Jake Angeli, 'QAnon shaman,' pleads guilty to obstructing vote counting on Jan. 6
The man who, by way of his fur hat with horns, painted face, bare tattooed chest and spear, became one of the more widely recognized figures of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol pleaded guilty to obstructing a civil proceeding in a D.C. federal court on Friday.
The charge carries a maximum of 20 years in prison. In court on Friday, Angeli said he understood that was a possible penalty.
Before Judge Royce Lamberth accepted the plea, he determined that Angeli was mentally competent, based in part on a psychological examination the judge had ordered.
Angeli told the judge he was "very appreciative for the court's willingness to have me and my mental vulnerabilities examined."
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He told Lamberth that he hoped "your honor certainly didn’t’ take any offense to anything I told the psychiatrist. I didn't meant anything personal whatsoever. I just said I hoped you were impartial."
Lamberth said he took no offense to whatever comments were in the report. "I thought it was very pleasant," he said. "I was pleased."
Angeli's St. Louis-based attorney, Albert Watkins, asked that his client be released and placed under his charge and care. Watkins described to the judge how he had lined up resources, including a family who would house Angeli and a doctor who would work with him on his mental health issues.
Watkins said that, with the agreement, the government has acknowledged that Angeli was neither a planner nor organizer of the Jan. 6 events.
Lamberth said he would take the arguments and filings about Angeli's release under advisement. He set a tentative sentencing date for Nov. 17.
Angeli had been ordered held in custody since his arrest in Phoenix three days after the raid on the Capitol. He showed up for what he expected to be a follow-up interview with FBI agents upon his drive back from D.C.
Instead, he was arrested. The horned hat and the spear he had with him in his car were confiscated.
Angeli had worn his intentionally eye-catching outfit in and around Phoenix since at least 2019, usually carrying a sign that read, “Q Sent Me.”
His aim, he told The Republic in a previous interview, was drawing attention to the QAnon movement, which imagined that Trump would soon dismantle a global cabal of elite leaders that held power through an international sex trafficking ring.
Instead, that outfit drew attention to Angeli when he wore it during the raid on the U.S. Capitol.
For subscribers: How Jake Angeli went from a Phoenix character to the face of the U.S. Capitol raid
In the news release Thursday, Angeli's attorney, Watkins, suggested that Angeli had rejected his adherence to QAnon. The release said that Angeli "has repudiated the 'Q' previously assigned to him and requests future references to him be devoid of use of the letter 'Q.'"
Angeli's face, painted red, white and blue, and draped by wolf tails hanging from his horned hat, became ubiquitous during media coverage of the melee at the U.S. Capitol. He became one of the most high-profile of the more than 500 people arrested for their actions on Jan. 6.
Five people, including a U.S. Capitol police officer, died as a result of the hours-long occupation of the U.S. Capitol.
On Friday, in court, the judge asked him if he had read the statement that laid out what he was accused of doing: threatening congressional officials, unlawfully remaining in a restricted building and committing civil disorder.
"That’s what really happened?" the judge asked him.
"Yes, your honor," Angeli said.
"You are, in fact, guilty of this offense?" the judge asked.
"Yes, your honor," Angeli said.
Angeli, who was arrested under his legal name, Jake Chansley, had previously insisted in media interviews that he had done nothing wrong. “I walked through an open door, dude,” he told NBC News the day after the insurrection.
The government had described Angeli as one of the leaders of the raid, which succeeded in halting for hours the certification of the 2020 election victory of President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump.
Lamberth, in a March ruling rejecting Angeli’s request to be released while awaiting trial, agreed with prosecutors.
Lamberth said Angeli did not enter the Capitol “to ponder Statuary Hall, but with an intent to disrupt the functions of our government by means of force."
Lamberth cited video that showed Angeli walking into the Capitol through a door while people were climbing through a nearby broken window as evidence he was part of the initial incursion of the building. Lamberth wrote that Angeli “quite literally spearheaded” the entry into the Capitol.
In pleadings filed by his attorney, Angeli asserted that he felt invited to the U.S. Capitol by Trump, who, at one point, in a speech before the invasion of the Capitol, said he would be joining protesters who would march on the building.
Watkins described his client as someone who was led astray by the former president.
“The Defendant is a sweet, gentle, well spoken, smart man whose longstanding commitment to all that is peace and non-violence is second in duration only to his recognized mental vulnerabilities,” Watkins wrote in a motion filed June 22.
Watkins told the court, during a June hearing, that Angeli was cooperating with FBI agents investigating the events of Jan. 6. Watkins said those talks, which he said were not part of a plea deal, “demonstrated the wholesale commitment by the defendant to do what is right for the country.”
Angeli was photographed outside the U.S. Capitol on top of scaffolding set up for the pending inauguration of Biden and, inside the Capitol, squaring off with a police officer. He carried a spear topped with a U.S. flag that had been zip-tied to the top.
In a video captured by a journalist working for New Yorker magazine, Angeli strutted down the Senate floor and took position on the dais. It was the spot where Vice President Mike Pence had been moments earlier presiding over a joint session of Congress certifying the 2020 election results.
Angeli posed for photos on the dais and called Pence a traitor, according to the video. He then scrawled a note for Pence and read it aloud for the New Yorker reporter’s camera. “It’s only a matter of time,” Angeli said. “Justice is coming.”
The next day, Angeli called the FBI, knowing that authorities had posted his image and announced they were looking to speak to him. He agreed to an in-person interview at the Phoenix FBI office once he returned to that city. When he showed up for that interview, he was arrested.
Angeli had faced six federal counts related to his actions inside the U.S. Capitol. Two of the crimes involved him unlawfully being present in a “restricted building,” which the Capitol became once Pence was inside it. He was also charged with disrupting an official proceeding.
An initial pretrial services report suggested Angeli be released while awaiting trial. But a magistrate judge in Phoenix ordered him held partly because his adherence to QAnon showed a detachment from reality.
He was transferred to a jail facility run by the sheriff’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, because it could offer him an all-organic diet. Judge Lamberth ordered that Angeli be fed an all-organic diet in keeping with his professed religious belief as a self-studied shaman.
Angeli had been held in what his attorney described as near solitary confinement, spending 22 hours a day in his cell. Such treatment was taking a toll on Angeli’s well-being, Watkins wrote in court filings.
In May, Lamberth ordered that Angeli undergo a mental health evaluation.
In a 2019 interview with The Republic, Angeli said that he had never sought any mental health treatment. But, he said, part of shamanism was rigorous self-examination.
"The fact of the matter is," he said, "people who are insane don't know they are insane. If you question your own sanity, that's actually a sane act."
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Jake Angeli, 'QAnon Shaman,' pleads guilty in Jan. 6 Capitol riot
