“I’ll look just like ANTIFA. I’ll get away with anything,” William Robert Norwood III is alleged to have boasted in a text message group chat before the Jan. 6 riot. A South Carolina man bragged in a group text chat that he disguised himself as an anti-fascist, or antifa, activist during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and succeeded in assaulting officers and stealing police gear, authorities said. The man, William Robert Norwood III, relayed his plan in a text to four other people on Jan. 5, according to screenshots of the chat included in a criminal complaint and an arrest warrant filed Thursday. “I’m dressing in all black,” Norwood wrote, according to the complaint. “I’ll look just like ANTIFA. I’ll get away with with anything.” A day after the riots, Norwood sent an update: “It worked… I got away with things that others were shot or arrested for. “The cop shot a female Trump supporter. Then allowed ‘ANTIFA Trump supporters’ to assault him. I was one of them. I was there. I took his s—,” Norwood continued. Attached to the text was a selfie of Norwood “wearing what appears to be a U.S. Capitol Police tactical vest underneath a zipped up camouflage jacket,” the FBI wrote in the complaint. According to the screenshots, Norwood wrote to the group: “I got a nice helmet and body armor off a cop for God’s sake and I disarmed him. Tell me how that works.” He claimed that once he changed out of antifa garb, he was targeted by officers. “I fought 4 cops, they did nothing. When I put my red hat on, they pepper balled me,” Norwood wrote. Immediately after the violence Jan. 6, baseless conspiracy theories circulated on social media and conservative media outlets that antifa had somehow been behind the riots. There is no evidence that anti-fascist activists were involved in the riots, which led to the deaths of five people, FBI officials have said repeatedly.
via nbcnews: South Carolina man charged in Capitol riot bragged he dressed as antifa and fought police