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Reffitt’s defense attorney pleaded for his release, downplaying his comments about the violence as mere words.
Faruqui decided to keep Reffitt in jail pending trial.
The judge’s ruling prompted a whimper from the family over the court conference call line. Reffitt’s wife, daughter and girl’s boyfriend had gathered for the line hearing, with the girl’s boyfriend also testifying in court on Monday.
“[It] is not an easy thing to say, but I think it is what the law requires in this case. … It has clearly placed a huge burden on your family, ”Faruqui said at Monday’s hearing.
Reffitt reportedly traveled to Washington with guns in his car in the days leading up to Jan.6 alongside another unnamed member of the extremist paramilitary group Three Percenters, according to Justice Department court records.
After the attack, he returned home to Texas – where he was met by his 16-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son, who disapproved of his pro-Trump policies. The trio got into a fight, with Reffitt telling his daughter he would put a bullet in her cell phone if she posted about him on social media, according to court records and testimony at Monday’s hearing. He finally told his daughter and son that if they reported him, they were traitors and “traitors would get shot,” his daughter said.
The court hearing was at least the third time that Reffitt’s family members have given details to authorities about him.
The girl had also testified about her father before a grand jury, according to debates on Monday.
“He’s not a violent person. He just says things. He talks a lot. … It’s just that he’s a queen of the theater,” she said during the hearing. “I wasn’t scared, I guess. It was boring in a way.”
In the days following the attack, Guy Reffitt was recorded speaking inside his home, and prosecutors now have the audio recordings, according to court documents. At home, Reffitt spoke of a video he took on January 6, bragged about and defended his role in the riot, and called it “a preface” because he promised not to to have finished.
The judge said he believed Reffitt may still pose a danger to the community, especially given the guns he kept, his statements about future violence and the additional messages he sent to d ‘other Trump supporters who supported a revolt against American governance. Faruqui also noted a silencer Reffitt owned for a gun, which was found in his home.
When Reffitt and the other Three Percenters visited Washington in early January, he brought an AR-15 rifle and pistol with him, prosecutors said. Prosecutors said Reffitt, clad in body armor, wore the pistol and plastic cuffs as he advanced on a police line protecting the Capitol. When investigators later searched his house and found his weapons, Reffitt first told them that the muffler he had was a “fuel filter.”
Reffitt had also posted ahead of time about “walking in heat,” and after the riot, other messages about shifting his target to mainstream media and tech companies, according to departmental court records. of Justice.
He also allegedly wrote to other Three Percenters, prosecutors said, about a messaging app on the Capitol takeover.
The extremist group Three Percenters has attempted to move closer to what its members believe to be a small armed group of American revolutionaries who fought the British in the War of Independence, prosecutors said. It is one of the few extremist groups active during the Trump era that federal investigators leaned into as they tried to gain a better understanding of planning and coordination before the Capitol riot.
Prosecutors also said in Monday’s hearing that a Three Percent leader was questioned and was subsequently arrested, but did not provide further details or a name.
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