Capitol Rioter Brothers Charged With Assaulting Journalist On Jan. 6

The Justice Department on Thursday arrested and charged two brothers who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 , 2021, accusing them of assaulting a photographer and stealing the journalist’s camera.

The brothers, 52-year-old Phillip Walker of Pennsylvania and 49-year-old David Walker of New Jersey, have been charged with forcibly taking an item from a person and assaulting a person with the intent to commit another felony. Those are on top of the misdemeanor charges faced by other Jan. 6 rioters.

NBC News was the first to report their arrests. While the DOJ’s complaint doesn’t name the photographer, NBC News identified her as Erin Schaff, one of three New York Times journalists at the Capitol the day of the riot. She has written about what happened to her that day, describing her fears of being killed.

“Grabbing my press pass, they saw that my ID said The New York Times and became really angry,” she wrote for the Times a day after the insurrection. “They threw me to the floor, trying to take my cameras. I started screaming for help as loudly as I could. No one came. People just watched. At this point, I thought I could be killed and no one would stop them. They ripped one of my cameras away from me, broke a lens on the other and ran away.”

The DOJ’s charges detail an interview the FBI conducted with Phillip Walker about a week after the riot, prompted by a tip the agency received about his participation. He admitted to the interviewers he had a physical confrontation with a person he believed to be a member of “Antifa,” took that person’s camera and later disposed of it in a body of water.

The FBI’s investigation uncovered that David Walker participated in the riot as well. Surveillance footage from the riot revealed that he pushed the photographer after she pursued the brothers to retrieve her camera equipment.

The charging documents also contain several photos of the Walkers at the Capitol that day.

The Walkers are among the roughly 1,500 people who’ve been charged in connection with the riot. More than 1,000 have been convicted, with more than 600 of them punished with incarceration. The longest sentence that’s been handed down is 22 years.

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has also been indicted on federal charges for his role in inciting the riot.

The former president has repeatedly spoken out in support of the rioters, even as recently as at this week’s debate between him and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, referring to them as “this group of people that have been treated so badly .”