Feds ask for 51 months for Arizona man who raided Capitol in fur hat

Federal prosecutors have asked that Jake Angeli, the Arizona man who gained infamy by taking part in the Jan. 6 raid on the U.S. Capitol with a painted face and wearing a fur hat with horns, be imprisoned for 51 months.

An attorney representing Angeli, on the other hand, asked that he be released after his sentencing hearing, scheduled for Nov. 17, arguing that the more than 300 days he would have already served in custody would be adequate punishment.

Angeli pleaded guilty in September to a felony county of obstructing a civil proceeding, specifically the certification by Congress of the 2020 election results.

Angeli, who was charged under his legal name, Jacob Chansley, had joined thousands of others in storming the Capitol, disrupting the joint session of Congress. Angeli stood out with his attire: horned fur hat, with tails that draped his face, which was painted red, white and blue, and shirtless, showing off elaborate tattoos.

Angeli has said he drove to D.C. from Phoenix with others, feeling called to attend a rally by President Donald Trump, who had asked his supporters to amass that day.

Angeli entered the U.S. Senate chamber and posed for pictures, flexing his left arm, holding a spear topped with an American flag in his right hand, on the dais where Vice President Mike Pence had been presiding minutes before.

The government’s memorandum, filed Tuesday, opened by quoting the prayer Angeli said from that perch, as captured in video taken by a reporter working for The New Yorker magazine.

In it, Angeli thanked “Heavenly Father” for the opportunity to “send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs.”

The sentencing memorandum filed in Angeli’s defense opens with a quote from the movie, “Forrest Gump,” with the main character, whose name is misspelled in the memo, saying: “My momma always said, you’ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on.”

Angeli’s attorney, Albert Watkins of St. Louis, noted that Angeli had cooperated with authorities as soon as he knew he was being sought, including arriving at the Phoenix FBI office for an interview.

Watkins’s memo said that though a psychological examination of Angeli found him competent, it did diagnose him with “mental health infirmities.”

Angeli’s time in jail was made tougher than usual because of restrictions put in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Watkins’s memo said, leading Angeli to serve his time in solitary confinement.

“He suffers from severe anxiety, panic attacks, and a constant feeling of claustrophobia while he is locked alone in his cell each day,” Watkins’s memo reads. Those conditions, he wrote, were intended for violent offenders and “surely not intended for the long-term confinement of a first-time non-violent offender.”

Watkins said the conditions and Angeli’s mental fitness merited the judge ratcheting the sentence downward from federal guidelines.

Watkins said that Angeli’s mental deficiencies should have been apparent as he walked around the frigid D.C. air without clothes and, like the movie character Gump, strolled through the Capitol seemingly oblivious to the events going on around him.

“He was not an organizer,” Watkins wrote of Angeli. “He was not a planner. He was not violent. He was not destructive. He was not a thief.”

Although Angeli was not accused of causing physical harm to anyone, prosecutors said he contributed to the culture of terror in the Capitol that day.

The government wrote in its memo that “each rioter’s actions were illegal and contributed, directly or indirectly, to the violence and destruction that day.”

Prosecutors said that while Angeli has asserted in interviews that his actions were peaceful, the evidence showed the opposite.

“The government cannot overstate the seriousness of the defendant’s conduct as one of the most prominent figures of the historic riot on the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” the memo read.