Jacob Chansley aka the QAnon Shaman was recently rejected in his bid to have his conviction dismissed related to his participation in the January 6 insurrection, but the judge didn’t have strong words for only Chansley — Tucker Carlson called out too.
It has been noted that Chansley completed his sentence after being convicted of obstruction of Congress and was released early, but wanted the conviction dismissed based on footage of the insurrection that was shown on Fox News by former host Tucker Carlson before he was fired.
Chansley claimed that the video “undermines his conviction” and was “duplicative of police body-camera footage he was given months before he decided to plead guilty.”
Judge Royce C. Lamberth disagreed in a 35-page ruling against Chansley via The Washington Post:
“These videos are decidedly not exculpatory. Such footage, conveniently omitted by the [Fox News] program, shows nearly all of Mr. Chansley’s actions that day, including: carrying a six-foot-long pole armed with a spearhead, unlawfully entering the Capitol through a broken door, disobeying orders from law enforcement on more than a half-dozen occasions, screaming obscenities, entering the Senate chamber, climbing onto the Senate dais, sitting in the Vice President’s chair, and leaving a threatening message for the Vice President.”
But Lamberth had harsh words for Carlson as well:
“The host explicitly questioned the integrity of this Court — not to mention the legitimacy of the entire U.S. criminal justice system — with inflammatory characterizations of cherry-picked videos stripped of their proper context, language resembling the destructive, misguided rhetoric that fueled the events of January 6 in the first place.”
He further said that as a judge who has been privy to piles and hours of evidence over years of presiding over cases, a few seconds of video rarely serves as sufficient:
“Those of us who have presided over dozens of cases arising from, listened to hundreds of hours of testimony describing, and reviewed thousands of pages of briefing about the attack on our democracy of January 6 know all too well that neither the events of that day nor any particular defendant’s involvement can be fully captured in a seconds-long video carelessly, or perhaps even cynically, aired in a television segment or attached to a tweet.”
