Global Courant
WASHINGTON — A Donald Trump supporter who drove a stun gun into the neck of a D.C. police officer kidnapped by the mob during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Wednesday to 12.5 years in prison.
Daniel “DJ” Rodriguez, a California man who traveled to D.C. with fellow Trump supporters who belonged to a Telegram group called the “PATRIOTS 45 MAGA Gang,” pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy, obstruction of official proceedings, tampering with documents or procedures and inflicting bodily harm on officers using a deadly or dangerous weapon.
“There will be blood,” Rodriguez wrote in the “MAGA Gang” Telegram chat on the night of Jan. 5, just hours before attending Trump’s rally at the White House Ellipse. “Welcome to the Revolution.”
On January 6, after joining the fight in the Capitol’s lower western tunnel — where some of the most violent scenes of the day took place — Rodriguez attacked officer Michael Fanone, later boasting of his actions to the Telegram- chat.
“Omg I’ve done so much (now) and got away,” Rodriguez wrote to fellow members of the Patriots 45 MAGA Gang. “Tazzed the f— out of the blue.”
Daniel Rodriguez, wearing a red MAGA hat, during the Trump rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, before slamming a stun gun into Mike Fanone’s neck.U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson handed down Rodriguez’s sentence Wednesday, saying he was a “one-man army of hate, attacking police officers and destroying property” on Jan. 6.
Fanone called Rodriguez’s life story “pathetic” and said he lost his career, friends and faith in the criminal justice system because of what he went through that day.
“I don’t give a shit about Daniel Rodriguez. He didn’t exist for me as a person a long time ago,” Fanone said on Wednesday. “Any compassion or empathy I felt toward those besieging our Capitol, whose actions I felt were at least partially influenced by their leader Donald Trump and his lies, has been eroded — eroded by the attacks on me and my family. are targeted by supporters of Donald Trump and the right-wing media.”
Referring to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing investigation into Trump’s actions leading up to Jan. 6, Fanone called on the Justice Department to press charges against Trump and all others responsible “regardless of their wealth or current political position”, and the mantra to prove that no one is above the law.
“Your Honor, we must all join the fight against Donald Trump and the destructive divisive movement he has come to represent,” Fanone said. “We must not give him a safe haven, and his facilitators – whether in business, in politics and in the media – give no quarter. In the fight to preserve our Republic, there should be no spectators.
Prior to his sentencing, Rodriguez spoke in a rambling speech for about 20 minutes, saying that he “really” thought a civil war was about to start and that he believed the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were formed because police shut down across the country . He acknowledged his actions against Fanone, but stopped with an apology.
Federal prosecutors wanted Rodriguez to spend 14 years in federal prison — an upward deviation from his sentencing guidelines, which suggested a sentence of about eight to 10 years — and said Rodriguez had committed an act of terrorism. Rodriguez’s “flagrant” behavior “showed a clear intent to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the election” and was “calculated to halt the peaceful transfer of presidential power for the first time in the country’s history” said prosecutors. arguedwho called Rodriguez’s efforts “typical of an intent to influence government behavior through intimidation or coercion.”
Rodriguez’s federal public defenders said Trump’s “incendiary lies” about the election “created a frenzy of anger and uncertainty” and that Rodriguez’s “unwavering faith in the words of the former president led him to lose all sense of right and wrong. ” Rodriguez ‘greatly respected and idolized Trump’, who he saw ‘as the father he wished he had’, they said wrotesaid Rodriguez “believed Trump was someone to be admired: a multimillionaire graduate of Wharton Business School, with his name massively displayed in gold on buildings across the United States.”
Forrest Rogers, an American living in Germany on January 6, first discovered evidence that Rodriguez gave Fanone electroshock after reviewing frame-by-frame online footage as part of his work for “Deep State Dogs,” one of the groups of online”Incendiary huntersthat surfaced in the aftermath of Jan. 6 to identify Capitol rioters. After Rogers tweeted footage of the incident, Rodriguez was identified by activists who knew the man in the MAGA hat from the Beverly Hills protest scene.
Rodriguez was then identified in a February 2021 HuffPost story, and was arrested by the FBI the following month. In an FBI interview after his arrest, Rodriguez called himself a “fucking piece of shit” and said he was “not smart.” Rodriguez said he was influenced by the far-right conspiracy theory website InfoWars as well as conservative commentators such as Steven Crowder, Mark Dice and the duo of the “Hodgetwins” brothers. Rodriguez, who believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election, told the FBI that Trump “called usto D.C. on January 6, and that he felt obligated to respond to the Commander-in-Chief.
“Are we all so stupid that we thought we were going to do this and save the country and then everything would be all right?” Rodriguez said during his FBI interview. “We really thought so. That’s so stupid, isn’t it?”
Daniel Rodriguez at the Capitol on January 6.U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol and nearly 600 have pleaded guilty. Of the approximately 524 defendants convicted, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has sentenced approximately 310 to prison terms ranging from a few days to nearly two decades in prison. The punishments continue on an almost daily basis: D.C. chiropractor David Walls-Kaufman was sentenced to 60 days in prison after he admitted to “wrestling” with officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, including an officer who committed suicide nine days later.
The longest sentence yet for a January 6 defendant — 18 years in federal prison — went to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in November 2022. case.
Two other January 6 defendants who assaulted Fanone received significant sentences. Kyle Young — a Jan. 6 rioter who was accompanied by his teenage son when he handed Rodriguez the stun gun used to attack Fanone, which Young grabbed during the attack — was sentenced in September to more than seven years in prison. Albuquerque Head – a January 6 rioter who shouted “I got one!” when he grabbed Fanone and dragged him into the crowd, he was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison in October.
In addition to his violence against Fanone, Rodriguez entered an office space in the Capitol through a broken window and urged the crowd to move forward. Using a pole, Rodriguez smashed a window in the private “hideout” office of R-Idaho Senator Jim Risch. Months after his arrest, Rodriguez was charged along with two co-defendants: Ed Badalian, who was found guilty of three charges in April; and a man known to online sleuths as #SwedishScarf, who has been identified by the FBI but is believed to have fled the country, according to prosecutors.
