Georgia attorney sentenced to 18 months on Jan. 6 charges
Georgia attorney William McCall Calhoun Jr., who boasted of his participation in a “hostile takeover” of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and predicted a civil war if former President Donald Trump was not returned to power, was sentenced Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C., to 18 months in prison.
Calhoun, a 60-year-old criminal defense attorney in Americus, had asked U.S. District Court Dabney L. Friedrich for no jail time, citing an “onerous” two months spent in the Washington jail after his arrest a few days after the riot. After his release on bond, Calhoun said he was the target of “widespread media defamation, death threats and harassments” over the past two and a half years.
The experience has left him a changed man, his lawyer wrote in a memo filed with the court prior to his sentencing.
“Though his actions on January 6, 2021 have caused (and will continue to cause) him devastating life consequences, Mr. Calhoun will happily acknowledge that those events led him to turn his life over to Christ and strengthened his Christian faith,” attorney Jessica Sherman-Stoltz wrote. “It is through his faith in God that he hopes to begin his rehabilitation process.”
Along with his prison sentence, the judge ordered Calhoun spend two years on probation and pay $2,000 in restitution.
In a one-day bench trial in March, Friedrich found Calhoun guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony that carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. She also found him guilty of four misdemeanors.
Calhoun is one of 25 Jan. 6 defendants with ties to Georgia. Of those, 20 have either pleaded guilty or been found guilty. The remaining five are awaiting their day in court.
Calhoun was among the initial hundred or so rioters to enter the Capitol, making his way past broken glass and tear gas, through the Capitol Rotunda and up to the outer door of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“We overran multiple police barricades and busted through,” he posted to social media after the riot. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door and pushed down the hall towards her inner sanctum. The mob was howling with rage. Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
Federal prosecutors sought twice as much time for Calhoun — 36 months — citing violent, conspiratorial messages Calhoun spread across social media in the months and weeks leading up to the riot and his lack of remorse afterward.
“”I’m a lawyer, and a believer in law and order, but I’m here to tell you there are [i]s only one remedy for what ails this country — about 10-20 million of these rioting, racist communists need to die. Then the rest will straighten up,” Calhoun wrote in a post on the conservative social media platform Parler five days before the presidential election. an Oct. 29, 2020. “Until that happens we’re wasting our time.”
Three days after the election, Calhoun posted even more threats.