“I got hit with rubber bullets and pepper sprayed. I was the first person to light the fire on the Capitol steps … WE TOOK THE CAPITAL,” Reffitt texted a friend immediately after the attack, according to court testimony.
In another text he talked about how he was “lead up the Capitol steps.”
But it was the reaction to Reffitt’s views by his only son that produced the most wrenching testimony. The appearance of Jackson Reffitt, 19, on the stand against his father as a government witness briefly brought the elder Reffitt to tears.
“If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot,” Jackson Reffitt testified his father threatened him and his younger sister said days after returning from Washington.
Reffitt is also charged with witness tampering. “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot,” Jackson Reffitt said his father told him and younger sister days after returning from Washington.
Explaining why he turned his father in to the FBI, Jackson Reffitt said despite causing a rift in his relationship with his mother and two sisters, and the prison term facing Guy Reffitt if convicted, the confrontation was “the best-case scenario” for them all.
“I don’t regret it, but it’s a lot,” the son testified. “I don‘t have words to really describe it.”
Reffitt has pleaded not guilty to five felony counts, including obstructing a congressional proceeding and transporting firearms for unlawful use at a riot. In a cascade of texts, recorded conversations and video Zoom calls to his family, to fellow Three Percenters and to potential recruits, prosecutors tried to show that Reffitt led those behind him to defy police and break into the building. The government also tried to prove he was carrying a pistol at his hip and was hit repeatedly by rubber bullets and bear spray when he defied police.
“Multiple clay bullets and a battle cry like in Braveheart,” Reffitt wrote in one exchange. “The insurrection began immediately after.”
Even as Reffitt seemed to corroborate the government’s contentions about what he intended to do in Washington, what he actually did there, and why he did it, he explained and defended his motives.
The taking of the Capitol and even violent removal of elected lawmakers was justified under a “constitutionalist” doctrine by which the American people have the right to disobey with laws they disagree with, he told his children, fellow Three Percenters and strangers at a pro-Trump rally that morning near the White House, according to court testimony or evidence.
Reffitt’s anger included career politicians, “50 years” of congressional corruption, and Trump’s “sacrifice” for us. It was inflamed by what he saw as indifference to widespread but scattered pockets of violence that erupted in several U.S. cities amid racial justice protests in 2020.
“They burned down our country and nothing happened to them,” he said in one conversation. “They had theirs, let’s show them ours.”
Evidence highlighted his conviction that the solution lay in armed revolt — peaceful, ideally, but not required — to replace elected lawmakers.
“Too many lines have been crossed. Too many years this has happened. We are about to rise up the way the Constitution was written,” he texted a family chat group on Dec. 21, according to court testimony.
“If they won’t follow the Laws of the Land, [w]e have no reason to follow their laws,” he texted his family. “Time to remove them. That’s why I’m goin to DC.”
“I’m more of, im voting for someone new,” Jackson Reffitt replied.
At the Jan. 6 Trump rally at the Ellipse, Reffitt recorded himself repeating over and over that he and others were going to the Capitol and they would drag out lawmakers.
“I don’t care if Pelosi’s head is hitting every step, we’ll grab them out by their ankles.”
After the riot, he texted to family, “We took the United States Capital. We are the Republic of the people.”
“I had every constitutional right to carry a weapon and take over the Congress,” he told his family in a conversation his son recorded. “We went in. They scurried like rats and hid.”
In Reffitt’s defense, William L. Welch III had few questions for the Capitol Police officers and FBI agent who introduced surveillance video of his actions and evidence of his recorded statements.
“Is there any reason to believe any of them were deepfakes,” Welch asked FBI Special Agent Stacy Shahrani about Reffitt’s video recordings.
Welch also asked if anything was digitally altered.
“As an investigator, I check for things that are there, not for things that are not there,” Shahrani replied.
Wearing a dark suit, pink shirt and below-shoulder-length dark hair, Jackson Reffitt was stoic when he described sending the FBI an online tip on Christmas Eve, after his father texted that day and on Dec. 21 to a family chat group, saying “It’s the government that’s going to be destroyed in the fight.”
Over three hours of testimony, Jackson Reffitt said their once moderately opposing political views widened into a chasm over his father’s support of Three Percenters ideology, disregard of existing federal laws and the outcome of the election.
When Guy Reffitt returned home after Jan. 6 with his AR-15 rifle, pistol and clothes still reeking of bear spray, he was “proud and ecstatic,” Jackson Reffitt said. The father showed his family video of what he did, said he was armed at the Capitol, and called Jan. 6 a “preface” to what was coming next, his son said.
As a nationwide FBI dragnet unfolded, Reffitt snapped at his children, telling them not to snitch and warning his younger daughter that if she was recording him he would “shoot your phone.”
It was too late. Jackson Reffitt met an agent at a nearby restaurant after the FBI followed up his tip on Jan. 6, providing screenshots and video links his father had shared with his children of his exploits.
Jackson Reffitt, who testified he has raised $158,000 from donors for his college and living expenses, acknowledged that he gave unpaid televised interviews about turning in his father before telling his family. He said that he did not immediately move out nor speak to his sisters about his concerns about their father, despite saying he was “terrified” by what he had said to him and his younger sister.
Still, he said that while he felt “gross” and “very uncomfortable,” he could no longer take his father’s statements as “anything else than literally” after he “had proven that he can say stuff, and act on it.”
He added that he spoke out publicly believing, “it would be a good thing to talk about for a lot of families that are going through this. … There were hundreds of people on January 6, they all had families. Everyone is attached to them.”
Leaving the courthouse where she has watched every session, Nicole Reffitt, wife of Guy and mother of Jackson, told reporters it was a “hard” day. Asked whether she spoke with Jackson, Politico reported, she said she told him “that I love him.”