Donald Trump sure knows how to pick them. One of those he enlisted to attack the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. was already charged with attempted first-degree murder. The FBI just arrested Matthew Beddingfield, even though those same detectives discovered him over 10 months ago. Now, he can add these charges, NBC News reported:
‘[F]elony charges of assaulting officers, impeding officers during a civil disorder, and carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon on restricted Capitol grounds, as well as several misdemeanors.’
He was first profiled in The Huffington Post story last March in an article about facial recognition technology. Members of an informal online detective group had tracked him down.
When he was 19, he allegedly shot another teen in the head while they were in the parking lot of a North Carolina Walmart. Afterward, he fled the scene. However, he turned himself in “the next morning.” He was jailed on a one million dollar bond. After his attorneys got his bail reduced to $100,000, he made it out. He pled guilty to a lesser charge for the murder and was then on probation.
Beddingfield and his father went to Washington on January 6, after being inspired by a November 2020 Trump rally. They brought along another Trump supporter, all believing the ex-president’s lies about a stolen election.
Videos showed that the younger Beddingfield was right at the front of the seething mob attempting to overthrow the American election:
‘[He was] jabbing at the police line with his American flag, throwing a metal object at the police, and appearing to give a Nazi salute. By the time Beddingfield emerged from the Capitol, his father, Jason Beddingfield, like thousands of others, was on the restricted exterior grounds of the U.S. Capitol.’
For some reason, Beddingfield was not facing charges until his father made the mistake of describing the January 6 event on his Facebook page. He called it taking “the country back.” The older man, holding a pro-Trump flag, also jumped a fence to enter the restricted Capitol grounds.
Beddingfield was scheduled to appear in Federal Court in the Eastern District of North Carolina.
It appears that the FBI could arrest over 2,500 people for participating in January 6. Thus far, it has arrested 725 of them for the attempted coup.
The online detectives have tracked down hundreds of those guilty of attacking the Capitol Building. Many insurrectionists were listed on the FBI’s Capitol Violence website, but they have not yet been arrested. The Beddingfield senior claimed his son was not there on January 6:
‘He was not there, he was not with me. He did not do the things that have been speculated about. I mean, there’s a lot of doppelgangers in the world, isn’t it? All technology is not foolproof, is it?’
Beddingfield was not the only one who pled guilty for attempted murder and then joined the January 6 insurrectionists, according to WSVN 7 News in Miami. A Florida man belonging to a “violent white supremacist prison gang” was also charged last summer. He spent six months in prison for his part on January 6.
There are still a number of people to shake out of this January 6 tangle.
Three White Lions podcast, Gloria Christie reads a chapter from her book of the same title. She also writes for the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Gloria Christie Report her newsletter for people on the go. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor in a briefer version of Bipartisan Report. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery (in process). Find her here on Facebook.
