Brandon Fellows had never attended a Trump rally before last week. He said he was motivated to drive to Washington after seeing a tweet from the president. "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th," President Donald Trump wrote on Dec. 19. "Be there, will be wild!"
Fellows didn't know about a planned march that would eventually overtake the U.S. Capitol. He said he had simply come to see Trump give a speech.
But within hours of watching Trump's speech, Fellows had his feet propped up on a table in the office of a U.S. Senator, smoking a joint. He roamed the halls of the Capitol, heckled police officers and posted videos along the way on Snapchat.
"I have no regrets," said Fellows, a 26-year-old former grocery store worker from upstate New York who now makes money cutting trees and repairing chimneys. "I didn't hurt anyone, I didn't break anything. I did trespass though, I guess."
Indeed, in the days since the upheaval, Fellows said his profile on the dating app Bumble is "blowing up" after he posted pictures of himself at the Capitol.
Fellows, who lives in a converted school bus, said he stopped working last spring because of fears of Covid-19. But he said he became disillusioned when New York state denied him unemployment benefits. "For awhile, in early March and April, I was super poor," he said.
Fellows said he gets much of his news from conservative commentators on YouTube, including Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder. He said he has also started watching Newsmax and One America News, which have both promoted false claims of a rigged election.
He said his political views have created friction with his family, so much so that on Christmas Day only his grandparents invited him to dinner. They asked him to eat on his bus because he didn't take Covid-19 seriously enough, he said.
His stepfather of 14 years, Timothy Monroe, said he wasn't surprised when he learned that Fellows was inside the Capitol. "He knows what he believes," Monroe said. "You can't really change it with any kind of reality."
Fellows said he came to D.C. in part because he believes that the election was rigged. But his primary motivation was his anger at government measures to prevent Covid-19, such as lockdowns of restaurants and gyms.
"This is the last stand," Fellows said, in an interview with a Bloomberg News reporter prior to Trump's speech. "I feel like I've seen a lot of the election fraud evidence, and I don't understand why nothing is being done." Trump's claims of election fraud in the Nov. 3 election have been rejected by state and federal courts, as well as some members of his own party.
Following the conclusion of Trump's speech, Fellows joined in on the march on Pennsylvania Avenue, headed toward the Capitol. "I was like 'Oh cool, there's gonna be a march,'" he said. "I've never been in a march."
By the time he arrived, he said the barriers protecting the perimeter had already been overrun. As he was scaling a wall to reach the Senate side of the Capitol, he said he was thinking, "I'm not missing this, this is history." Fellows helped others climb over the wall, videos show.
Fellows's interactions with police officers inside the Capitol led him to believe there wouldn't be consequences for going inside. "Did I think I was going to get in trouble?" Fellows said. "Uh, no."
After leaving the Capitol, Fellows posed for pictures next to a line of police officers in riot gear and on an abandoned police motorcycle.
He said he is planning to return to Washington for more protests surrounding President-Elect Joe Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20, and he predicted there would be more violence. The FBI issued a warning that there are plans for armed protests in D.C. and at all 50 state capitals in the days leading up to the inauguration.
‘No Regrets’: A Capitol Rioter Tells His Story From Inside
Brandon Fellows had never attended a Trump rally before last week. He said he was motivated to drive to Washington after seeing a tweet from the president. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” President Donald Trump wrote on Dec. 19. “Be there, will be wild!”
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