Brandon Fellows had by no means attended a Trump rally ahead of final week. He mentioned he was motivated to drive to Washington following seeing a tweet from the president. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” President Donald Trump wrote on Dec. 19. “Be there, will be wild!”
Fellows did not know about a planned march that would at some point overtake the U.S. Capitol. He mentioned he had basically come to see Trump give a speech.
But inside hours of watching Trump’s speech, Fellows had his feet propped up on a table in the workplace of a U.S. Senator, smoking a joint. He roamed the halls of the Capitol, heckled police officers and posted videos along the way on Snapchat.
“I have no regrets,” mentioned Fellows, a 26-year-old former grocery retailer worker from upstate New York who now tends to make revenue cutting trees and repairing chimneys. “I didn’t hurt anyone, I didn’t break anything. I did trespass though, I guess.”
Indeed, in the days considering the fact that the upheaval, Fellows mentioned his profile on the dating app Bumble is “blowing up” following he posted images of himself at the Capitol.
Fellows was amongst hundreds of Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, forcing Vice President Michael Pence, members of Congress and their staffs into hiding. Five men and women died in the melee, which includes a rioter who was shot by police and a Capitol Police officer from unspecified injuries suffered in the course of an altercation with the intruders.
Fellows’s story offers a detailed account of how a single Trump supporter ended up participating in the Capitol riot, an occasion that has spawned mass condemnation and prompted House Democrats to pursue impeachment for a second time in much less than two years.
His story also gives a true-globe instance of a Trump supporter who absorbed false facts on social media and heeded the president’s contact to take action. It’s an illustration of why so numerous technologies organizations have taken actions considering the fact that the Capitol riot to crack down on conspiracies that have proliferated on its platforms, which includes Twitter’s ban on Trump’s account.
Fellows, who lives in a converted college bus, mentioned he stopped working final spring mainly because of fears of Covid-19. But he mentioned he became disillusioned when New York state denied him unemployment positive aspects. “For a while, in early March and April, I was super poor,” he mentioned.
Fellows mentioned he gets considerably of his news from conservative commentators on YouTube, which includes Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder. He mentioned he has also began watching Newsmax and One America News, which have each promoted false claims of a rigged election.
He mentioned his political views have designed friction with his family members, so considerably so that on Christmas Day only his grandparents invited him to dinner. They asked him to consume on his bus mainly because he did not take Covid-19 seriously adequate, he mentioned.
At the Capitol, he mentioned, even although numerous of the rioters had been men and women he would not usually get along with, it “felt like family.”
“We were there for one common cause, which is making a statement that the government is crushing down on us,” he mentioned.
His stepfather of 14 years, Timothy Monroe, mentioned he wasn’t shocked when he discovered that Fellows was inside the Capitol. “He knows what he believes,” Monroe mentioned. “You can’t really change it with any kind of reality.”
Fellows mentioned he came to D.C. in element mainly because he believes that the election was rigged. But his principal motivation was his anger at government measures to protect against Covid-19, such as lockdowns of restaurants and gyms.
On Jan. 6, Fellows mentioned he arrived outdoors of the Ellipse, a park adjacent to the White House, just following 1 a.m. He was a single of the very first men and women in line to get into Trump’s rally and sat just 5 rows away from exactly where the president spoke, video shows. Fellows came ready for the cold climate, wearing snow pants, a leather jacket with an American flag emblazoned on the back and a knit hat that resembles a knight’s helmet and beard.
“This is the last stand,” Fellows mentioned, in an interview with a Bloomberg News reporter prior to Trump’s speech. “I feel like I’ve seen a lot of the election fraud evidence, and I don’t understand why nothing is being done.” Trump’s claims of election fraud in the Nov. 3 election have been rejected by state and federal courts, as properly as some members of his personal party.
Following the conclusion of Trump’s speech, Fellows joined in on the march on Pennsylvania Avenue, headed toward the Capitol. “I was like ‘Oh cool, there’s gonna be a march,'” he mentioned. “I’ve never been in a march.”
By the time he arrived, he mentioned the barriers defending the perimeter had currently been overrun. As he was scaling a wall to attain the Senate side of the Capitol, he mentioned he was pondering, “I’m not missing this, this is history.” Fellows helped other folks climb more than the wall, videos show.
Fellows mentioned he watched a fellow Trump supporter bashing in a door at the Capitol with a cane and at some point break by means of the door. A crowd of rioters pushed by means of only to be pushed back outdoors by police officers. Once the creating was overrun, he mentioned he initially hesitated ahead of going in but did so following hearing that men and women inside weren’t becoming arrested. He got in by means of a broken window.
In the 30 minutes or so he was in the Capitol, he filmed dozens of videos and posted them on Snapchat.
In a single of them, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News, he heckled Capitol Police officers who weren’t wearing helmets.
“Where’s your helmet, bro?” Fellows asked an officer. “I wasn’t issued one, because they ran out,” the officer replied.
“They don’t care about you? Are you guys rookies, is that why?” Fellows shot back. “I’ve been here eight years,” the officer mentioned. “Pretty cool what happened here today,” Fellows replied.
Another video shows his muddy boots propped on a table in Senator Jeff Merkley’s workplace, exactly where Fellows mentioned he took two puffs from a joint an individual handed to him. “This one is going to get me incriminated,” Fellows mentioned of the video in Merkley’s workplace.
In a video posted to Twitter, Merkley surveyed the harm in his workplace in which a door was smashed “off its hinges” and artwork was torn from the wall. “It was unlocked, they could have simply opened the door,” Merkley mentioned. “So count this office trashed.”
After leaving Merkley’s workplace, Fellows mentioned he wandered the Capitol and asked a police officer for directions to the National Statuary Hall. The police officer explained that the statues represent every state and offered directions on how to get there, according to Fellows’s video of the encounter. “Dude, you’re super cool,” Fellows mentioned.
Fellows’s interactions with police officers inside the Capitol led him to think there would not be consequences for going inside. “Did I think I was going to get in trouble?” Fellows mentioned. “Uh, no.”
After leaving the Capitol, Fellows posed for images next to a line of police officers in riot gear and on an abandoned police motorcycle.
He mentioned he is arranging to return to Washington for more protests surrounding President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, and he predicted there would be more violence. The FBI issued a warning that there are plans for armed protests in D.C. and at all 50 state capitals in the days top up to the inauguration.
“Obviously Trump started a movement in a way, but I think we started something even bigger by doing this,” Fellows mentioned. But now the law enforcement is rounding up other folks who participated in the Capitol intrusion, he believes he as well may possibly be arrested.
“Do you think I’m going to go to federal prison?” Fellows asked. “I was told federal prison is not fun.”
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