A former Connecticut alderman who won his city’s Republican mayoral primary while facing criminal charges stemming from the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, has pleaded guilty to trespassing for his role in the attack.
The former alderman, Gino DiGiovanni Jr. of Derby, Conn., pleaded guilty on Friday to a misdemeanor count of entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds, court records show. He entered the plea via videoconference during a hearing before a federal judge in Washington.
Mr. DiGiovanni, 42, was originally charged with several other misdemeanors, which were dropped under a plea agreement with federal prosecutors that his lawyer, Martin J. Minnella, called a “fair resolution” of “an unfortunate situation.”
Mr. DiGiovanni lost the general election in Derby, an old mill city of about 12,000 people 10 miles west of New Haven, in November. He faces up to a year in jail when he is sentenced in April, but Mr. Minnella said he hoped that his client would be spared jail time.
“There are people who did some very terrible things that day,” Mr. Minnella said in an interview on Sunday. “Gino wasn’t one of them, and he doesn’t condone what they did.”
Mr. DiGiovanni is among more than 1,265 people to be charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, when supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol in a bid to disrupt the certification of President Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, according to the Justice Department. Mr. Trump faces federal conspiracy charges as a result of the riot, and a federal investigation into the day’s events is continuing.
Mr. DiGiovanni told The New York Times last fall that he traveled to Washington the day of the riot to hear a speech by Mr. Trump, and then followed the crowd to the Capitol. He said he entered the building through a door being held open by a Capitol Police officer, looked around briefly and left, adding that he had neither seen nor engaged in any violence.
“I didn’t go down there to overthrow the government,” he told The Times, adding: “I didn’t know there was going to be a quote-unquote insurrection.”
Mr. DiGiovanni, a contractor by trade, was not an alderman at the time of the riot. He was elected to Derby’s Board of Aldermen, the city’s legislative body, in November 2021. The federal authorities charged him last August with being in the Capitol illegally based on photos turned up by online sleuths.
He won the Republican mayoral primary the next month, beating the three-term incumbent, Richard Dziekan, by 10 votes out of about 400 cast. Mr. DiGiovanni, the chairman of Derby’s Republican committee, lost the general election to Joseph DiMartino, the Democratic nominee, with Mr. Dziekan running as an independent.
