‘Vets For Trump’ Member Arrested By FBI For Capitol Riot Involvement

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Antonio LaMotta, a 63-year-old man residing in Virginia, was arrested by FBI agents this week for participating in last year’s Trump-incited attack on the Capitol, where he briefly made it inside the Capitol building as the violence unfolded before police pushed him out.

LaMotta is already facing other criminal charges, including for election interference, after he was discovered traveling to the Philadelphia Convention Center, where the tabulation of ballots from the 2020 election was underway, alongside “Vets for Trump” co-founder Joshua Macias and a small arsenal. LaMotta was a member of Macias’s group. The weapons in the duo’s possession at the time of their arrest on November 5, 2020, included handguns, an AR-15-style rifle, 160 rounds of ammo, a lock-picking kit, and a samurai sword, per The Philadelphia Inquirer. Charges imposed on LaMotta and Macias in connection to that incident also include criminal conspiracy and carrying firearms without the required licensing. The Capitol riot case against LaMotta was unsealed in federal court on Tuesday and employs security footage showing him inside the Capitol building.

His riot charges include four misdemeanors, which no matter their status can lead to jail-time in the event of an admittance or finding of guilt. LaMotta and Macias’s trial on the charges from the Philadelphia incident is scheduled for October. If the two weren’t stopped before potentially getting inside the convention center where counting votes in the Democratic-leaning area was underway, the weapons they carried certainly suggest lethal violence could have unfolded. The two men made it near the convention center before getting stopped and apprehended. A tip to law enforcement about what the two were doing said armed individuals were heading to Philadelphia to “straighten things out” amid the count.

The threat of political violence from dedicated supporters of Donald Trump is consistent and expanding. In a more recent case, a man named Ricky Shiffer attempted to force his way into an Ohio office of the FBI after agents raided Trump’s Florida property known as Mar-a-Lago in a government records probe.

According to available information, Shiffer fired a nail gun and had a rifle with him. A highly used account on Trump’s social media platform known as Truth Social seemingly belonged to Shiffer, who was shot and killed after an hours-long stand-off with law enforcement following the incident at the FBI office. After the 2020 election, election workers and others involved in the conducting of elections faced violent threats. In another case, Trump supporters attempted to force their way into the home of a Georgia election worker’s grandmother in hopes of making a so-called citizen’s arrest of that election worker — Shaye Moss — and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who was also an election worker in 2020. Freeman and Moss were targeted by baseless conspiracy theories about their supposed involvement in imaginary fraud. What if the rampaging Trump supporters found Freeman and Moss?

Featured Image (edited): via Blink o’fanaye on Flickr and available under a Creative Commons License