NEW YORK — A Brooklyn judge’s son pleaded guilty to felony charges Wednesday for storming the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot while dressed as a caveman, the Department of Justice announced.
Aaron Mostofsky, 35, copped to civil disorder and theft of government property charges for his role in breaking into the Capitol building with hundreds of other Donald Trump supporters during the siege of the building as Congress was about to certify the vote from the 2020 presidential election.
“What I’m doing here today is to express my opinion as a free American, my beliefs that this election was stolen,” Mostofsky said during a video interview inside the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. “We were cheated.”
Mostofsky is the son of Steven “Shlomo” Mostofsky, a judge on the Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn.
He posted videos to his Instagram account showing him on a bus to the Capitol, and included clips taken inside and outside the building, federal prosecutors said.
Wearing a fur pelt and carrying a long wooden walking stick, Mostofsky entered the Capitol just after 2 p.m., when other rioters broke the window next to the door to the building’s Senate wing.
During the mayhem, Mostofsky picked up a police vest and a U.S. Capitol Police riot shield, prompting the theft of government property charge.
A Capitol Police officer took the shield from Mostofsky after he left the building.
In their complaint against Mostofsky, the feds included a meme that another Instagram user sent to him after the riots.
“Imagine coming off 10 hits of acid and u look around and ur in the US Capitol like s--t,” the meme reads, along with a photo of Mostofsky in the Capitol.
Prosecutors discovered another Instagram message in which Mostofsky told a buddy to “look for a guy looking like a caveman” near the Capitol building, referring to his costume, said court papers.
He was arrested in Brooklyn less than a week after the riots and released on $100,000 bail.
Mostofsky faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine when he is sentenced on May 6.
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