Brandon Straka, a conservative activist, was confronted with a choice between pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit and facing serious charges with a long prison term related to the Jan. 6 Capitol rally. He chose to accept the plea deal because he felt he would not get a fair trial.
On Jan. 6, 2021, after then-President Donald Trump addressed the rally at the Ellipse, a park near the White House, Straka walked to U.S. Capitol where he was supposed to give a speech at an event planned to take place on the east side of the building, Straka recollected of that day.
He thought that something unusual might be happening, so when he was about three blocks away from the Capitol, he started shooting a video to record everything that happened from that point on, Straka said.
“As I’m entering the grounds [on the east side of the Capitol], there are no police officers present that can be visible anywhere in the video. People on the grounds are very, very calm.
“There’s a man on the top of the steps on the east side, sort of motioning down and hollering out. ‘They’ve opened the doors, they’re letting us in.’”
Straka said he walked to the top of the stairs and began filming while holding his camera fully above his head, as there were hundreds of people standing outside. Most people did not enter the Capitol, but some did, he added.
“The doors were wide open. ... I never went inside the building, I just stood outside of the building, filming.”
After about eight minutes, a man with a bullhorn came outside of the Capitol, Straka continued. “He said into the bullhorn: ‘They’ve cleared Congress. Everybody’s left the building. Clear out, clear out.’”
“At that moment, I immediately turned around, I left,“ Straka said.
Straka then came to his hotel room, uploaded the video he shot to Twitter, and posted it with a comment similar to “This is what I witnessed today at the Capitol,” he said.
However, after seeing on TV the footage of what had occurred on the west side of the Capitol, he took his video down. “It was really shocking to me because I didn’t see anything like that with my own eyes.... I took my video down when I saw that because I didn’t want anybody to think that I was there or a part of it or somehow condoning whatever that was.”
“But for that hour or two that my video had lived on Twitter, Twitter trolls had copied my video, and they began mass posting it for the next several weeks and tagging the FBI.
“On Monday, January 25, I woke up to an FBI squad on my door. They came in and raided my apartment and put me in handcuffs. [They] presented me with a search warrant and they took me to jail.”
Facing Charges
Straka said that being in jail really terrified him because it was just five days after the President Joe Biden’s inauguration when the Democrats had taken full control of the federal government, and he thought he could “be spending decades in prison for spending eight minutes outside of the Capitol on January 6.”
On the east side of the Capitol, where Straka was, there were no police and no barricades, he said. “There’s a very large sidewalk [there], very, very wide, so you could drive a truck down the sidewalk, and on both sides of it, there was bike rack in the grass, ... but the sidewalk was wide open.”
“I think any logical person would not think that they weren’t allowed to be on that sidewalk, not to mention the fact that there were thousands of people everywhere. So I don’t know how on earth anyone would get the indication that they should not be there.”
Straka said he believed that the charges against him were not fair: “A lot of people, even people who went inside the Capitol, even people who crawled through a broken window and went inside the Capitol, are getting misdemeanor charges of being on restricted grounds or parading inside the Capitol. I was charged with a felony for that.”
He was also charged with a felony for “impeding an officer in the line of duty.”
“I was standing there with my arms above my head, my camera pointed toward the open doors of the Capitol and filming. And there’s a moment in my video ... where a police officer comes to the doorframe of the east side Capitol doors ... somebody grabs his shield out of his hand and they begin passing it back through the crowd. And as that’s happening, a few people in the crowd are shouting, ’take it, take it, and take the shield, take the shield.'”
This happened about 35 feet in front of him with hundreds of people in between him and the Capitol doors, Straka explained.
The FBI said they “knew conclusively” that it was his voice, Straka said. “First, they said it was me shouting ‘take the shield, take the shield.’ And then they changed it to me shouting ‘take it, take it,’” he said.
Straka said he “vehemently denied” the charges. The government later offered him a plea deal that dropped the two felony charges but charged him with “a misdemeanor of disorderly conduct,” Straka said. However, there was a condition attached to the plea deal: “They put in my plea deal that I witnessed this police officer having his shield taken away and that I shouted ‘take it, take it’ to encourage the crowd to take the shield away.”
He was told that if he objected to the deal, he could go to trial facing the two felonies and the misdemeanor that he had already been charged with, and possibly an additional felony charge of “obstruction of Congress,” which carries a sentence of 20 years,” Straka said.
Facing such pressure, Straka signed the plea deal, which means he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit only to avoid facing charges with long prison terms that he believed would not be heard before a fair trial, Straka explained.
Trials of Jan. 6 defendants are held in Washington, D.C., and these judges do not release jurisdiction to somewhere else, Straka said.
“Every jury trial that has taken place so far on January 6 cases has resulted in the juries deliberating for a matter of two hours or less and coming back with guilty on all counts verdicts.
“I don’t believe that my case would have been any different. My opinion is that it does not matter if you’re innocent, and it does not matter if the evidence shows that you’re innocent. If you are a vocal Trump supporter who questioned the 2020 election and you’re going before a D.C. judge and jury, you’re going to be punished for making the decision to support Donald Trump and question the election.
“A lot of the judges in Washington, D.C., are liberal-appointed activist judges who also hate Donald Trump,” Straka said.
Aftermath of Confession
He has been portrayed by media as an “insurrectionist” who “encouraged an attack on a police officer,” he said. He believes, however, that “nobody should ever take a shield from a police officer, and nobody should ever encourage anybody to take a shield from a police officer.”
In 2020, at the time when the BLM movement promoted defunding the police, Straka, a Democrat-turned-Republican, and his WalkAway Campaign organized “Rescue America” rallies across the country during which they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support police officers, the activist said.
In December last year, WalkAway held a fundraising event to “refund the police” and “raised $30,000 to give to defunded police departments to help restore training and equipment,” Straka said.
The funds were raised through a limited email campaign aimed at his followers, Straka said. His audience supports the police, and they would have never supported Straka and his campaign if they had believed that he participated in or encouraged an attack on a police officer, Straka said.
Straka said that he and his organization have been permanently banned from online-donor and popular payment services.
“My name has been destroyed in the media. I am now synonymous with being an insurrectionist and a terrorist who went to D.C. on January 6 to try to overthrow the government and encourage an attack on a police officer, when in fact, I thought I was going to be speaking at a First Amendment-protected event,” Straka said.
“It’s been catastrophically destructive to my name and the name of my organization,“ Straka said, but he added: ”I’m a fighter, I’m going to fight my way back, I’m going to keep going, I’m not going to back down. ... This is an uphill battle, but we’re going to win.”
