A former member of the Ohio National Guard, who investigators said went AWOL after President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday and charged with assaulting officers at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack.
Matthew Honigford, a 31-year-old from Delphos, Ohio, was arrested in his home state on Tuesday and faces three felony counts, including two counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and one count of civil disorder, along with several misdemeanors.
Video cited by the government shows the man identified as Honigford held a flagpole horizontally and pushed it into an officer after berating the officers on the west side of the Capitol, where some of the worst violence took place. One of the men standing alongside Honigford around the time of the assault — Taylor James Johnatakis — was convicted of multiple charges on Tuesday.
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Honigford, investigators said in an FBI affidavit, previously “stopped attending drill weekends” after Biden’s 2020 electoral victory over Donald Trump, with Honigford “stating that his sister was sick and he needed to be available to help her and that he did not trust the current state of the country following the election of Joe Biden as president.” A witness said Honigford “was reported Absent Without Leave but permitted to remain in the Ohio Army National Guard until his Expiration Term of Service date on March 14, 2022.”
Video viewed by NBC News shows the man identified as Honigford making sexually explicit comments about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as well as making comments about Pelosi's love of Jeni's ice cream and the cost of her freezer, the latter of which was a subject of a lot of attention from right-wing websites in 2020 after Pelosi appeared on The Late Late Show with James Cordon in Nov. 2020.
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