Jan. 6 defendant Dustin Thompson GUILTY on all charges. including felony obstruction of Congress.
More on the case:https://t.co/uolGhCGILU
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) April 14, 2022
A jury on Thursday convicted the Jan. 6 defendant Dustin Thompson on all six charges he faced — including felony obstruction of Congress — rejecting his effort to blame Donald Trump’s campaign of disinformation about the election results for his conduct.
The verdict, the third conviction in three jury trials for the Justice Department, was a significant validation of prosecutors’ effort to separate the actions of individual participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot from the attempts by Trump to subvert the election results.
After the verdict, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton tore into Trump for his efforts to dupe supporters into believing the election was stolen.
“I think our democracy is in trouble because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn’t, in my view, really care about democracy but only about power,” Walton said…
Trump’s ability to influence his supporters to march on and breach the Capitol has been a focus of the Jan. 6 select committee in Congress. It has pointed to claims from defendants like Thompson — as well as Trump’s lengthy silence during the riot — as evidence that the former president bears singular, perhaps criminal, responsibility for the violence that broke out that day.
Dreher didn’t contradict that narrative but urged jurors to set it aside.
“This is not president Trump’s criminal trial,” he said. “It is not up to you to decide whether anyone other than the defendant should be prosecuted for any of the crimes charged. The fact that another person may also be guilty is no defense of a criminal charge. The question of the possible guilt of others should not enter your thinking.”
Thompson was convicted on six charges: obstruction of an official proceeding — which carries a maximum 20-year sentence — as well as theft of government property, entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, disorderly conduct in the Capitol, and parading in the Capitol. The jury deliberated for about three hours…
Defendant Dustin Thompson:
The jury trial of Jan. 6 suspect Dustin Thompson continues this morning. Yesterday, during opening arguments, his attorney admitted that his client stole a coat rack and a bottle of liquor, but said Trump authorized the attack. https://t.co/h9q4OxFfGv
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) April 13, 2022
… An exterminator from Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Thompson, 38, was laid off in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Alone at home with his new wife, he began spending long days on the internet, steeping himself in conspiracy theories about the upcoming vote.
As the election approached, he said, he fully believed that if Donald J. Trump ended up losing, it would only be because the voting had been rigged, as the president had been warning publicly for months. Even after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner, Mr. Thompson could not accept that it was true…
“If the president’s giving you almost an order to do something,” he said, “I felt obligated to do that.”
Mr. Thompson’s story is not unusual. At several points during the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack, many people charged with crimes have sought to blame Mr. Trump in various ways for their actions, mostly at pretrial bail hearings or at sentencings after pleading guilty.
But Mr. Thompson is the first defendant to attempt the argument at trial in front of a jury. In making his case, he offered a window into the toxic and relentless flood of conspiracy theories and lies, stoked by Mr. Trump, that helped give rise to the riot…
Well before the trial began, Mr. Thompson’s lawyer, Samuel H. Shamansky, made a bold request of the judge in the case, Reggie B. Walton, asking for permission to subpoena Mr. Trump as a witness. Judge Walton ultimately rejected the move, saying that hauling the former president into the courtroom would only have been a distraction.
Instead, at his trial this week, Mr. Shamansky has painted Mr. Thompson as an impressionable man who filled his days of pandemic-driven isolation with a steady diet of election fraud conspiracy theories. Mr. Thompson agreed that a “perfect storm” of circumstances, as Mr. Shamansky put it, had caused him to fall prey to Mr. Trump’s lies about the race and ultimately led him to the Capitol.
“It was just an awful year — being unemployed, newly married, quarantine, Covid,” he told the jury. “I don’t know where my head was.”
Before Mr. Thompson offered his account, his wife, Sarah Thompson, took the stand…
When he went off to Washington on Jan. 5, she said, driving with a friend, Mrs. Thompson did not think that her husband would get into trouble. She was happy, as she put it, to be at home with the “house quiet.”
But on the evening of the riot, Mr. Thompson texted her a video of himself, milling about with others in the looted parliamentarian’s office. The room was littered with paperwork and overturned furniture.
Her response to him was simple and direct.
“I will not post bail,” she texted back.
Pour (dis)encourager les autres:
! Walton detains Thompson without bond pending sentencing.
"The inevitable reality is that whether he does time now or does time later, he’s got to do time," Walton said just before ordering him held.
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) April 14, 2022
Baud
?
debbie
Where’s your savior now, Dustin? Why has he failed to save you?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
ROFL
‘So in seven months the young and supple Mr. Thompson went from Joe Square citizen to full tinfoil hat. I don’t buy it. He was bonkers long before that.
laura
A man who “passively filled his days with election conspiracy theories.” From where I’m sitting he looks like a man who sought out, on the daily, opportunities to open his skull and fill it with shit and then traipsed his happy ass all the way to DC with a buddy to attempt to overthrow his own government because his god king failed to win an election and took federal property as a consolation prize and then hooted all over social media about his badassery and now has major sads because he expected that his conduct was consequence free. Womp Womp.
Sure Lurkalot
For those of us who have relations who stew themselves in bullshit all day every day, I really don’t have doubts that this guy was influenced and provoked by things he saw and read. Good on the judge to advise the jury that despite any one else’s complicity, the defendant had agency and made his own choices.
Sure Lurkalot
@laura: You said it better.
mrmoshpotato
I hope they throw the book at this shitstain for each of the six charges. What a traitorous idiot.
ETA
Fascist idiots following an idiotic fascist.
eclare
I like his wife.
mrmoshpotato
Perhaps shoved up Putin’s bitch’s fat, orange, fascist ass?
Litlebritdifrnt
These are the same people who believed TFG that he would “march down there with you” knowing full well that the Secret Service had already made arrangements to get him out of there. He is a itinerant liar, I still cannot believe that there are people out there in MAGA hats who believe any single word he spouts, I mean how bloody gullible do you have to be to believe his shit? Really? And they are still spouting the “Space force has all the evidence and are going to arrest Biden any day now”. I followed the Birthers back in the day with the crew at Fogbow and they were nuts, but these people, they have the Birthers beat by miles.
Old School
I could use a coat rack. I wonder if he’s done with it.
mrmoshpotato
Salty balls, you traitorous trash.
James E Powell
If Judge Walton’s comments were about any Democrat, they’d be the lead story on every news show. The story would cover the front page of the FTFNY. Every Sunday show would feature Republicans repeating the comments and slamming all Democrats.
mrmoshpotato
I know there are web sites dedicated to tracking down these Dump-humping, fascist shitstains so they can face the music for trying to overthrow our (and their own) government, but does anyone know about sites that track the sentencings of these Dump-humping, fascist shitstains?
lollipopguild
But…but…but….the President of the United States LIED to me! (sound of cell door slamming shut)
scav
“I will not post bail,”
I want that on a stamp.
Litlebritdifrnt
And then there is the lunatic who tried to steal a car by claiming he was a Federal Marshall because Trump had declared some such shit. These are real human beings who believe this shit. My Sis and Bro in Law have a friend who follows the Q shit on Facebook. She tells them whenever they visit that Biden is dead, the person pretending to be Biden is a double and he is not in the White House but a “duplicate” Whitehouse created just for him. Trump is still POTUS and flying around on AF1 doing his POTUS stuff. This is in the UK, so this nonsense is not confined to the US, there are people over here who have been indoctrinated into this stuff. The major problem is THAT THESE PEOPLE VOTE!
Roger Moore
An excellent point. It’s too bad the same logic is not applied to wealthier defendants.
Baud
Interesting. So contrary to the liberal consensus at the time, President Obama should have affirmatively told people to drink bleach.
topclimber
Does anyone know if the Russian Orthodox Patriarch has teamed up with his Ukrainian counterpart(s) to call for an Easter ceasefire?
eclare
@Litlebritdifrnt: It’s hard to comprehend those beliefs. It truly is a cult, and I don’t know how you deprogram the cult members.
gene108
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Trump is extremely honest and sincere when he displays his bigotry. When Trump kicked off his campaign, in 2015, by saying Mexicans are rapists, he meant it.
They know Trump’s racism, lack of intellectual curiosity, etc. aren’t an act. They share these traits with Trump, and know in these areas he’s totally honest and utterly sincere, unlike other politicians who they know are not true believers.
schrodingers_cat
@Litlebritdifrnt: How are you feeling?
MisterDancer
He’s one of those White people Dr. King used to talk about (I know, I know, but King is so relevant here):
eclare
@MisterDancer: Poor White people and poor Black people have so much more in common than poor White people and rich White people.
Scout211
What? Since when is being a newlywed a defense in a criminal trial.
This guy must be some fun to live with. No wonder the new wife relishes her quiet house now and will not post bail.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Old School: I’m sure he’s finished the liquor.
RaflW
@scav: I think it would make a nice temporary rotating tagline here at BJ.
I don’t often feel bad for the families of these nutters, but the combo of that line and her earlier mention of enjoying some quiet when he left town – yeah this may not be a long lasting marriage.
zhena gogolia
@laura: good summary
Gin & Tonic
@topclimber: Orthodox Easter is next week.
trollhattan
I’m liking this Judge Walton fellow. His jib, it is cut well.
Meanwhile, California show how to get ‘er done. “Russian
WarOilship, go fuck yourself.”Sure Lurkalot
@eclare:
It’s as plain as day and rather than believe it, because they need to believe something, they instead believe in space lasers and satanic cabals and Trump flying around on Air Force One, ruling the world. And besides, every poor white person is just a nascent rich one whose ship hasn’t yet arrived.
eclare
@trollhattan: Impressive!
topclimber
@topclimber: will miracles never cease?
Oops. This looks like it might be old. Better it than me. FSM willing, they will get their shit together this year too.
debbie
@topclimber:
NPR reported on a trip by a number of religious leaders who made a trip to Ukraine. It was pointed out the Russian Patriarch was not in attendance and in fact was a vocal supporter of Putin. Doubtful there will be much of anything that’s joint.
topclimber
@Gin & Tonic: Prior ceasefires in the east have spanned all Christian dates. At least, that’s what I think my last post said.
RaflW
@gene108: The entire Trump thing is about the elevation of a sub-mediocre person to ‘greatness’. They can finally point with (absurd) pride that a born-lucky, corrupt dolt who is no brighter than them could reach the ‘top’.
zhena gogolia
@topclimber: the Russian patriarch is a criminal like his boss
topclimber
@debbie: It looks live the only fraternal wishes are among the Vatican and the (ha!) other Christians in Europe. (Looking at you, Lutherans!).
topclimber
@zhena gogolia: At what point do you think he starts covering his Holy ass?
laura
@mrmoshpotato: the best J6 and related fuckery tracker is Marcy Wheeler. Emptywheel.net or @emptywheel there are very few who can both read and comprehend the sheer volume of legal fillings and then turn around in short order and post cogent narratives and calls bullshit like no other. She has a very tough gatekeeper of comments who Brooks no shenanigans. I was booted for failing to differentiate my nym and so just lurk on the daily.
debbie
@topclimber:
I couldn’t find the specific report, but there’s this which was written before their visit last Tuesday.
zhena gogolia
@topclimber: I make no predictions about anything Russian any more
Geminid
@scav: “Spousal warship, I will not post bail.”
Geminid
@trollhattan: I read recently that Scotland achieved a like level of renewable energy in electrical generation in 2021, close to 97%. This was in a story about the installation of an eighty ton tidal turbine generator in the River Tay.
Mike in NC
That infamous photo of Fat Bastard raising a fascist clenched fist on January 6 will be in history books for generations to come. Rottenest motherfucker on the planet whose last name isn’t Putin.
prostratedragon
@RaflW: So many of these arrests, and no doubt convictions in the future, have helped to solve bad domestic situations.
Warblewarble
Russian patriarch is a dishonest warmonger.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
If your President asked you to turn down your thermostat and buy an electric car ,would you do that? No? Then your stupid excuse is stupid.
RSA
It’s a little ironic that this guy’s tribe has traditionally rejected the idea that being disadvantaged and subject to bad influences might be mitigating factors when someone commits a crime. There you go, Mr. Thompson. You had a free choice, and you chose badly. These are the consequences.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@topclimber:
Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahahahahaha… No.
In Russia, Putin is the leader of the church.
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia: And I don’t mean God.
Geminid
@Geminid: Correction: the River Tay tidal turbine generator installed last year weighed 680 tons, not 80 tons. A shipyard in Dundee constructed a submersible barge to transport the turbine. That was the first vessel built in Dundee in 40 years.
debbie
Move over, Madison Cawthorne:
Dan B
@Geminid: There’s a company that wants to build a floating wind farm 42 miles off the Washington coast. It’s not a large site so there is room for more. It would power 800,000 homes, almost half the state’s residences. We’re already close to 90% renewables with hydropower and wind so more would be great.
Ryan
@debbie: Maybe he’ll pardon him, like he’s given all his staffers executive privilege.
Patricia Kayden
topclimber
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I am disappointed yet again.
I thought all the rain now and in the near-term might convince certain a-holes that folks could use a few days off. If they are days that remind them of a cultural bond like Orthodox Christianity, couldn’t hurt.
Chief Oshkosh
@James E Powell: Yep. Similarly, WTF happened with the Ginni Thomas story? If a liberal Justice had a spouse steeped in and acting on far-left bullshit, it would be top of hour, every hour.
prostratedragon
In another connection I’ve heard that we have Molly Jong-Fast to thank for the phrase performative moronics. Fits here as well.
Ryan
@Patricia Kayden: Rule #2 in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, which is about standing up to autocracy, is simple: defend institutions. Now, Meet the Press might be the only institution we loathe more than preznidental debates, nevertheless, no presidential debates is straight out of the autocratic playbook and is something that must be seen as unacceptable.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
Scotland appears to be doing very well, but nature is unpredictable. From a recent BBC News story:
But even 83.7% is mighty impressive.
Renie
Thompson should have just gone full Nazi and said “I was just following orders”.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@laura: commenter lasharongue (sp?) posted this video last week of Marcy Wheeler and Ben Wittes which goes a long way to contradict the Do-Nothing Garland so beloved of a lot of people who should know better, like the O’Bros and the above-mentioned Molly Jong-Fast, to say nothing of most of MSNBC. Personally, I find Wheeler so deep in the weeds that she’s hard to follow. I’m probably going to re-listen to this YouTube over the weekend
Geminid
@Brachiator: Achieving carbon neutral electrical generation is not so heavy a lift. With renewable sources like wind and solar becoming dependable low cost technologies, and energy storage catching up, the constraint on the clean energy transition in electrical generation soon may be sunk costs in fossil fuel generation plants. Some of those plants will be efficient as surge capacity in the next decade but they might be just a few dinosaurs by the end of that decade.
Hoppie
@Old School: I could use a bottle of liquor.
But I am sort of picky…
Roger Moore
@RSA:
It’s only not an excuse when Those People use it. When We use it, it’s a perfect excuse.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
This is very good, but I have not noticed that energy costs have declined much.
Geminid
@debbie: It sounds like House Republicans are counting their chickens before they are hatched. A lot of people assume Republicans will win a majority this November. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Baud
@Geminid:
Geminid
@Brachiator: I don’t think you will see electricity costs drop as your state shifts to renewables. You might see them stabilize, though, in the long term. In the medium term, there are plenty of infrastructure investment backlogs, such as burying power lines, that will suck up savings.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Scout211:
Yep, I noticed that too. My first thought was, “Well that guy’s marriage definitely won’t survive incarceration.”
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
An important part of this is that renewables are only marginally cheaper than fossil fuels. Of course those fossil fuel prices include enormous implicit subsidies because they don’t include the cost of externalities. If we were actually charging fossil fuels at their real price including environmental damage, things would be different.
wetzel
I decided to be open about this in writing about philosophy, medicine, etc. as I pursue my dumb job. Although never diagnosed, I do possess the capacity for delusional thinking. I’m not sure if I access this superpower from the manic of schizoid direction. Every ten years I have a few uncanny moments, and then I return to regularly scheduled programming. Maybe because I know enough philosophy, psychology and general science, I can interrogate the verifiability criteria for meaningfulness. I can attribute it to unconscious process. I learned to do this a long time ago. Most sane people talk nonsense anyway.
I’m saying this because I know what it’s like to be in the state this person was suffering. Maybe there are 2-3% of people who have experienced that state, but very few who would risk their ethos to describe it. I feel sorry for the poor eyelash cosmetologist from Beverly Hills too. She in a similar manic state. It is one of the failure pathways for a person above 300 on the Holmes Rahe Stress Scale. Think about it. It is now possible to cultivate and marshall an army of lunatics on the internet. Almost certainly the influence operators are mimicking the syncronicities and signs and portents of delusions of reference to activate this type. It’s a tragedy.
Old School
@Hoppie:
It didn’t say where it came from. It could have Republican backwash in it.
wetzel
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Personally, I find Wheeler so deep in the weeds that she’s hard to follow.
Grip down. Stay in the apple cart. Make yourself process. She’s writing at LSAT level. No joke, Marcy Wheeler has gotten so far above everyone else on the DOJ investigation that it’s almost as if she and her team are the only real journalists covering it. They are the only ones with a bird’s eye view.
I wish she would take on an intern who could write down to The Atlantic or New Yorker level and publish into a more widely read venue than Empty Wheel. But they are established in their ways. That’s for sure.
Empty Wheel is required reading these days. The cognitive work will stave off dementia!!
Quiltingfool
@eclare: My niece married a black man. Her husband was a great guy, the family liked him very much (except for her dad, but he is an asshole and nobody in the family liked him at all). One day we were talking about the kind of food we ate growing up and his family ate and discovered we all ate the same – what we called “poor people food.” Things like beans and cornbread, fried chicken, Mac and cheese, and so on. Now, keep in mind not many black people live here, so the family had very little interaction with black folks growing up. Through Anthony, they learned that they had so much more in common than they realized.
Anthony is no longer with us. He had a defective heart and though he lived longer than the doctors predicted, his heart gave out. I made him a t-shirt quilt (jerseys from his son’s football leagues) a few years before he passed; he cried when I gave it to him and said he would put it away to keep it nice. I told him absolutely not, you use that quilt every day and think about how much you enjoyed watching your child play ball. I miss him.
O. Felix Culpa
@Quiltingfool: What a sweet and sad story. Thank you for sharing it.
AxelFoley
Or on rotation here in the tags.
edit: ninja’d by RaflW
Another Scott
@wetzel: You’re touching on one of my hobbyhorses. Too many people don’t accept that our eyes aren’t cameras and our brains aren’t somehow objective recorders and analyzers of reality. There’s a whole lot of complex electro-bio-chemistry going on behind our eyes, and too many charlatans have figured out ways over the centuries to warp our minds in dangerous ways.
I occasionally joke (at least to myself) about a vaccine against RWNJ-ism and the like. Heaven’s Gate was a few hundred people. The Trumpists and Putinists and Modi-ists number in the tens of millions (or more) and have lots more power than the HGers. I don’t know what it will take to marginalize cults like that, but it seems to me that much more needs to be done to understand – on a electro-bio-chemical level – what makes people susceptible and how to reverse it.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
wetzel
@Another Scott: I don’t know what it will take to marginalize cults like that, but it seems to me that much more needs to be done to understand – on a electro-bio-chemical level – what makes people susceptible and how to reverse it.
I don’t think there is a key on the scientific axis, because observations are reproducible in science, both sample and observation, but an individual person is unique. The solution is on the symbolic or poetic axis, in the moral agency of the manipulator. There is a rational moral argument not to manipulate people if you recognize their symbolic dignity. The trouble with people like Putin, though, is that he is delusional himself. He has a totalizing Christo-fascist dialectical phenomenology. We are just the meat puppets for his weird purification. People greatly overestimate the sanity of Vladimir Putin, I’m afraid, lol.
Omnes Omnibus
FWIW Thompson had one of the very best criminal defense attorneys on Columbus. Sam Shamansky is damned good.
Raven
@wetzel: I don’t know if you saw my response to our discussion about Athens yesterday?
Dopey-o
I recognize that you are talking about something very important here, but I have no idea what it is. Can you point to some references? Or flesh out your comment?
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Thanks for the pointer. Wheeler is very, very good, and I think Wittes is right that Garland is doing a lot, very carefully, so that the cases will result in successful prosecution. It’s still not clear to me how many bigwigs will see the inside of a courtroom, but they’re doing it right so far.
Whether she’s making too many connections with too little evidence that will stand up in court, I dunno. As Wittes said, it’s easy for us to agree on the facts that we saw with our own lying eyes, but courtrooms can be different…
Cheers,
Scott.
columbusqueen
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes, he is, but I’m still kinda proud I kicked his ass in years ago during a divorce he was handling as a package deal w/ a criminal case. At the end, Sam sighed, “Not my best day.” I smiled & replied, “Not your usual turf, so rough things happen.”
dnfree
@Brachiator: We put solar panels on our house. They feed ComEd (Illinois), and Illinois credits us for the energy they produce. But there’s a “delivery charge” we pay every month whether we had a surplus or not. Everyone on the power grid pays the delivery charge.
Now ComEd has applied to the state to increase the delivery charge. So they’re looking out for themselves.
Omnes Omnibus
@columbusqueen: I’ve been on the same side with him in couple of cases with multiple defendants. And I have done everything in my power to never do domestic cases. Ever.
Tehanu
@AxelFoley:
Don’t know if that would make a great stamp, but a rotating tag, absolutely! And good for her!
columbusqueen
@Omnes Omnibus: You’re smarter than I am. It was my specialty, which is why I’m now retired. Burnout is inevitable in the field.
Wapiti
@Dan B: Getting well above 100% renewable from wind and solar would give a little room for more water down the rivers. Maybe remove some dams.