A 21-year-old January 6th insurrectionist took a federal plea deal, got eight charges reduced to one, agreed to pay $700 for a Republican conference room door he helped to break and other fees, and faces years in federal prison.
Nicholas James Brockhoff, 21, of Covington, Kentucky, was arrested in Counce, Tennessee (near Pickwick Lake in West Tennessee), in May 2021. In January 2021, he joined thousands of other rioters to breach the U.S. Capitol in hopes of stopping Congress from certifying results in the 2020 presidential election.
Brockhoff pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to one charge of assaulting law enforcement officers with a dangerous weapon, a fire extinguisher. Before he signed a plea deal last week, he faced eight charges, including another charge of using a deadly weapon (the fire extinguisher), obstructing law enforcement, entering restricted grounds, disrupting government business, engaging in violence on the Capitol grounds, demonstrating, and more.
A Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation found that Brockhoff travelled over 500 miles and eight hours by car from Kentucky to Washington, D.C., to join the “mob that had gathered on the west side of the U.S. Capitol.” At around 2:32 p.m., he threw an object at law enforcement officials.
Later, he “assaulted” law enforcement officials “when he discharged the contents of fire extinguishers, which are deadly or dangerous weapons when used as Brockhoff did.” He sprayed police at least two times from two locations, according to the DOJ. In doing so, “he caused law enforcement to disperse, which interfered with their ability to conduct crowd control and prevented them from seeing, avoiding, or deflecting projectiles and weapons intended to injure them.”
On his way inside the building, Brockhoff found a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) helmet on the ground. He put it on his head, reads the report, “and wore it as a trophy.” Through a broken window, Brockhoff entered the Senate Conference room.
Once inside, Brockhoff and others left the room and went into hallway. They found a door labeled “ST6M,” a Republican conference room. He and others kicked the door, and at one point Brockhoff instructed another to kick the door “farther to the right.” They kicked a hole in the door, and Brockhoff reached his hand inside and opened the door from the inside. Once inside, he tore open a box, and “riffled through the papers in the office.”
Outside the building, Brockhoff, still wearing the police helmet, is confronted by MPD officers who ask him, “You’re going to come out with an MPD helmet?” To which, Brockhoff replies, “I found it on the ground.”
Later, officers asked Brockhoff his name, and he gives his first and last name. They ask if he’s injured, to which he replies, a “little bit.” They ask if he injured himself climbing through a window, to which Brockhoff replies, “glass, glass, glass, yeah.” The injuries on his hands can be seen in police footage from body-worn cameras.
Much of the government’s identifying evidence on Brockhoff came from Capitol surveillance footage and police cameras. In nearly all of them, he is identified by his blue jacket with a green hood and his black backpack with a yellow tag.
As part of his plea deal, Brockhoff will face only one count of use of a deadly weapon. For this, the DOJ will ask the court for a reduced sentence. He could face nearly four to five years in prison. However, he faces a statuary maximum of 20 years. But the court will decide how much prison time he will get.
His plea deal also includes paying $700 for the damage he helped to inflict on the Republican conference room door. He’ll also pay $2,000 in restitution to the Architect of the Capitol to aid in the more than $2.7 million worth of damage caused to the building that day. He will also pay an unknown sum in restitution to the victims of violence on January 6th.
Brockhoff is slated to be sentenced in March.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Tennessee, the FBI’s Memphis Field Office, and Hardin County Sheriff’s Department helped investigate the case.