A Texas man who helped lead a pro-Trump mob in an advance on the police at the Capitol last year was convicted on Tuesday of obstructing congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election, bringing an end to the first criminal trial to stem from the violent assault.
The guilty verdict against the defendant, Guy Wesley Reffitt, came only about three hours into the first day of jury deliberations and after a weeklong trial that included testimony from police officers, a Secret Service agent, one of Mr. Reffitt’s compatriots in the Texas Three Percenters militia group and Mr. Reffitt’s son.
The jury also convicted Mr. Reffitt of wearing an illegal pistol on his hip during the attack and of later threatening his teenage son and daughter to keep them from turning him in to the authorities. He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on the obstruction count alone.
The trial, in Federal District Court in Washington, was a victory for the Justice Department, which has only just begun the marathon process of bringing to trial scores of rioters accused of storming the Capitol or assaulting the police outside it on Jan. 6, 2021.
The jury’s decision validated the prosecutors’ move to use an unusual obstruction count to charge hundreds of defendants in riot-related cases and could provide an incentive to some who are awaiting trial to consider pleading guilty.
Presented over four days, the government’s case against Mr. Reffitt, a 41-year-old oil-field worker from Wylie, Texas, about 30 minutes outside Dallas, was exhaustive.
Prosecutors introduced a staggering amount of evidence, including private chats between Mr. Reffitt and other members of the Texas Three Percenters before the Capitol attack, a recording of a Zoom call they conducted after the riot and a 30-minute video that Mr. Reffitt made of himself — with a camera mounted on his helmet — just before he led the mob up a staircase outside the Senate chamber and confronted the police.
In their opening arguments last week, prosecutors told the jury that they considered Mr. Reffitt the “tip of this mob’s spear” and that he had purposefully set out on Jan. 6 to stop Congress from putting the final touches on Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential victory.
After packing his wife’s car with body armor, plastic hand ties, a .40-caliber pistol and an AR-style assault rifle, prosecutors said, he drove 2,000 miles to Washington with another member of the Three Percenters, a loosely organized militia movement that takes its name from the supposed 3 percent of the colonial population that fought against the British.
Documenting his actions with a GoPro-like camera mounted on his helmet — or what he called his “bump cap” — Mr. Reffitt filmed himself moving among the crowd outside the Capitol, repeatedly urging people to storm the building and drag lawmakers like Speaker Nancy Pelosi out by their hair or their ankles. He then led a section of the mob up a staircase of the building, pushing through a hail of pepper balls and other projectiles until he was finally subdued with chemical spray, according to the officers who fought him off.
Some of the most dramatic testimony at the trial came from Mr. Reffitt’s 19-year-old son, Jackson, who, during more than three hours on the stand, told the jury about how the toxic politics of the Trump era had caused a painful rupture in the family. The tensions boiled over, Jackson said, after a boastful Mr. Reffitt returned to Texas after storming the Capitol and told him and sister not to sell their father out to the authorities.
“He said, ‘If you turn me in, you’re a traitor,’” Jackson Reffitt testified as his father sat across the courtroom unable to meet his eye. “‘And traitors get shot.’”
Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key Developments
The first trial. Guy Wesley Reffitt, a Texas man who helped lead a pro-Trump mob against the police during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, was convicted of obstructing Congress’s duty to certify the 2020 election. The verdict brought an end to the first criminal trial to stem from the riot.
Ex-Proud Boys leader indicted. A federal grand jury has charged Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, with conspiracy in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He is the second leader of a far-right group to face charges in the investigation of the attack.
The potential case against Trump. The Jan. 6 House committee said there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Donald J. Trump may have engaged in a criminal conspiracy as he fought to remain in office. The move adds to pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute him.
Mr. Reffitt’s lawyer, William L. Welch, put on a muted and abbreviated defense, starting with an opening statement that lasted not much more than three minutes. He called no witnesses and presented no evidence, but argued to the jury that prosecutors had rushed to charge his client, who, he claimed, had never physically assaulted the police.
A wild card in the case is whether or not Judge Dabney L. Friedrich decides after the jury’s verdict to toss out the government’s central obstruction charge against Mr. Reffitt — a count the government has used in hundreds of similar cases instead of more politically fraught crimes like sedition or insurrection.
In the months leading up to the trial, several defense lawyers, including Mr. Welch, challenged the use of the obstruction law, claiming that prosecutors had stretched it beyond its original design as a way to curb activities like shredding documents or tampering with witnesses in congressional inquiries.
But 10 federal judges — including Judge Friedrich — have upheld the statute, saying it can be used. Only one federal judge in Washington, Carl J. Nichols, has said the law does not apply to the Capitol attack, dismissing the count in the case of another rioter from Texas on Monday.
Judge Friedrich ruled before began the trial that she might toss the charge if she did not believe the evidence supported the claim that Mr. Reffitt had acted “corruptly” in disrupting Congress’s work, as required by the text of the law. To that end, prosecutors sought to show that he had acted corruptly not only introducing evidence that he confronted officers outside the Capitol, but also that he waved the crowd on to continue their assault on the building even after he had fallen.
The judge’s decision could affect upcoming trials, many of which feature the obstruction charge. Perhaps the most important in the next few months is the trial of four leaders of the far-right nationalist group the Proud Boys, which is scheduled to begin in May.
