A New York chimney repairman who smoked pot in the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., during the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and glorified the violence that day was sentenced this week to more than three years in prison.
Brandon Craig Fellows, 29, was sentenced to 42 months in prison, which includes five months for a contempt of court charge. Fellows, who represented himself, was convicted in August of obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony, and several misdemeanors, including trespassing and disorderly conduct.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Donald Trump appointee, admonished Fellows for his “utter lack of remorse” at his sentencing hearing on Thursday.
“It’s time for you to grow up!” the judge said, Washington, D.C., CBS affiliate WUSA reported.
Prosecutors called him a “cheerleader” who’d do it again in 2025 if Trump doesn’t win, WUSA reported.
McFadden had recently denied Fellows’ request to delay sentencing — albeit from behind bars, which he described in his motion as “fun” — due a looming legal issue over the obstruction charge, which is headed to the Supreme Court.
Fellows was among thousands of Trump supporters who traveled to Washington that day for the “Stop the Steal” rally protesting the certification of Joe Biden as president. After the rally, Fellows marched with a large crowd toward the Capitol building.
Anticipation built as he surveyed the thousands of rioters on the West Plaza and the West Lawn.
“Oh bro, we’re gonna get gassed soon,” Fellows said in a cellphone video, according to prosecutors. “I heard windows just break.”
Outside the Parliamentarian door, he recorded the chaos.
“We’re at the main f—— gates,” he narrated. “They’re banging it like a f—— battering ram. It’s f—— crazy.”
“We are coming for you, traitors,” he also said.
When the rioters broke the door open, Fellows yelled, “Oh, s—! Oh, s—! Oh, s—! Oh, s—! Holy, s—, bro!”
At 2:52 p.m., he entered the Capitol, stood on broken furniture and waved a “Trump 2020” flag.
He walked across a hall and into Merkley’s office. Donning a fake beard and sunglasses, he sat in a chair, propped his feet onto a conference table, and smoked pot.
“What is your message?” a rioter, who was livestreaming, asked him.
“Man, oh man, we got pissed,” Fellows replied. “We ripped it out of the hands of these police officers.”
Other rioters in the office erupted in laughter. Then Fellows left the office and the Capitol building the same way he went in, heckling two U.S. Capitol officers as he exited.
Outside, in an interview with a news network, Fellows admitted to smoking marijuana in a Senate office.
“Yeah we went in there and then 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 told a reporter.
He admitted going into the Capitol after seeing a fellow Trump supporter breaking through a door with a cane. He said he initially hesitated to go in but did so after hearing that people inside weren’t being arrested.
“Did I think I was going to get in trouble?” Fellows said. “Uh, no.”
In the days after the insurrection, he celebrated on social media.
“Brought my heart joy to see these members terrified for their lives,” he wrote in one post. “For what they have done and are doing to this country I hope they live in constant fear.”
He was arrested on Jan. 16, 2021, in New York.
He was granted pretrial release from custody on home confinement, with GPS monitoring and a curfew, which was revoked after he contacted the mother of his probation officer to intimidate the officer and harass the officer’s mother, court documents said.
He also harassed a former girlfriend and was found in violation of a protection order and failed to check in with the authorities in the nearly four months he was on release.
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