WASHINGTON — A Donald Trump supporter who federal authorities say built a giant pro-Trump billboard that the mob of Trump supporters used as a battering ram against police officers during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was arrested Tuesday.
Jeffrey Newcomb, a 41-year-old from Polk, Ohio, faces several charges, including felony charges of obstructing law enforcement during civil unrest and assaulting, resisting or obstructing federal officers while using or carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon. The FBI says he later bragged about his work on X.
“Went to Jan. 6 to protest peacefully and as loudly as possible: with 15-by-10-foot signs on a custom-made aluminum cart,” Newcomb wrote in 2023 on a now-deleted X-profile, FBI prosecutors said. “I spent seven hundred dollars on this. Keeping my identity secret because bullets are expensive.”
Several other Jan. 6 defendants have been charged with using the sign — which read in all caps: “Trump 2020 Keep America Great.” – as a battering ram during the attack.
“I went to the Capitol but was blocked by pylons, so the guys in the neighborhood came and picked it up [the sign] to throw it at the police,” Newcomb said, according to the FBI.
The FBI said Newcomb also wrote that “one of the protesters found the sign[] and place it on the Capitol. (I wasn’t).”
The FBI says they have traced surveillance cameras that show Newcomb “moved the sign around Constitution Avenue, NW and other areas near the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally near the White House” and that once he he reached the steps of Newcomb,’ along with other rioters assisting, his giant metal frame ‘TRUMP’ sign passed from the southwestern part of the West Plaza crowd into the center of the crowd.
“The metal sign frame was approximately 8 feet high and 11 feet wide, welded in place with screws and supported by large casters that were about the size of a person’s head. Rioters cheered the sign’s arrival and many in the crowd helped move the sign closer and closer to the police line,” the FBI said.
Newcomb and other rioters “then began pushing the sign onto a path to ram it into the police line,” then fell “as he began walking up the steps of the plaza” and then “got back up and grabbed the sign again time when the The crowd continued to push the sign forward,” the FBI said
As police officers “struggled to address the danger caused by the sign,” Newcomb “backed down and at one point supported rioters who continued to push the sign toward the police line by pushing on the rioters’ backs,” according to the FBI . “When police were struck by the sign, they could easily have fallen over due to the sheer size of the frame, and the sharp edges and corners could easily cause cuts or splits,” they said.
Last week, Trump called January 6 ‘a day of love’ wrongly claimed his supporters were unarmed. Many of the rioters were armed using a wide variety of weapons, including firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, bear spray and even explosives during the siege of the Capitol, which left more than 140 officers injured and several dead.
“There were no weapons there. We had no weapons. The others had weapons, but we had no weapons. And when I say we, these are the people who walked down – this was a small percentage of the total that no one sees and no one, no one shows. But that was a day of love,” he said.
A Trump supporter who attacked police recently said ahead of her sentencing that she was “duped” by the former president’s lies about the 2020 election.
More than 1,500 people have been charged in connection with the attack, and prosecutors have secured the convictions of more than 1,100 suspects. Judges have sentenced more than 600 Jan. 6 rioters to prison terms, with sentences ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in prison, for a Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
