Feb. 3 (UPI) — A Pennsylvania man who led the violent breach of the police line during the Jan. 6 attack was convicted of assaulting a Capitol police officer Friday.
Ryan Samsel, who had been seen with a giant flag portraying Donald Trump as Rambo, and one of the first instigators of the Capitol riot, was convicted of assaulting Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, along with felony accounts of civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding.
Court documents state Samsel was observed in video footage walking toward barricades manned by uniformed Capitol Police officers and “immediately became confrontational.”
Samsel removed his jacket, flipped his “Make America Great Again” hat backwards and began pulling on the barricades until the crowd broke through. Edwards was sent reeling backward by the force of the crowd and hit her head on a banister, knocking her unconscious.
“The lights were on, but no one was home,” Edwards said at Samsel’s trial
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb oversaw the trial of Samsel and co-defendants James Tate Grant, Paul Russell Johnson, Stephen Chase Randolph and Jason Benjamin Blythe last year.
Cobb convicted all five defendants of at least two felonies each, but dismissed several misdemeanor charges alleging the men knowingly engaged in violent acts in a restricted area because then-Vice President Mike Pence was in the building.
The felony charges alone could land Samsel up to 20 years in prison.
Federal prosecutors and conservative critics have tried to paint Samsel as the face of the Capitol insurrection. While the prosecution assessed he was the instigator of the riot, right-wing apologists paint him as the poster child of mistreatment endured by defendants implicated in the riot.
Samsel had written open letters to sympathetic members of Congress, including Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, in which he called himself a “political prisoner” and complained of the medical treatment he had received while in custody.
More than 1,250 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and about 900 of them have been convicted.
