The Bucks County man behind the moment that allegedly incited the Jan. 6 Capitol riot takes his case to trial

WASHINGTON — It was the shove that started it all.

Just before 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Ryan Samsel, of Bristol, led a group of four men in toppling a bike rack-barricade outside the U.S. Capitol, concussing an officer, and opening the floodgates to thousands of angry supporters of former President Donald Trump who would soon overrun the building.

As federal prosecutors tell it, that moment — before the smashing of windows and doors, before the all-out brawls that erupted with police, and before the violence that sent members of Congress scurrying from the mob that seized control of their chambers — was the precipitous incident in an attack on the U.S. government unrivaled in American history.

“[Samsel] and his codefendants cleared the way [for] the hours of terror, violence, destruction and injury that followed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle Mirabelli wrote in a recent court filing.

But as Samsel, a 39-year-old barber from Bristol, took his case before a federal judge on Monday, he maintained the government has greatly exaggerated his role.

“Those barricades didn’t fall because of anything Mr. Samsel did or was going to do — they were going to fall,” his defense lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., said in an opening statement to the court. “It’s not even remotely possible to pin the events of Jan. 6 on Mr. Samsel.”

» READ MORE: Accused Bucks Capitol rioter Ryan Samsel once assaulted an ex with pizza and tried to drown her, feds say

The dispute over the import of Samsel’s bike rack attack — the first breach of the Capitol security perimeter on Jan. 6 as a crowd of thousands swelled behind him — will prove central as his trial plays out in a federal courtroom in Washington this week.

He and four codefendants — James Tate Grant, 30, of North Carolina; Paul Russell Johnson, 37, of Virginia; Stephen Chase Randolph, 33, of Kentucky; and Jason Benjamin Blythe, 27 of Texas; none of whom knew each other before Jan. 6 — face charges of civil disorder and assaulting officers that could send them to prison for years.

Rather than risk judgment by a jury, they’ve opted to have their verdict decided by U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb.

But even as Samsel is fighting the government’s characterization of him as a singular instigator of the Jan. 6 attack, his case has taken on a totemic status outside the courtroom among both conspiracy-mongerers and riot defenders who seek downplay the seriousness of what occurred that day.

Video preceding the bike rack assault shows Samsel brushing shoulders with some of the most prominent figures prosecuted in the Jan. 6 investigation, leading to speculation in some corners about whether he’d been put up to launching what became the day’s first attack on police.

Footage depicts him whispering with Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader from Florida who has since been convicted on sedition charges and sentenced to 17 years, prompted some to conclude that Samsel was following instructions from the militant, alt-right group.

Samsel briefly encouraged that impression when he told fellow inmates that Biggs had goaded him into charging the barricades by questioning his manhood. He’s since recanted that story and prosecutors have found no evidence to support it.

Other video shot seconds before Samsel whipped off his denim jacket, turned his “Make America Great Again” hat backward and aggressively lunged toward the officers manning the barricades, shows him chatting briefly with Ray Epps.

The Arizona rioter became an obsession of conspiracy theorists who falsely accused him of being an undercover FBI operative sent to provoke Trump supporters into attacking. But both men have told investigators that Epps was merely urging Samsel to calm down.

Since his January 2021 arrest, some have also sought to cast Samsel as a poster child for the plight of Jan. 6 detainees.

His then-attorney said in June of that year that Samsel been beaten in the D.C. jail by two correctional officers during a fight over toilet paper that left him with a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, and persistent seizures.

Samsel has since written open letters to sympathetic members of Congress including U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, urging them to come to the aid of him and other men he’s described as “political prisoners.”

In court Monday, prosecutors set all that aside, opting instead to let Samsel’s actions speak for themselves.

Videos they played showed him not only leading the first attack on the barricades, but also later attempting to steal a riot shield from a cop on the Capitol’s western front and later hurling a wooden 2x4 at another group of officers, nearly hitting one in the head.

Additionally, government lawyers plan to introduce evidence that on the day Samsel traveled to Washington, he was on parole in Pennsylvania for another violent assault — in which he smashed a hot pizza in the face of his pregnant girlfriend, poured beer over her head, shoved her into a canal and then held her head under water until she told him she loved him.

That 2011 conviction came followed a conviction two years earlier after an incident in which he held another woman against her will for five hours and choked her to the point of unconsciousness.

Three years earlier, according to court records, Samsel pleaded guilty to running yet another woman off the road, punching her windshield and threatening to kill her in a dispute over $60.

But as he sat in court Monday, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, Samsel sought to portray himself not as one of the more violent members of the Jan. 6 mob, but as just another guy — one of thousands who’d shown up to support Trump that day only to find themselves later caught in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. He’d even stopped to aid the officer he’s now on trial for injuring, his attorney said.

“The evidence is just not going to show,” Woodward said, “that Mr. Samsel played some outsized role in the events of Jan. 6.”