WASHINGTON — DC Police say they are investigating after a convicted Jan. 6 participant reported being assaulted at a restaurant at the Wharf on July 4.
According to an incident report, Brandon Fellows, 29, of Schenectady, New York, told police he and another person who follows Jan. 6 cases, Corinne Cliford, had gone to Del Mar to celebrate the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision narrowing the scope of an obstruction statute used to charge hundreds of Capitol riot defendants, including Fellows.
Fellows told police two other patrons at the restaurant saw a pro-Trump baseball cap he was wearing and became agitated, telling him he was “not welcome with your Trump bulls***.” Video posted to social media by both Fellows and Cliford appears to show them engaging in a contentious back-and-forth with two other patrons, a man and a woman, who complained they were trying to enjoy their dinner and they were annoying them.
“Unfortunately, you’re making me happy that I’m being annoying,” Fellows says in the video.
All parties involved in the discussion appear to be drinking alcohol.
According to both the incident report and video posted to social media by Fellows and Cliford, the situation then further devolved. In separate videos shot from a distance an unknown amount of time later, the female patron can be heard yelling anti-Trump statements at Fellows before appearing to slap him on the side of the head. In the video, Fellows appears to respond by shoving the woman back – at which point her male companion punches Fellows twice in the head.
The incident then appears to erupt into a scuffle which was eventually broken apart by other restaurant patrons. According to the police report, the male and female patron then left the restaurant.
DC Police told WUSA9 on Monday that no arrests had been made and the case remained under investigation. The incident report indicates police are investigating the case as a bias-motivated crime.
A call to Del Mar seeking comment was not immediately returned Monday.
Fellows, a former chimney repairman, was convicted in August of one felony count of obstruction of an official proceeding and four misdemeanors for his role in the Capitol riot. At trial, prosecutors showed Fellows entering the U.S. Capitol through a broken window and then proceeding to Sen. Jeff Merkley’s (D-OR) office, where he smoked marijuana. Fellows then joined rioters in the Crypt before heckling officers who didn’t have helmets on his way out of the building. Prosecutors said Fellows then posted extensively on social media, “glorifying the violence of his fellow rioters.”
Fellows spent the majority of his case in pretrial detention after his bond was revoked due to multiple release violations, including calling the mother of his probation officer. After firing multiple attorneys, Fellows chose to represent himself – including during a disastrous bond review hearing in which he appeared to admit to illegally attempting to get judges removed from cases in D.C. and New York. In addition to his conviction at trial, Fellows was also found in criminal contempt of court for repeated outbursts, including calling the proceeding a “kangaroo court” and a “nazi court.”
In February, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden sentenced Fellows to 37 months in prison for his role in the Capitol riot. Fellows was also ordered to serve an additional five months behind bars for contempt of court due to his behavior at trial. Fellows received approximately 32 months’ credit for time spent in pretrial custody and began serving a three-year period of supervised release at the end of May.
Since release, Fellows has remained in D.C. Last month, according to a filing from the probation office, he was removed from a congressional hearing after shouting that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be sent to prison. Fauci, who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022 and helped lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration, was testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about the origins of COVID-19.
According to federal court records, Fellows was scheduled to appear again before McFadden on July 15 for a hearing at the request of the probation office. The probation petition was not publicly available on the docket.
Fellows, who is now represented by a federal public defender, has appealed his sentence to the D.C. Circuit and was due to submit his appellant brief by Aug. 29. Federal prosecutors have not yet indicated how they intend to proceed in dozens of cases where defendants like Fellows have been convicted on the obstruction of an official proceeding count affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling last month.