A Fairfax County supporter of a white-supremacist group was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for assaulting a police officer and destroying media equipment at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Joseph Brody, 24, said in federal court in Washington that he “didn’t intend to harm any innocents.” He said he believed it would have taken “supernatural courage” to “do what is right in the moment” and “go against the crowd.” U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said that she found his remorse lacking but that she was giving him a relatively light sentence because he had just turned 21 at the time of the attack.
“I hope you will reflect on the impact this had,” Friedrich said.
Brody was one of several young men who traveled to the Capitol together on Jan. 6 as supporters of Nick Fuentes, an online personality who founded the America First Foundation and whose followers call themselves “Groypers.” Fuentes — who has espoused racist and antisemitic views, denied the Holocaust and endorsed segregation — gained new prominence in 2022 when he dined with Donald Trump and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Brody was prolific in “America First” chatrooms, where he frequently made sexist, racist and anti-gay comments and fantasized about rape and murder, according to anti-fascist researchers who reviewed leaked chat files.
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Brody and his friends were among the first rioters to enter the Capitol, about 2:15 p.m. They then went into an office belonging to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Brody separated from them and went onto the Senate floor, where he photographed some documents he thought looked important, according to facts detailed in his plea agreement from February. After leaving the building, he shoved a bike rack into a police officer guarding the north side of the building, who responded by spraying Brody with a fire extinguisher. Brody then joined a group destroying media equipment on the Capitol grounds; he took apart a corded phone and pulled out an extension cord.
Friedrich agreed with prosecutors that Brody was “a leader,” someone “taking charge” in the riot rather than just a follower of the crowd. But she called his pushing of the officer “kind of pathetic” and said many assaults were more egregious.
Public defender Alexis Gardner described Brody in court as akin to “a young, dumb frat boy,” drunk on mob passion instead of beer.
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“They have the president behind them,” she said, referring to Trump. “They all feel that they’re on the right side of history.”
Gardner argued that incarcerating Brody was counterproductive, given that the “neo-Nazi ideals” he had expressed are widespread in U.S. prisons and could prove persuasive again: “His brain still isn’t fully developed yet.”
After Brody’s arrest, Fuentes — who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 but did not go inside — outed his former ally as the commenter “Broseph” on America First internet forums. While Broseph accused some far-right figures of alienating mainstream Republicans, according to chats leaked to the alternative media site Unicorn Riot, he also spoke against immigrants, journalists and Jewish people.
“Easy to dehumanize immigrants when you’re forced to be around them,” one 2018 post reads. In another, Broseph wrote, “Journalists have names and addresses. … They should be worried about death squads coming for their lives.” He bragged about having Eastern European roots, saying his people “purged” Jews from the continent, and said he was sympathetic to a mass murderer who targeted young women. He occasionally commented on Virginia politics; in 2018, he expressed support for state lawmaker Nick Freitas in the Republican primary to take on Sen. Tim Kaine (D).
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After the Jan. 6 riot, Brody briefly coordinated door-knocking efforts in Fairfax County for Glenn Youngkin (R) in his successful gubernatorial campaign. A spokesman for the Republican Party of Virginia said Brody was an employee for only about a month in 2021; he did not work for the Youngkin campaign.
Brody was a football captain at Robert E. Lee High School in Springfield, Va., which was renamed for late congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis in 2020. After high school, while working various jobs to pay tuition at Northern Virginia Community College, Brody told the court, he “began getting more and more involved in politics … through online discussions and videos.” That content, he said, “led me down a path toward more and more fringe ideas.”
He dropped out of school during the coronavirus pandemic, he said in court. In a letter to the judge, he said he then “started to get involved” with the Groyper movement and participated in “unfortunate” events, including the Jan. 6 riot. But, he said, “that was a phase in my life that has passed. For over two years now I have not been associated with those people.”
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Friedrich did not ask Brody about his engagement with white-supremacist ideas; instead, she focused on his dropping out of college and his sporadic employment.
“Most 24-year-olds aren’t just sitting at home being taken care of by mom or dad,” the judge said.
The sentencing was split over two days several weeks apart, and in the interim Brody launched an outdoor handyman company. But Friedrich said Friday that she was still bothered by his “lack of motivation.”
“I can’t help but be concerned by your inability to launch,” she told him.
His mother, Maureen Brody, who has run for school board in Fairfax County and for a seat in the state legislature, has said that she was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6. On social media, she has promoted Fuentes’s work and false claims about human trafficking purportedly orchestrated by Democrats. She declined outside court to comment on her views.
