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A New Jersey gym owner on Friday became the first person to plead guilty to assaulting a law enforcement officer during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Scott Kevin Fairlamb’s deal with federal prosecutors could be a benchmark for dozens of other cases in which Capitol rioters clashed with police. Fairlamb’s attorney said prosecutors will recommend a prison sentence ranging from about 3 ½ to4 ¼ years, but the judge isn’t bound by that term of the plea agreement.
His plea comes less than two weeks after a group of police officers testified at a congressional hearing about their harrowing confrontations with the mob of insurrectionists. Five officers who were at the Capitol that day have died, four of them by suicide. The Justice Department has said that rioters assaulted approximately 140 police officers on Jan. 6.
Fairlamb, 44, a former mixed martial arts fighter whose brother is a U.S. Secret Service agent, was one of the very first rioters to breach the Capitol after other rioters smashed windows using riot shields and kicked down a locked door, according to federal prosecutors. After leaving the building, Fairlamb harassed a line of police officers, blocking their progress through the mob, prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
A video showed him holding a collapsible baton and shouting, “What (do) patriots do? We ... disarm them and then we storm the ... Capitol!”
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth set a sentencing date of Sept. 27 for Fairlamb, who has been jailed since his Jan. 22 arrest at his home in Stockholm, New Jersey.
Defense lawyer Harley Breite said he will ask the judge for a sentence below the government’s recommended guidelines.
Breite said his client wanted to “pay the price for what he had done and then move on with his life.”
Fairlamb pleaded guilty to two counts, obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting a Metropolitan Police Department officer. The counts carry a maximum of more than 20 years in prison.
He had been indicted on 12 counts, including civil disorder, assaulting a police officer and engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds.
Another video captured Fairlamb shoving and punching a police officer in the head after he left the Capitol, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit.
Fairlamb’s social media accounts indicated that he subscribed to the Qanon conspiracy theory and promoted a bogus claim that former President Donald Trump would become the first president of “the new Republic” on March 4, prosecutors wrote.