Ex-police officer sentenced to over 7 years for role in Capitol riot

A Virginia police officer who prosecutors say lied about his actions before, during and after the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol riot, including his military service and his marriage, was sentenced Thursday to 87 months in prison.

Thomas Robertson and Jacob Fracker were members of the police department in the small western Virginia town of Rocky Mount when they joined the mob that stormed the Capitol. Both have since been fired.

“You were not some bystander who just got swept up in the crowd,” Judge Christopher Cooper said at Robertson's sentencing Thursday in US District Court in Washington. “It really seems as though you think of partisan politics as war and that you continue to believe these conspiracy theories.”

Robertson, 49, was found guilty by a jury earlier this year of six crimes, including using a large wooden stick to block police outside the Capitol and destroying his phone when he got home. Fracker, who pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge, testified at the trial.

Cooper said Robertson’s case was similar to that of Guy Reffitt, a member of the far-right antigovernment militia group Three Percenters, who confronted an officer outside the Capitol with a gun. Reffitt was sentenced to 87 months in prison by a different judge.

At his sentencing, Robertson depicted his actions on Jan 6 as an aberration in the life of a respected member of a law-abiding and respectable community.

The government’s filings suggest he became radicalised under the influence of those around him, including the chief of a small neighbouring police department and a retired FBI agent.

Prosecutors took the unusual step of publishing two detailed FBI investigations into the claims Robertson made in his appeal for mercy.

Retired police chief Dennis Deacon wrote the court saying that he had helped train Robertson as a police officer and that these crimes were “completely out of character.”

The agent produced a text conversation from March 2021, in which Robertson told Deacon,

You were not some bystander who just got swept up in the crowd. It really seems as though you think of partisan politics as war and that you continue to believe these conspiracy theories.

Judge Christopher Cooper

“I can kill every agent that they send for at least two weeks" and that he was “prepared to die in battle.”

Deacon replied that Robertson should "be smart, pick battles, plan logistics, very carefully recruit and hope its not going to come down to it ... we need a place to go ... remote, defensible, water, very rugged terrain.”

Cooper said he found it particularly “disturbing” that Robertson made those comments after law enforcement officers were critically injured at the Capitol.

In an interview, Deacon said he was telling Robertson to recruit "friends” for "whatever inevitable things may happen . . . a flood or a hurricane,” or in the "extremely unlikely" event that "the government is overthrown by others from outside."

Another man described as a retired FBI agent went to the Capitol with Robertson and Fracker but did not go inside, according to the court records.

That man, who could not be reached for comment, called the Capitol Police “cowards” who “will be on their knees before us” in text messages to Robertson, records said.

Fracker is set to be sentenced on Tuesday.

In his letter to the court, Fracker said he had been labelled a ‘rat’, a ‘snitch’ and a ‘back stabber’ by community members for testifying against Robertson. "It really is just heart breaking,” he said.

At least two dozen people with past or current law enforcement affiliations are charged with criminal involvement in the Jan 6 attack.