By Jan Wolfe
(Reuters) – The participant in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol nicknamed the “QAnon Shaman” for his horned headdress argued through a lawyer on Tuesday that all Americans – and disinformation – are to blame for the deadly violence.
Jacob Chansley of Arizona is currently in federal custody awaiting trial on six criminal charges including violent entry and disorderly conduct.
He was one of hundreds of supporters of then-President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s election. Five people including a Capitol Police officer died in the violence.
In a court filing seeking Chansley’s release from jail while he awaits trial, his lawyer, Albert Watkins, said the attack was the direct result of the divisive U.S. political climate.
Watkins said his client has become “inextricably and in perpetuity linked to an event which will become known not as a day of infamy, but as a day on which our nation was compelled to commence bellying up to the bar to acknowledge each of our roles in permitting, fostering, tolerating, endorsing or ignoring without action an ever increasing barrage of divisiveness, intolerance, untruths, misrepresentations, and mischaracterizations through an unrelenting multi-year propaganda odyssey.”
Watkins said in an interview that his client was swayed by online disinformation and by Trump’s rhetoric.
On June 10, federal agents transferred Chansley to a prison in Colorado where he will undergo a mental health evaluation to assess his competency to stand trial, according to a June 16 court filing submitted by federal prosecutors.
Watkins argued in Tuesday’s court filing that prosecutors have intentionally ignored evidence that Chansley was not a leader of the Jan. 6 attack.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)
