WASHINGTON — A North Carolina man who was out on bail on an attempted murder charge when he joined a mob at the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6 pleaded guilty Thursday to a felony count of assaulting police.
Matthew Beddingfield, 22, of Middlesex, North Carolina, appeared before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to enter his plea of guilty to the single felony count. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop multiple other counts, including other felony charges of civil disorder and entering and remaining in a restricted grounds with a dangerous weapon.
Beddingfield was arrested in February 2022 after being identified in part by online sleuths – as well as by photographs his father had posted of them at a prior rally in support of former President Donald Trump in November 2020. According to charging documents, Beddingfield jumped over police barricades and charged a group of U.S. Capitol Police officers on the southwest side of the building before attacking them with a metal flagpole. Investigators also accused Beddingfield of joining a group of rioters inside the building who’d tried to storm the Senate Wing, but were eventually forced out by police.
According to court documents, Beddingfield was out on bail on Jan. 6, 2021, on a charge of attempted murder in connection with a December 2019 shooting in a Walmart parking lot. Beddingfield later pleaded guilty to felonious assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to probation.
Although Beddingfield was granted bond in his Jan. 6 case, prosecutors had argued for keeping him behind bars — in part because of what they described as his history of "deeply troubling" hate speech. They noted in a March 2022 detention memo that images from Jan. 6 appeared to show him giving a Nazi salute at the Capitol and that he had a history of expressing violent white supremacist views online.
"Beddingfield unabashedly expresses his wish that members of [minority] groups meet a violent end and in others he expresses a desire to inflict said violence or death on the same," prosecutors wrote at the time.
Beddingfield was scheduled to be sentenced on June 22. He’ll face a maximum term of eight years in prison.
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