ORLANDO, Fla. — Orlando Proud Boy Arthur Jackman has pleaded guilty to his role in the 2021 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building ahead of the certification of the 2020 election results.

Jackman, who is married to an Orange County deputy sheriff, admitted Wednesday in federal court to illegally entering the Capitol along with other members of the Proud Boys on Jan. 6, 2021, after believing false claims the election months earlier was stolen from former President Donald Trump. He is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 6.

According to federal court documents detailing Jackman’s actions, he and other members of the far-right organization had discussed the possibility of invading the Capitol as early as two days after the election. By Nov. 24, 2020, nearly two weeks after Joe Biden won the race, he wrote in the text-messaging app Telegram, “We can fight the vermin in the streets all day, but unless something big happens, the problem is really the vermin in the FBI, CIA, Congress, the Corporations, Hollywood, our courts, Governors, schools … that’s a lot of cleaning up to do.”

The text messages exchanged ahead of election certification, documented by prosecutors as being part of a group chat of the Proud Boys’ Ministry of Self-Defense, further envisioned a violent attack on the Capitol, in which the organization’s members would “make the whole country stand up and [expletive] do bad things to bad people.”

“[W]hat would they do [if] 1 million patriots stormed and took the capital (sic) building. Shoot into the crowd? I think not,” one unnamed member wrote according to records attached to Jackman’s plea agreement. An unnamed leader replied “They would do nothing because they can do nothing.”

The day the election was being certified, Jackman was in Washington, D.C., as vice president of the Orlando-based “Space Force” branch of the Proud Boys. He and other members of the Proud Boys — including Kevin and Nathaniel Tuck, a father-son duo of former Central Florida cops — followed a crowd into the Capitol, pushing past a police barricade overwhelmed by thousands of fellow rioters.

Once inside, Jackman and Kevin Tuck, a former Windermere police officer also expected to plead guilty, made it to the Senate gallery — where they stayed for several minutes before leaving the room and later the building — but not before stealing an American flag, according to prosecutors.

Along with entering a restricted building, Jackman was charged in part with disorderly conduct and assaulting police officers, charges which will be dropped as part of the plea agreement. He was also charged with obstructing an official proceeding, which was also dropped following a Supreme Court ruling forcing prosecutors to prove defendants charged with obstruction tried to tamper with or destroy documents.

Jackman’s arrest came as a shock at the time after his marriage to Orange Sheriff’s Deputy Sarah Jackman was revealed. The Sheriff’s Office conducted an internal investigation into the matter and concluded Deputy Jackman was not aware of her husband’s activities ahead of and during the riot.

As for the Tucks, they’ll appear in a plea hearing Sept. 9. Like Kevin Tuck, who was a senior pastor at Lighthouse Church in Apopka, his son Nathaniel was a former police officer, working for the Apopka Police Department until months before the riot. He was also a former local Proud Boys leader.

The elder Tuck, however, resigned from the Windermere Police Department shortly after his arrest by federal authorities.

Along with the criminal case, Jackman and the Tucks are among many members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — a far-right paramilitary groups whose members were also implicated in the J6 riot — named in a lawsuit filed by the District of Columbia in 2021. The lawsuit accuses the organizations and its members of orchestrating “a coordinated act of domestic terrorism.”

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