Kyle Fitzsimons is charged with assaulting police officers in the Jan. 6 insurrection but seeks pretrial release on the basis that he is not a violent person. A man who assaulted police during the Capitol riot in his butcher’s coat asked to be released from jail on Thursday, arguing that any violence on his part was stoked by elected officials making a fever pitch that the presidential election had been stolen. “He was swept up in the large crowd and behaved in a manner that was completely foreign to his actions before or after January 6th,” Natasha Taylor Smith wrote in her motion to revoke the detention of Kyle Fitzsimons. Fitzsimons, a 37-year-old former Marine from Lebanon, Maine, drove down to Washington to attend former President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 5. After the rally, he went to his car and changed into a white coat from his job as a freelance butcher and headed to the Capitol with an unstrung bow. Letting video from the riot speak for itself, prosecutors played a slideshow in court on Thursday to show how Fitzsimons grabbed the shoulder of a U.S. Capitol Police sergeant and tried to pull him into the crowd. The sergeant repeatedly struck Fitzsimons with a baton to get free of his grip, creating a gash on Fitzsimons’ forehead. The government followed that video with another that captured Fitzsimons lowering his shoulder before charging into a line of officers. Fitzsimons also assaulted a Metropolitan Police officer by pulling his gas mask to the side so another rioter could pepper-spray him. (…) Fitzsimons has a history of calling his congressional representatives about election fraud and impeachment, and prosecutors said they hear the same rhetoric that he used in his previous calls — which led to his participation in the Jan. 6 riot— in calls he has made from jail. “I need to get bailed out and rally the troops,” Fitzsimons said on one phone call that prosecutors played for Contreras on Thursday.
via courthousenews: ‘A lamb to Trump’s lion,’ butcher from Capitol riot wants out of jail