A Montco gym owner who said his martial-arts training led him to join Jan. 6 rioters pleads guilty

The owner of a Montgomery County gym who initially said he had joined the mob of pro-Trump rioters that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to help people suffering inside admitted in court Tuesday that he knowingly entered the building illegally.

Jim Robinson, 60, of Schwenksville, told FBI agents last year that as a fourth-degree master black belt in the Korean fighting style of Tang Soo Do, he had always been taught to help people in need. He said he had been drawn to the crowds by screams and cries of people rushing into the building.

And even as he was pleading guilty to one misdemeanor count of illegally demonstrating in the Capitol building, Robinson paused to note that he had done his best to render aid.

He helped a 60-year-old woman who had fallen and was in danger of being trampled by the crowds, he told U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich. And he said he had chided another rioter for lighting up a joint in the halls of Congress.

“No matter what side or what beliefs you have, that’s not what you do in the building,” Robinson said. “I found it repugnant.”

Friedrich remained unimpressed. She repeatedly questioned Robinson about whether he knew he wasn’t supposed to enter the Capitol — no matter what he may have done while there — before accepting his guilty plea .

“I’ve got to own up to what I did,” Robinson finally said.

Robinson’s plea makes him the 49th Pennsylvania defendant convicted of playing a role in the Capitol attack — a list that includes former police officers, small-business owners, several members of the Philadelphia Proud Boys, and at least one other gym owner.

Dawn Bancroft, the former owner of Bucks County Elite Fitness in Doylestown, was sentenced to two months in prison last year for participating in the riot and filming a video afterward in which she said she had been looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to “shoot her in the friggin’ brain.”

Like Bancroft and Robinson, many of the Pennsylvania defendants have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor crimes such as illegally demonstrating on Capitol grounds — an offense punishable by up to a year in prison. Meanwhile, others like Philadelphia Proud Boys president Zachary Rehl, face charges of playing a central role in the planning behind the attack and have opted to take their chances at trial.

On Robinson’s profile page with the American Tang Soo Do Association, he said he began training in the martial art in 1990 after two seasons playing football for a Pottstown team.

His social media accounts feature photos of him in various martial-arts poses as well as one in which he is holding an American flag with a logo of the Three Percenters, an antigovernment militia. Other posts are peppered with right-wing messages railing against everything from inflation and U.S. relations with Russia to COVID-19 precautions and vaccines.

FBI agents identified Robinson — the owner of King of Prussia-based Robinson’s Martial Arts & Fitness, known to his students as “Master J” — in surveillance footage after receiving a tip from a confidential source.

Dressed in all black with his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail and his face occasionally covered with a black balaclava, he was pictured among a crowd that pushed its way into the Rotunda’s east entrance. Security stills show him spending several minutes inside, pumping his fist in the air, shouting and chanting.

At one point, he was caught on camera removing a velvet rope from a security post meant to keep people out of unauthorized areas and holding it over his head like a trophy.

But in court Tuesday, Robinson portrayed himself as only an accidental participant in the chaos of the day.

“There were people everywhere,” he said. “You’d get pushed forward, then you’d get pushed back, then you’d get pushed left, then pushed right. People were falling down. … I was not trying to get in there. I was kind of stuck in the mob.”

As a result of his guilty plea, he will face up to a year in prison at a sentencing hearing set for April.