‘I didn’t punch any officers,’ North Carolina man says after new Jan. 6 assault charges
Former Marine Lee Stutts of Lake Norman on Saturday defended himself against new federal charges against him related to the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I didn’t do what they say I did,” the 46-year-old Terrell resident told The Charlotte Observer, days after a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted him on two more charges. “I didn’t punch any officers. I didn’t push any officers.”
A superseding indictment filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia adds two counts of assault and resisting or impeding officers using a dangerous weapon, for a total of 15 counts against Stutts, according to an Observer review of court records.
A superseding indictment typically adds charges to an original indictment after investigators obtain additional information.
A federal grand jury originally indicted Stutts on Jan. 10, the Observer previously reported.
On Jan. 6, 2021, after a speech by then-President Donald Trump, Stutts joined several thousand people who ascended on the Capitol building in Washington. There, a crowd broke through police barricades, breached the building and attempted to stop the joint session of Congress where electoral votes were being counted in the 2020 presidential election.
Members of the U.S. House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack found that Trump provoked his supporters to violence through his false allegations of fraud in the election.
Four people died at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, WTOP reported — a woman shot by a police officer, two men of natural causes and a woman who died from an accidental amphetamine overdose. Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer assaulted at the scene, died a day later of a stroke that was ruled natural, according to officials.
“Whup somebody’s ass from antifa’’
Stutts is accused of pushing and shoving officers with his hands, a barricade, a battering ram and a bike rack as he helped lead the Capitol breach, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
In an interview in January, Stutts told the Observer that he thought antifa would be at the Capitol, but he instead encountered walls of police officers with shields and batons.
He was referring to the far-left, anti-fascist activists whom President Donald Trump blamed for the protests against racial injustice across America in 2020.
“I went up there to support our country and to whup somebody’s ass from antifa,” Stutts said in January. “We have to protect the people.”
“I wore a helmet and had my fists,” he told the Observer in January. “I roughhoused a little bit, but I didn’t punch them, none of that.”
Although evidence suggests the crowds that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were overwhelmingly made up of longtime Trump supporters, Stutts on Saturday said he believed FBI agents who didn’t like Trump infiltrated and provoked the crowd. The notion that the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 riot is a conspiracy theory that lacks evidence, The Associated Press has reported.
Someone poured fake blood near him to further incite people, Stutts said.
“It’s all about Trump,” he said of the FBI. “They vote for Biden.”
He said he never assaulted officers with a large sign, as alleged in an FBI agent’s affidavit. The sign appeared behind him in the crowd and then above his head, Stutts told the Observer. “I was trying to protect my face,” he said.
What FBI affidavit says
In the affidavit, the FBI agent said Stutts and other rioters moved a large sign on wheels with a metal frame toward a police line and barricade. “The rioters used the sign as a battering ram against officers attempting to hold the line,” the agent said.
Stutts then grabbed the bike rack barricade beneath the sign and pushed it toward the officers, according to the affidavit.
After police took the sign from the rioters, video shows Stutts throwing a water bottle at the police line, the FBI agent said.
Later that afternoon, “Stutts was one of the rioters leading the way” in a final breaking of the police line, the agent said. “After the Plaza was overrun, Stutts could be observed raising his arms and pumping his fists in a celebratory manner as police officers retreated from the oncoming swarm of rioters.”
The accusations are false, Stutts reiterated to the Observer on Saturday.
“It’s just a bunch of mess,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Justice media affairs office did not respond last week to a request for comment.
