QAnon Mascot Gets 3 Years for Capital Insurrection, Despite Mental Illness and Horns
The buffalo have finally come home to roost.
Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman” also known as “Yellowstone Wolf”, also known under his legal name ‘Jake Angeli’, and also discussed as ‘the embarrassment to buffalo everywhere’, was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison Wednesday.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the D.C. District Court, who sentenced Chansley said that he “made himself the very image of the riot.”
Chansley had pled guilty to a single count of obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress. Chansley was facing a maximum sentence of more than four years in prison and has already spent 317 days in pretrial detention this year, which Lamberth said will count toward time served.
“What you did was terrible,” Lamberth told Chansley. “You made yourself the center of the riot.”
Video Footage of Jan 6th Capital Insurrection and/or Riot:
Chansley spoke for a half-hour before his sentencing telling the court he asked himself what ‘Jesus and Gandhi would do’, during his time in solitary confinement. Qanon’s sacred buffalo and former mascot then said, “But I also believe in law and order. And in order for law and order to exist, those things have to be practiced with responsibility and accountability,” he said. “If the law is broken and there’s no punitive action, there’s no point in having the law.”
Judge Lamberth, called Chansley’s remarks “heartfelt” but said he couldn’t justify reducing the sentence below the minimum that prosecutors asked for.
Although Chansley had not committed any acts of physical violence during the riot, Chansley admits to leaving a note on the Senate dais where Vice President Mike Pence had presided, which read: “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.”
Chansley has since renounced the QAnon movement and his support of former President Donald Trump. Watkins, his lawyer, offered Chansley up as a potential witness in Trump’s second impeachment trial earlier this year, though he was ultimately not called to testify.
On Jamuary 6th, Chansley made it clear several times on camera that he was following President Trump’s direction, and that he only left the capital once Trump asked the rioters to ‘go home’ via twitter.
Chansley’s attorney told the press that officials at the federal Bureau of Prisons, or BOP, have diagnosed Chansley with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. A point which Chansley and his attorney brought up often in court.
It is an affirmative ‘insanity defense’ under any Federal statute, the burden of proof is on the defense. They have to show that “at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense.” (Full federal statute here.)
“I am not an insurrectionist. I am certainly not a domestic terrorist,” Chansley said. “I am a good man who broke the law.”
There may not be a better mascot or symbol for the Qanon movement, than a mentally ill, 30-something, white male Trump supporter, dressed in a meaningless costume, with a mild god complex and very little actual understanding of how government works.
More capital rioters are expected to be sentenced in the coming weeks and months. 695 people have been charged in the Capitol insurrection so far. Federal prosecutors are currently looking into holding President Trump himself responsible for the insurection, under the Federal Riot act.
