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WASHINGTON — On Friday night, a Fox News guest who represents several Jan. 6 defendants sent out a series of tweets suggesting that one of the people who threw bear spray at U.S. Capitol officers was an undercover officer .
In fact, he was a Trump supporter who had already been arrested and charged. Monday morning, he pleaded guilty.
Edward Rodriguez, 28, of Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of assaulting, resisting or obstructing certain officers, causing bodily harm. Online sleuths, who identified Rodriguez in early 2021, had nicknamed him “Suit Macer”, because he wore a suit and “maced” a line of officers.
In a nearly empty courtroom a few blocks from the Capitol, Assistant U.S. Attorney Will Widman laid out the facts the government says it can prove in court: that Rodriquez traveled by train to Harrisburg, Pa. , and joined a charter bus that arrived a few hours before the president. Speech by Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, in the middle of the night. This could prove, Widman said, that while on the restricted U.S. Capitol grounds, Rodriquez used a can of bear spray to directly assault three police officers and indirectly assault four others and that one of the officers, who was wearing contact lens wear at the time, had to be assisted by a supervisor due to overwhelming and intense pain.
Rodriguez did at least two media interviews on Jan. 6, wearing the same outfit he wore when he assaulted seven police officers in a mob attack, the government said.
“Here in America, we are fighting back. We will never give in to dictatorship, corruption, communism or socialism. We the people will never put up with their bulls —,” Rodriguez said in one of the interviews, according to the government.
The government also pointed to a survey Rodriguez made on Google after the attack: “What does bear spray do to humans?”
Rodriguez, who bounced off the podium wearing a bright blue suit, nearly forfeited his plea deal after the judge read the consequences of a felony plea. He emphatically pointed out that he was hit with pepper spray first. He admitted to harming officers, but was quick to note that it happened “right after he was sprayed, of course”. He said he found the pepper spray on the floor.
U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, appointed by Trump in 2017, eventually accepted the plea after Rodriguez took a break to talk to his attorney. Friedrich set the sentence for July 18.
Leaving the courthouse, Rodriguez was a little more camera-shy than he was on Jan. 6, using his gloved hand to try to obstruct the view of his face when he saw a reporter take pictures. photos of his departure. He jumped in an Uber with his lawyer.
Online, however, some people now think Suit Macer is a Fed. Joseph McBride, a New York lawyer representing several Jan. 6 defendants, tweeted on Friday about an apparently recovered Washington police document that noted that undercover officers were supposed to wear wristbands rainbow-colored on January 6. He later posted an image of a man pepper spraying while wearing a wristband.
“It’s probably just a coincidence…” McBride wrote.
Pro-Trump social media users ate it, thinking an undercover officer had pepper sprayed other officers. “Wow! Caught in the act!!!” wrote one Twitter user. “If this photo and document is genuine then it’s proof that a police officer sprayed something toxic at another police officer,” another wrote. “That would be metaphorical proof of the Fedsurgency’s ‘hard proof’ level.” Another user agreed: it was a “smoking gun” that showed “bracelets identifying J6 government instigators.”
A few basic details didn’t match: The bracelet was on the attacker’s right hand, not his left, as the Washington police document describes. It wasn’t rainbow colored either; it appeared to be red, white and blue. More importantly, the owner of that wrist had already been identified, arrested, and charged: video from those sprayed officers shows that the wrist was Rodriguez’s. He had to plead guilty within 72 hours of McBride’s tweet.
McBride, who recently took to Fox News to discuss the Out-of-context videos from January 6 played by Tucker Carlsondeclined to say whether, at the time of his tweet, the person with the bracelet had already been identified and would soon plead guilty.
“I won’t comment on that,” McBride told NBC News on Tuesday. “Look, you know, we have a job to do. There’s an information war going on.”
McBride said he would not intentionally lie to the public. “I would never knowingly release false information to the public, that’s not what I do. And it’s the truth,” he said Tuesday.
About 1,000 members of the pro-Trump mob have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.