The federal judge overseeing capitol rioter Brandon Fellows bond hearing told him it was a "bad idea" for him to represent himself, but Fellows, who has been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding insisted on taking the stand. As the judge predicted, Fellows put his foot in his mouth not once but twice by admitting he committed two additional felonies, reports WUSA 9.
Over the course of the nearly 2-hour hearing, Fellows rambled across a difficult-to-follow litany of complaints about his incarceration, stopping to touch on subjects as widely varied as the Taliban, Guantanamo Bay, a woman who'd left her child in a dumpster and a "constitutional lawyer" who had allegedly advised him to wrap his cell phone in tin foil to avoid capture.
In her much shorter cross-examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mona Furst got Fellows to admit – under oath – that he had climbed into the Capitol through a broken window without police permission, that he had used the previous judge's wife's contact information to try to get him removed from the case and that he had missed court-ordered mental health and drug testing appointments.
[Judge] McFadden, having listened to him talk for nearly two hours, then brought Fellows back down to Earth.
"You are charged with a federal felony," McFadden said. "This is not a community college where you get pats on the back."
Fellows was interviewed in February 2021 by WNYT 13 about his participation in the riot. He wore the same fake beard he wore during the riot:
Fellows says, at one point, he wandered into Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley's office and put his feet up on a table, as he and others passed around what appeared to be a marijuana joint.
"I do regret potentially smoking what may have been weed," he said. "I think that discredits me and makes me look stupid to a lot of people. And also it's not something I want to be sharing with my future children."
