Six months of evidence, court filings and motion hearings have created a composite sketch of the people arrested — in all their treachery or bone-headedness — and of the country many said they were fighting for.
One group dressed in combat attire, used walkie-talkies, adopted code names such as “Gator 1” and “Gator 6” and, once inside the Capitol, appeared to be searching for legislators, according to the government. One militiaman wore a patch on his vest that read “I don’t believe in anything. I’m just here for the violence,” according to an affidavit from an FBI agent.
Lawyers blame Donald Trump, the media, naivete, trauma, unemployment, the pandemic, Washington elites, their clients’ childhoods and the singular nature of the event itself.
“I got caught up in the moment,” said Josiah Colt, the Idaho man who was photographed hanging off the Senate balcony in a helmet and kneepads and sitting in the chair reserved for the vice president.
A “momentary lack of restraint” is how an attorney for Thomas Webster describes his tackling a police officer outside the Capitol.
Many of the Jan. 6 defendants had been going through a lot. This is both a sad truth and a crucial part of their legal strategy. The pandemic triggered job losses, and losses of direction and security. Searching for order and meaning, they immersed themselves in politics, conspiracy, Trump’s rhetoric and right-wing media. One attorney has cited “Trumpitis” and “Foxmania.” Lawyers have mounted what you might call an externalized-insanity argument: The defendants were hearing voices saying the presidential election would be stolen by sinister forces unless they intervened. It was a delusion, but the voices were real. And one of them belonged to the president of the United States.
Anthony Antonio lost his job because of the pandemic, moved in with friends who watched Fox News constantly and says he came to Washington because Trump commanded him. (Antonio, charged with five counts including obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, has yet to enter a plea.)
“The reason he was there is because he was a dumb--- and believed what he heard on Fox News,” Antonio’s attorney, Joseph Hurley, said in an interview in May.
Folly and sadness abound in these cases. When a Pennsylvania man was arrested last month on charges of stealing government property amid the chaos, among his possessions were literature titled “Step by Step To Create Hometown Militia” and a model of the U.S. Capitol made of Legos.
Patrick Stedman, a self-proclaimed dating guru from New Jersey, was flagged to the FBI by former classmates who saw him bragging publicly about participating in the first wave of rioters to breach the building, according to an affidavit. After being charged with disorderly conduct and obstruction of government procedure, Stedman continued to share his wisdom on Twitter.
“The essence of the masculine spirit is the impulse toward oblivion,” he tweeted shortly before his indictment was filed (he has pleaded not guilty). Days later, he posted: “Women will fall in love with any man so long as he’s in the arena.”
Personal baggage has been submitted as evidence. Douglas Jensen — the Iowa man who wore a “Q” shirt and stalked Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman up a flight of stairs — is “the product of a dysfunctional childhood” spent mostly in foster care, according to his lawyer. Jensen, saddled with stress, the lawyer said, became a “true believer” in QAnon, an extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat.
“Maybe it was midlife crisis, the pandemic, or perhaps the message just seemed to elevate him from his ordinary life to an exalted status with an honorable goal,” his lawyer wrote last month in a petition to release Jensen from jail as he awaits trial for disrupting government business and obstructing an officer during a civil disorder. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
“In any event,” the lawyer continued, “he fell victim to this barrage of Internet sourced info and came to the Capitol, at the direction of the President of the United States, to demonstrate that he was a ‘true patriot.’ ”
A sense of victimhood still burns in some defendants, who have offered a litany of grievances while caught in the gears of the legal system.
“It’s not fair,” yelled Richard Barnett — who famously propped a foot on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office — referring to his detention during a March 4 hearing. “Everybody else who did things much worse are already home.”
Other lawyers have argued that their defendants are the ones who were served cocktails of misinformation. Albert Watkins, who represents multiple Jan. 6 defendants, likened them to the followers of Jim Jones, the 1970s cult leader who persuaded his followers to commit suicide by drinking grape punch spiked with cyanide.
Watkins tried the unique tactic of calling his clients “f---ing retarded” in the press. On television, the crowd that overtook the Capitol looked like a powerful, unruly mob, but participants arrived at this historic desecration burdened with “overwhelming hardships and vulnerabilities,” as Watkins said about Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” during a recent hearing. (Chansley has pleaded not guilty to six counts, including obstructing an official proceeding.)
Now in jail awaiting trial, Chansley “struggles to cling on to and salvage his mental health,” Watkins wrote, and continues “to reconcile his role in his current lot in life” — as if the Capitol breach was something that happened to Chansley, and not the other way around.
It's a lot to absorb, psychologically and legally. The FBI is still tracking down participants and digging through their life stories. D.C. judges are handling multiple hearings per day; at least 11 were on the court's calendar on Monday alone. Defendants languish in jail as their families suffer. Attorneys are deluged with video and photo evidence produced by their own clients and gathered by the government. Amid the echoes and static of remote hearings, players are debating the differences between a principal actor and an aider or abettor, if a "momentary lapse in judgment" could last multiple hours, and whether a weapon meets the legal definition of "dangerous" if it didn't cause serious harm.
The question at the core of this massive effort is what to do with the people who led normal lives until Jan. 6, when a vortex of forces compelled them to engage in criminal behavior.
“These are weighty issues. All the judges are consumed by these issues,” said U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan during a motion hearing for Gieswein earlier this month. Many of the defendants“come to court with unblemished records — they never paid a fine over 50 bucks,” he added.
“The really interesting aspect of this is the difference between moral responsibility and criminal legal culpability,” Goelman says. “I don’t think there’s any lawful authority that would agree that because the president was telling me to go, that’s a defense.” Trump has dismissed accusations that he is responsible for any criminal behavior, noting that his speech that day included the word “peacefully” (though it ended with “fight like hell”).
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