I Will Never Be My Children’s Friend. I Will Always Be Their Father
In still shots from police body cameras Evan Neuman appears to grab a barricade separating Capitol Police from rioters in front of Capitol Building.
“It’s not fair.
A leader of this country should not use people
as pawns in a way that bypasses someone’s rational thought.
I just think it’s really sickening that politicians
in this country are not touchable,
but individuals [like my dad] are painted
as the leader [of the events of January 6].”
Peyton Reffitt
I cannot help but pray for the children of Guy Reffitt.
Because he was a man of his word, the words – the beginning of the homily at the Mass of the Resurrection for our father – came easily:
“I don’t remember when. I don’t remember where. I don’t remember to whom he was speaking. But somewhere, sometime, some place, I heard our father say, ‘I will never be my children’s friend. I will always be their father.’ And he was – always our father.”
While it’s difficult not to stand in judgement, we can only hope that sometime, somewhere, someplace, Guy Reffitt will again be a father to his children.
In September 2023, The Washington Post’s Dan Rosenweig-Ziff reported:
“Roughly 15 percent of the more than 1,100 people charged for actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were turned in by family members, friends or acquaintances, according to an analysis by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.”
On May 6, 2024, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia marked the fortieth month since the assault on the U.S. Capitol and Democracy with an updated statistical report.
More than 1,424 defendants have been charged in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Approximately 510 have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including 133 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
Approximately 11 individuals have been arrested on charges related to assaulting a member of the media or destroying their equipment.
Of the 1,334 defendants charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building, 127 have been charged with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon. [For those doing the math, just over 9 percent of those charged had some kind of weapon.]
More than 355 defendants have been charged with corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding, or attempting to do so.
For those who still believe the myth of simple, nonviolent “tourists”:
255 have plead guilty to felonies.
365 have plead guilty to misdemeanors; 97 of those who have plead guilty to felonies have plead to federal charges of assaulting law enforcement officers and 58 additional defendants have plead guilty to feloniously obstructing, impeding, or interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder. Of these 155, 145 have been sentenced to prison terms of up to 15 years.
165 individuals have been found guilty – either by a jury of their peers or in bench trials; another 37 individuals have been convicted following an agreed-upon set of facts.
Approximately 884 defendants have had their cases adjudicated; 541 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration; approximately 172 have been sentenced to periods of home detention; and 31 received combined sentences of home detention and incarceration.
The May 6 United States Attorney’s Office report included a request for the public’s help in locating Evan Neuman. According to his indictment, based largely on police body camera footage, Neuman called police officers “little bitches,” who “kneel to antifa” and said to one officer “I’m willing to die. Are you?”
Neuman, 51, is charged with 14 crimes, including “assaulting four police officers with his fists and using a metal barricade and ramming it into a line of police. Neuman is not one of the “hostages” constantly referred to by the 45th president and his congressional/ political allies. He’s an international fugitive. He claimed to be “willing to die,” but turned tail and ran – through Italy and Ukraine to Russia-allied Belarus, abandoning his two teenage children still in California.
It’s difficult – almost oxymoronic – to claim a Capitol- and Democracy-assaulter is a “political prisoner” when he or she has plead guilty. Genuine political or ideological prisoners are not incarcerated for the violence they’ve perpetrated against police officers or the nation’s democracy and been “caught in the act” on police body cameras or the videos their fellow rioters broadcast on Facebook. Political prisoners are victims of state oppression and/or repression.
Merriam-Webster.com (the dictionary people) defines “hostage” as “a person held by one party in a conflict as a pledge pending the fulfillment of an agreement” or “a person taken by force to secure the taker’s demands.”
On June 17, 2024 Reuters news agency reported “Russia is holding at least a dozen American citizens in jail, including journalists and active duty soldiers.” Among them:
Evan Gershkovich, Wall Street Journal reporter, sentenced for “espionage” in a secret trial in July to 16 years in a Russian high security penal colony;
Paul Whelan, former Marine, arrested in 2018 and serving a 16-year sentence;
Alsu Kurmasheva, dual U.S./Russian citizen and Prague-based reporter for Radio Free Europe;
Gordon Black, U.S. staff sergeant charged with stealing $13 from his girlfriend and threatening to kill her;
Robert Gilman, former U.S. Marine charged with a drunken attack on a police officer on a train;
Ksenia Kareline, dual U.S./Russian national who donated about $50 to a U.S. based non-profit that donates non-military aid to Ukraine.
The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and other news agencies have repeatedly reported Russian President Vladimi Putin is holding the Americans as bargaining chips – to be exchanged for Vadim Krasikov, one of Putin’s favorite hitmen, currently serving a 2019 life sentence for the assassination of a 40-year-old Georgian citizen of Chechen descent who fought Russian troops in Chechnya and later claimed asylum in Germany. Krasikov is a former colonel in the Russian intelligence service, the FSB.
