Matt Brackley had a sense of foreboding long before the FBI showed up at his home two days after he announced his intention to run for the Maine State Senate in 2022. He was already struck with what he calls a “heavy heart” a year earlier, on January 6, 2021, before leaving his Washington, DC, hotel room to go hear President Donald Trump address a rally on the Ellipse. Before leaving his hotel room, he dropped to his knees and — for the first time in five years — prayed to God for guidance.

At two a.m. on Tuesday morning, Brackley was released from a federal detention facility at Ft. Devens, Massachusetts, having served four months of a fifteen-month sentence for his involvement in events at the U.S. Capitol that day. He is one of 15 Mainers who were pardoned and whose cases were dismissed as one of Trump’s first acts after being inaugurated to his second term as president on Monday.

While Brackley pleaded guilty to aggravated assault of a police officer for having pushed his way into a restricted area of the Capitol, he is adamant that he did no physical harm to the officers he pushed past and did, in fact, help a female Capitol Police officer out of harm’s way and to safety. For his efforts at the time, he was pepper-sprayed and briefly featured on national television news with milk streaming out of his eyes. His interactions with the criminal justice system did not begin until a year later and were, in his telling, an “eye-opening” experience.

It took eighteen months from the first FBI visit to his home to the moment a cavalcade of six SUVs descended on his Lincoln County home on July 21, 2023, to arrest him, shackle him, and take him to Portland for processing. In March the following year, he pleaded guilty to a single charge rather than the eight that the government had initially leveled against him. Citing an average 95 percent conviction rate, Brackley says he saw little reason to go to trial, and at no point did he deny his presence or actions at the Capitol. In recalling his experiences — whether being pardoned and released, prosecuted and convicted, or the events of January 6th themselves — there is a calm in Brackley’s demeanor. But the correction systems, he concludes, is “tragic.”

“There is no rehabilitation going on,” he says, adding that many wind up in prison because their backs got pushed up against a wall.

In Brackley’s case, he was pressed quite literally between two sides. As Trump was finishing his address to the rally, Brackley noticed men with radios and, in what he called paramilitary garb, herding rally-goers towards the Capitol. Curious, he followed at some distance. When he reached the base of the Capitol, he joined in what he characterized as a largely peaceful group of protestors singing songs, though some were being chased around by police. But then law enforcement threw flash-bangs into the crowd, one of which lodged shrapnel in the cheek of a woman standing near him. This, he said, changed the mood, and he grew angry.

Marching up the left side of the Capitol to the Senate, he said the police had pulled back entirely, allowing the crowd to surge forward. The doors he entered were open, and none of the police he encountered told him or those around him not to go in, he said. He didn’t encounter any resistance until after going through the rotunda. Then a policeman shoved him, and this, like the earlier use of flash-bangs, prompted him to push through two policemen, which is the basis of his “aggravated assault” charge. Today he regrets doing so and, given another opportunity, would not repeat those steps. But he doesn’t regret having protested what he still believes was a stolen election.

Admitting to what he calls “unconstructive” behavior on January 6th, Brackley says the whole episode awakened in him a desire to be more active in public life. It was only after returning home that he decided to run against an entrenched state senator, Eloise Vitelli, who at the time was the Democratic majority leader. He later briefly became the chair of the Sagadahoc County GOP before moving to Waldoboro. At 2 p.m. on Saturday, January 25th, Brackley will be speaking about his experience at the Topsham Baptist Church.