Staff Report –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a case that clearly demonstrates how Donald Trump’s insane candidacy and presidency both attracted crazies and turned people even crazier, a man from New York was sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison this week for his actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Brandon Craig Fellows, 29, of Schenectady, New York, was found guilty by a jury after a trial in U.S. District Court of felony obstruction of an official proceeding, felony entering and remaining in a restricted building. The jury also found Fellows guilty of three related misdemeanors, according to deadline reporting from the Washington Post.

The Justice Department press release on the sentencing has not yet been released.

Fellows was described as a handyman, a tree cutter and a chimney repairman who lives in a converted school bus. He represented himself at trial.

His case became famous for images and a video showing him smoking marijuana in the office of Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, after entering the Capitol through a broken window and after attending Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse by the White House.

His case is now making news for his Trump-like strategy of interrupting and challenging the judge.

He called U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden a “modern-day Nazi” running a “kangaroo court.”

“In all my years as a judge, and before that as a litigator, I have never seen such contemptuous conduct,” McFadden said at Thursday’s sentencing, recalling that Fellows also made “lewd comments” to his probation officer, “outlandish accusations” against prosecutors and heckling remarks to the jury as the verdicts were being read.

“There is no grand conspiracy here against you,” the judge said as Fellows kept interrupting. “It’s time for you to grow up!”

Prosecutors described Fellows as a “cheerleader” for the riotous mob. He tried to prevent the FBI from finding him by wrapping his cellphone in foil and wiping his data.

After he “paraded” through the Capitol crypt with other rioters, taunting law enforcement officers and smoking pot in Merkley’s office, he posed for photographs on a Capitol Police motorcycle outside the building and then raved about the attack in media interviews and social media posts.

“He told the jury he was having a blast,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolina Nevin said Thursday.

When the FBI caught up with him, she said, Fellows asked for a marker to write the word “liberty” on his forehead for his mug shot. He blamed police officers for their own injuries and showed no remorse for his actions, Nevin argued.

In a court filing Tuesday that he conceded was “rambling,” Fellows continued to assert that “the election was stolen, and we had and have a right to go in and throw the people out who made this happen.”

At his sentencing, he gave a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation railing against “crazy people who say a man can get pregnant,” accusing prosecutors of telling lies and bemoaning the “minimum of 23,736 hours” he had spent in jail “being treated like a terrorist without any constitutional rights.”

A liberal activist who interrupted now-Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court in 2018 had gotten off with a much lighter sentence than he would get, Fellows argued.

“I did not think I committed any crimes,” he said, adding later, “Officers were letting people in … saying, ‘Treat this place with respect, guys,’ which seems pretty welcoming.”

Outside the Capitol, people with bullhorns were claiming Vice President Mike Pence had already certified Biden’s election, although that turned out to be inaccurate, he said.

Judges are required by law to explain the reasoning behind the sentences they impose, and they seldom appreciate it when people in the courtroom add their own running commentary, according to Post‘s reporting.

As he began to announce the punishment, McFadden barely got three sentences out before earning his first jeer from the defendant.

The judge said Fellows and others who had smoked pot in the Capitol had treated it like a “frat house” and shown “utter disrespect for our first branch of government.”

“Just as they disrespect the American people,” Fellows interjected. The judge admonished him not to interrupt.

Fellows chimed in again.

“Sir, sir! This is a really bad idea for you to continue to interrupt me,” an exasperated McFadden said.

Fellows’s mother had written a letter to the court, McFadden said. Fellows protested that he had asked her not to. (She told the judge her son was a “challenging” individual.)

His grandmother submitted a letter — but “she knows nothing about this case!” Fellows declared. She thanked the judge for being “more than fair” throughout the proceedings.

Fellows argued that he thought he was allowed inside the Capitol for the riot — or, in his words, “an exciting museum tour with our supportive friends, the police” — because of a freewheeling romp he had taken at his home state’s civic mecca, the New York Capitol.

“Not only can you go up and touch it, but two weeks, two or three weeks prior to January 6th, I had sex in a vehicle about 20 feet away from it,” he said at trial.

“I definitely remember that,” the judge deadpanned.

During a hearing via video before his trial began, Fellows wrote “kangaroo court” on a piece of paper and held it up to the screen, prosecutors said. While Fellows was on the witness stand at his trial in August, McFadden warned him “to answer leading questions with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and to avoid editorializing comments about the trial and the prosecutor’s questions,” according to an order the judge signed Aug. 30.

“While the jury rendered its verdict, he interrupted the foreperson and yelled over her, ‘This is how you radicalize people!’ When the Court thanked the jurors for their service, Fellows laughed, ‘Ha!’” prosecutors wrote.

The judge sentenced Fellows to 37 months in prison for his Jan. 6-related convictions and an additional five months for contempt related to his courtroom outbursts. Fellows convinced him throughout the legal proceedings that he had “oppositional defiance disorder,” as he claimed, the judge said.

“I shared nothing but the truth here, unlike the other party,” Fellows said.

According to the government’s evidence, Fellows was among a mob of rioters on the Capitol grounds who entered the building illegally. Fellows made his way to the Upper West Terrace by scaling the Capitol wall and assisting others in doing the same in order to avoid the massive crowd and get what he said was, “a better spot, just like at a concert.”

Fellows entered the Capitol through a broken window by the Senate Wing door at approximately 2:47 p.m., wearing a fake beard fashioned of red yarn, a hat in the shape of a knight’s helmet, sunglasses, and carrying a flag and a trash can lid that he held as a shield.

After illegally entering the building, Fellows made his way to the office of U.S. Senator Jeffrey Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon.

“I walked in and there’s just a whole bunch of people lighting up in some Oregon room… they were smoking a bunch of weed in there,” he later told a reporter. Fellows was photographed smoking marijuana in Merkley’s office with his feet up on a desk. He next went to the Crypt and walked around. He eventually left the Capitol about 3:45 p.m.

On January 12, 2021, Bloomberg published a story headlined “‘No Regrets’: A Capitol Rioter Tells His Story from Inside.” The story quoted Fellows as saying “I have no regrets… I didn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t break anything. I did trespass though, I guess.”

That same day, Fellows posted this statement to his Facebook account: “We took the Capitol and it was glorious.” Fellows additionally had boasted about his actions during the riot in interviews with CNN, the New York Post, and Albany TV station WNYT.

Fellows was arrested on January 16, 2021, in Albany.

In addition to the two felonies, Fellows was found guilty of entering and remaining in a restricted building; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building; and disorderly conduct in a Capitol Building.

This case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Valuable assistance was provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York. The case was investigated by the FBI’s Washington and Albany Field Offices. Valuable assistance was provided by the New York State Police, the U.S. Capitol Police, and the Metropolitan Police Department.

In the 31 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 1,106 individuals have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including more than 350 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.

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