Federal authorities have secured a guilty plea from Maryland man Steven Patrick Cook, who admitted to two felony offenses of assaulting, resisting, or impeding police after participating in the violence at the U.S. Capitol of January 6, 2021, where he repeatedly confronted police officers.
Outside the Capitol building, Cook “pushed between and against police officers to further break the line and repeatedly grabbed at police officers’ batons and swung his closed fist at their heads,” per a timeline of his actions provided by federal authorities. Later, Cook reportedly joined the infamous violence inside the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace tunnel, a structure created via the construction at the complex for the then-upcoming presidential inauguration putting Joe Biden in office.
With a gas mask in tow inside that tunnel a little under an hour after fellow Capitol riot participants first entered the Capitol building elsewhere, Cook “bull-rushed his way, head-first, toward the police in an attempt to break the police line,” federal authorities added. Bull-rushing — which, as its name suggests, refers to a sudden and aggressive rush towards the target — is also a term used in football contexts.
Cook was arrested late last year, making his guilty plea represent a somewhat quick turnaround. The seriousness of his charges suggests that he will eventually face a prison sentence years in length when given his consequences by federal Judge Trevor McFadden, who is among the federal judges already known for handling some of the proceedings involving this violence.
Another, Tanya Chutkan, is the trial-level judge handling the criminal case accusing Donald Trump himself of attempted election interference over his actions after the 2020 presidential race, a case now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court as Trump claims that he holds wide-ranging legal protections by mere virtue of once serving as president that should shut down the proceedings.
