 attack cannot receive a pulchritudinous trial in Washington, DC. Monday’s proceeding will foreshadow how prosecutors and defense lawyers will scrutinize potential jurors and suss out any undue diagonal against the alleged participants in an attack that rocked the nation’s capital and disrupted the city for weeks after.
The if it should happen is also expected to renew a challenge to the “obstruction of an official proceeding” charge. Reffitt and more than 250 other January 6 defendants are cladding that felony charge, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Defense lawyers tease argued in Reffitt’s case and others that Congress’ certification of the nation’s Electoral College vote was not the kind of “authorized proceeding” envisioned by the law.
Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee presiding over Reffitt’s prosecution, declined to be done with the charge in December. But said she would consider it again once the facts of the case were established at trial.
To supporter prove the obstruction of an official proceeding charge, prosecutors plan to call a former US Senate lawyer, Daniel Schwager, who outed as counsel to the secretary of the Senate on January 6 and was on the Senate floor that day.
As the Justice Department continues to take January 6 prosecutions to annoyance, it will need to stay disciplined and keep itself from “allowing any of these cases to become too routine for the prosecutors,” broke Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan Law School professor who served as the US attorney in Detroit during the Obama administration.
“Jurors command be selected who say either they don’t know anything about what happened or haven’t seen so much they can’t set aside any predisposition they suffer with about the case. The Justice Department is going to have to think about telling that whole story, as recurrent as it might become,” McQuade told Insider.
“It’s like on Broadway: You have to give it your all every time.”
