First Capitol Riot Defendant to Stand Trial Found Guilty On All Charges

Guy Reffitt, the man accused of bringing a handgun to the US Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot is now the first person to stand trial for his involvement in the attack.

On Tuesday, he was found guilty of all counts.

The case of Reffitt, who is from Texas, isn’t formally connected to the hundreds of other pending criminal prosecutions surrounding the attack on the Capitol, but his verdict is a major win for the government.

Prosecutors have spent the past year negotiating plea deals, and battling legal challenges to the charges, all while trying to keep the political maelstrom surrounding the insurrection outside of the courtroom.

It was definitely questionable how a jury would respond to the government’s strategy for trying to hold each defendant involved responsible for their wrongdoing during the attack.

The jury spent nearly three hours deliberating after they spent the previous week hearing testimony and reviewing evidence from the prosecution that detailed the scope of the attack on the Capitol and specific details of what Reffitt was doing before, during, and after the day.

Reffitt is scheduled to return to court on June 8 to be sentenced in person before US District Judge Dabney Friedrich. He’ll remain in custody until that day.

Reffitt faced a five-count indictment that charged him with bringing firearms to DC to support a “civil disorder,” obstructing an official proceeding and aiding and abetting, being in a restricted area with a handgun, interfering with police during a civil disorder that affected interstate commerce, and obstructing justice after he threatened his own children to not cooperate with the FBI.

The two obstruction counts were among the most serious, considering they carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Reffitt, 49 and a father of three, faced up to 10 years in prison if found guilty of having a gun in a restricted area, and up to five years for each of the civil disorder counts he was charged with.

The outcome of Reffitt’s case is likely to have a rippling effect on the hundreds of other pending cases, with the vast majority of defendants facing prosecution for their involvement in the attack on the Capitol.