Jackson Reffitt said he’d been concerned for some time about his father’s involvement with a right-wing militia group, the Texas Three Percenters, but after the 2020 election became alarmed about the tone of his father’s anti-government rhetoric. He repeatedly described “paranoia” that led him to report his father’s text messages to the FBI on Christmas Eve, about two weeks before the attack on the Capitol.
“What’s about to happen will shock the world,” Guy Reffitt texted his son that day. “We are about to rise up the way the Constitution was written.”
Jackson Reffitt said it sounded ominous to him.
“Receiving these messages and reading them, my paranoia pretty much blew over, so, I decided to alleviate some anxieties off my shoulders and to Google FBI and … go forward with any information I had,” he recalled.
He would later go on to record conversations with his father after he returned from Washington, and provide evidence that his dad threatened him to keep quiet about his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. That evidence has formed a crucial part of the government’s case against Guy Reffitt, and sets the case apart from the nearly 800 defendants charged in connection with the insurrection.
Jackson Reffitt seemed calm but subdued on the witness stand, and occasionally looked straight ahead from his seat — apparently at his father, who was seated directly across the courtroom. He said the process of deciding to report his dad to the FBI was nerve-wracking.
“I was nervous. I didn’t know what I was doing and I just felt gross,” Jackson Reffitt said. “I don’t think I can explain it. I just felt uncomfortable. … Just to Google that and to report my father — just saying it all out is pretty … weird.”
He said he didn’t hear back from the FBI until Jan. 6, two weeks after he used his phone to go on the agency’s website and serve up the tip about his father. But by then it was too late.
Jackson Reffitt described watching the Jan. 6 attack unfold on the news at home with his mother, and seeing law enforcement officials with guns drawn inside the Capitol and learning from his mother that his father was there.
“I pretty much stood there in awe and disappointment, saddened and scared,” he said. “I was terrified — I believe we all were — for the people there, what’s going to happen — as well as at a loss of words.”
Jackson Reffitt, currently a community college student, chewed gum on the stand — until a prosecutor discreetly stepped in to offer him a tissue to spit it out.
He said he and his father were close until 2016 or so, with their relationship becoming more strained as each of their political views became more polarized and his dad became more and more involved in the far-right militia group.
Jurors saw numerous text and chat messages from Guy Reffitt on Thursday, including one sent on Dec. 27 that said: “Give me liberty or give me death. The fuel is set. We will strike the match in DC on the 6th.”
Reffitt’s defense has dismissed his rhetoric as overheated boasting. But some of the online comments prosecutors presented to the jury on Thursday seemed more like practical advice than rhetoric.
At one point, Reffitt told other militia members that before leaving for Washington, he had put his affairs in order — alluding to the possibility he might die on Jan. 6. He said his security company would transfer into his wife’s name. “She will collect my life insurance,” he said.
Reffitt’s attorney, William Welch, continued on Thursday with his minimalist approach to his client’s defense. Welch spent only a few minutes cross-examining the FBI agent who handled Reffitt’s electronic devices and spent a couple of hours on the stand presenting many of his texts, chat messages, photos and videos to the jury.
Welch asked the agent, Stacy Shahrani, whether she could assess whether any of the files she reviewed might have been “changed” before she got it.
“It depends,” she said.
“Are you familiar, with your work, with the term deepfake?” the defense attorney asked, prompting an objection from the prosecution.
Shahrani later said she’d heard the term, but had seen no indication that anyone had tampered with any of the files.