Matthew Mark Wood, a participant in last year’s Trump-incited attack on the Capitol who originally traveled to Washington, D.C., prior to the violence with his grandmother and explicitly said via text that he was prepared to participate in a “raid” of the Capitol, is facing the possibility of nearly five years in prison.
Wood pleaded guilty to six charges including the felony offense of obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting. Relevant to a determination of guilt under that charge is intent, and like other participants in the violence, Wood directly laid out his intent in text messages. “If they want to raid Congress, sign me up, I’ll be brave heart in that bitch!” he said on January 2 of last year via iMessage. Life comes at you fast. Prosecutors are now requesting 57 months in prison for Wood to be followed by three years of supervised release and accompanied by over $2,000 in financial penalties. The sentencing range for Wood’s case cited by prosecutors is from 51 to 63 months.
At the Capitol, Wood was among the first people who made it inside the building, where he apparently remained for over an hour until pressured out of the premises by police. He was not directly accused of assault, although in one odd sequence of events, he apparently removed some portions of the velvet rope marking a path inside of the Capitol. “He went down through Statuary Hall—stopping to remove the velvet rope from each of six stanchions he passed and dropping it to the ground,” a court filing in Wood’s case said. He also encountered chemical irritant while venturing through the Capitol. Both police and members of the riot crowd used chemical irritants during the hours of confrontations throughout that afternoon.
In another message from the day after the riot that was noted in the same filing, Wood expressed remorse. “I find comfort in it because I worked to stop violent destruction of the property,” he claimed to the recipient, although it’s unclear whether there’s any evidence of this claim. None was noted in the filing. He climbed through a window when first entering the Capitol building, and once inside, he waved a flag and used his phone while wandering around.