It's simple: If the U.S. can get Germany to return Krasikov, Putin will release Gershkovich, Whelan and (maybe) some others. The Americans in Russian jails and prisons are hostages. January 6 rioters are incarcerated after being found guilty by juries of their peers or are still in jail awaiting trial because of the severity of the charges against them and/or because – like Evan Neuman - they’re flight risks.
Anyone who continues to call them “hostages” is deliberately lying.
At 1:09 p.m. on Christmas Eve 2020, Guy Reffitt texted his family:
“That’s what we all want but the machine just keeps grinding us down. Too many lines have been crossed. Too many years this happened. We are about to rise up the way the Constitution was written. Look up Maybury v. Madison 1803. Read it well and it will help explain this scenario.”
That evening, Reffitt’s son Jackson, then 18, went to his room, closed the door and filed an online tip to the FBI, warning that “his dad was going to do something big,” according to prosecutors.
Twelve days later, Jackson’s younger sister, Peyton, saw a social media picture of her father on the Capitol steps and initiated the following exchange with her father:
Peyton:
dad please be safe !! You know you are risking not only your business but ur life too and that isn’t just something to through away lol
Dad:
I have no intentions on throwing it away. I love ALL of your with ALL of my heart and soul. This is for our country and for ALL OF YOU and your kids. God Bless us one and all…
During the “rally” that preceded the assault on the Capitol, Guy Reffitt recorded himself saying the ensuing mob would drag lawmakers, including the Speaker of the House, out of the building. Hours later, he confronted police officers at a key entry point and used a megaphone to encourage people to push through the barricades placed to protect the building and legislators, a move prosecutors said helped the mob overrun police lines. He was not seen entering the building or assaulting officers.
That same day, Jackson met with an FBI agent and shared text messages and recordings of private conversations in which his father talked about carrying a weapon on Capitol grounds, how he motivated people in the assaulting mob to move forward and why he couldn’t “let his country fall.”
Guy Reffitt was arrested on January 16, 2021. On January 22, Jackson appeared on CNN, telling anchor Chris Cuomo: “I am kind of on my own with my family right now, with my own views about my dad. And it might be my fault for talking to authorities, but I don’t want to think that. He’s an adult and made his own decisions.”
However, according to a supporting affidavit for Guy Reffitt’s arrest warrant, when he returned home, he warned Peyton, 16, and Jackson: “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor and you know what happens to traitors. Traitors get shot.”
“I looked at my sister and she looked at me flabbergasted, almost confused. I was pretty grossed out” and “scared, not only for myself but for my sister,” Jackson told the jury during his father’s March 2022 Washington trial; he was 19-years-old at the time he testified.
To this day, it appears that some of those charged with January 6 crimes still do not know that they were reported by family members.
Despite pleadigng not guilty, Guy Reffitt was convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding, interfering with police in a riot, transporting a firearm for that purpose, armed trespassing and tampering with witnesses — his threats against Jackson and Peyton. He was sentenced to 87 months.
Peyton told members of the media, “Trump deserves life in prison if my father is in prison for this long.”
Evan Neumann
In a July 2, 2024 TheDailyBeast.com interview Jackson observed:
“My dad ran up the Capitol steps under Trump flags. If Trump was not involved, my father would have never been there. He would have never heard that language to incite him to really think that he’s doing something good, that he’s going to protect the country, that he’s going to fight for it.
“My dad was out listening to Trump’s speech right before going up to the Capitol. And, all my dad was saying is, ‘Once he’s done talking, we're going right to that Capitol.’ Without Trump’s language that day, I doubt he would have the energy or motive to do that.”
Jackson told TheDailyBeast he is certain that Trump deliberately roused his father and the others into what followed.
“He was using that sort of language to incite, to scare, to fearmonger, and to get people really active in a very dangerous way, which for people like my dad that fell down a rabbit hole, [it] really, really dug into his mind, into thinking of himself as a martyr, into thinking of himself as someone that needs to do this to save his family, when in reality, Trump just used them. Trump went home, and my dad was arrested 20 days later.”
Guy Reffitt is not a “political prisoner” or “hostage” and he stopped being a husband and father when, in his son’s words, he “went to the Capitol with a gun. He walked up the Capitol steps with a gun on his hip.”
Today, daughter Peyton, who has experienced serious anxiety in the time since her father’s arrest, is living with her older sister Sarah; their contacts with their brother are rare.
Nicole Reffitt, their mother, regularly participates in “vigils” outside the District of Columbia jail for January 6th arrestees.
Approaching my father’s age when he died, I’m grateful he was “always our father.”