‘I just got caught up in the moment’: Central Pa. Marine charged with punching officers during Capitol riot

Barton Shively, a Marine veteran from Mechanicsburg, offered a simple explanation when the FBI began circulating his photo online as a suspect wanted in connection with the Capitol riot.

“I just got caught up in the moment,” he told agents, according to court filings.

But as investigators described it late Tuesday in documents charging him with federal felonies, his “assaultive” behavior lasted considerably longer than a brief instance.

In three separate incidents throughout the hours-long siege — each of them caught on video — Shively, 53, allegedly shoved, punched, and kicked officers who had tried to keep him from charging the building.

Once he was finally persuaded to stand down — by a spray of Mace to his eyes — he gave an interview to CNN.

“We broke down the barriers. We rushed them. We charged them,” he said. “They started getting rough with us, so we had to push ’em back. That’s what we did.”

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Shively, who spent seven years in the Marine Corps before retiring in 1992, now faces charges of assaulting police officers, civil disorder, and using violence to enter restricted grounds — the most serious of which are punishable by up to eight years in prison.

He turned himself in after recognizing his photo among those the FBI circulated online. Investigators say that during a Jan. 14 interview, Shively explained he had driven to Washington with friends for President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6 and then marched to the Capitol with the crowd.

When rioters stormed the building and an officer tried to hold him back, he grabbed the man by the jacket and began yelling in his face, Shively told agents.

Later that afternoon, Shively was walking past a line of cops again. One nudged him with his baton and ordered him to step back, and he responded by punching the officer in his helmeted head, investigators said.

Even afterward, when Shively came across some of the same officers he had scuffled with earlier, his combativeness had not subsided. He told agents he confronted one of the cops, who was now holding a can of Mace, and kicked at him to try to get it out of his hand, according to his charging documents.

During the CNN interview, cited in court filings, an animated Shively, wearing a Marine Corps cap and brown jacket, shouted into the camera and insisted people like him were “losing their freedoms.”

“What are we supposed to do?” he said. “The Supreme Court’s not helping us. No one’s helping us. Only us can help us.”

Shively was released on bond after a court hearing in Harrisburg on Tuesday, during which prosecutors alleged that despite his initial cooperation, he had since tried to interfere with investigators’ efforts.

He reneged on a deal to share photos and videos he shot during the riot by deleting them from his phone when he discovered he was being charged, Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott R. Ford said. Shively also contacted two other rioters he purportedly identified during his first interview with agents to warn them he had spoken with the FBI, Ford said.

Shively’s lawyer, federal public defender Thomas Thornton, stressed that his client’s first instinct was to cooperate. “He did everything he could up to that point,” the attorney told the court.

Shively’s case, like those of the seven other Pennsylvania residents also charged with participating in the riot, will proceed in federal court in Washington.

Read the Shively affidavit: