Judge blasts 'QAnon Shaman' for recanting his apology and refuses to toss out his plea agreement

• A federal judge refused to toss "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley's guilty plea.
• Chansley recanted his remorse after Tucker Carlson came to his defense.

A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized so-called "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley for recanting his remorse for participating in the Capitol riot and shut down his attempts to invalidate his guilty plea agreement.

"The Court is disappointed to learn that, through his filings and public statements, Mr. Chansley has recanted the contrition displayed at his sentencing nearly two years ago," US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote. "Such an about-face casts serious doubt on the veracity of any of Mr. Chansley's claims, here or elsewhere."

Chansley was among the first rioters charged in connection to the January 6, 2021, insurrection. He pleaded guilty at a hearing in September of that year to one count of obstructing an official proceeding, for attempting to stop Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's electoral victory over Donald Trump. As part of his plea agreement, prosecutors dropped five other charges against him.

During the sentencing hearing, Chansley appeared profusely apologetic.

"I broke the law, and if I believe in freedom, if I believe in law and order, if I believe in responsibility and accountability, then that means that I should do what Gandhi would do and take responsibility even and especially when it incriminates me," he said. "No ifs, ands, or buts about it. That's what men of honor do."

Lamberth wrote in his Thursday opinion that he was "confident" that Chansley "would have received a higher sentence" if it wasn't for his "apparently unequivocal acceptance of responsibility" for his crimes. He gave him a 41-month sentence, close to the lowest permitted by the criminal statute and far less than the 20-year maximum.

Tucker Carlson came to Chansley's defense

Chansley was released from prison in March of this year. In media interviews after his release, he expressed regret for his guilty plea and tried to get it reversed.

On March 6, before Chansley left prison, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired security footage from the January 6 riot, obtained by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, that he falsely claimed demonstrated it was a peaceful protest.

One piece of footage obtained by Carlson is a 10-second clip that shows Chansley outside the Senate chamber. Chansley claimed the clip proved his innocence and that prosecutors withheld the video footage from him before he entered his plea agreement.

Chansley's court filings asking the judge to invalidate his guilty plea are premised on the arguments that the Justice Department messed up by failing to hand over that 10-second video earlier and that his attorneys were ineffective because they failed to get their hands on it. (The clip was provided to Chansley's lawyer in February 2023, the judge says.)

Calling Chansley's legal arguments "devoid of common sense," the judge said the 10-second video did not, in fact, prove he was innocent.

"These videos are decidedly not exculpatory, especially when viewed in context with the 'miles and miles and miles of footage' recorded of Mr. Chansley on January 6, 2021," Lamberth wrote. "Such footage, conveniently omitted by the March 6, 2023 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."

William Shipley, Chansley's current lawyer, said on Twitter that he does "not anticipate" filing additional challenges to the sentence.

The judge blasted Carlson, who was fired from Fox News earlier this year. Lamberth wrote the March 6 broadcast misrepresented the January 6 riot in ways "too numerous to count."

Carlson, the judge wrote, included "inflammatory characterizations of cherry-picked videos stripped of their proper context" that undermined faith in the criminal justice system.

"In so doing, he called on his followers to 'reject the evidence of [their] eyes and ears,' language resembling the destructive, misguided rhetoric that fueled the events of January 6 in the first place," Lamberth wrote. "The Court finds it alarming that the host's viewers throughout the nation so readily heeded his command."