EGN NEWS DESK
The {photograph} was an instantaneous image of Jan. 6, 2021: a person in bluejeans and a thick plaid overshirt reclining within the chambers of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with a smile on his face and his boot resting atop a black spiral pocket book on a nook of a desk.
The smirk and the lug-soled boot belonged to Richard Barnett, a 64-year-old former window salesman from Gravette, Ark., who goes by Bigo. He used his time within the workplace to pocket an envelope with the speaker’s letterhead and scrawl a crude observe to Pelosi herself. But it was the picture of him that basically lasted, possibly due to the best way it combined vandalism with the specter of violence — he had a stun machine on him — and encapsulated the rioters’ mockery of the nation’s democratic establishments.
Washington seemed nothing like that on Monday, as lawmakers in a quiet and snow-covered Capitol licensed President-elect Donald Trump’s November victory. The Bigos of the world don’t have any complaints about this election. But the story of his final 4 years — wherein he was convicted and sentenced and seemingly tried to commerce on his fame — is simply as revealing as that first image. He spent immediately in a low-security federal jail in Seagoville, Texas, a spot the place inmates aren’t allowed to have web entry however from which he manages to transmit his ideas on social media all the identical. These days, he’s a hero on the correct whose fortunes might be tied to these of a president-elect who has promised to pardon individuals like him.
What occurs while you put your boot on a desk within the speaker’s workplace?
“For higher or worse you’ve got change into one of many faces of Jan. 6,” Judge Christopher Cooper instructed him final yr, “and I believe you take pleasure in it.”
‘Bigo was right here’
Over the previous 4 years, nearly 1,600 individuals have been prosecuted in reference to the riot on the Capitol, together with Trump himself, and a whole bunch of these convicted have already returned to their earlier lives. My colleague Alan Feuer, who covers federal legislation enforcement, revealed a sequence of fascinating interviews with eight of them immediately.
I wished to have a look at the story of somebody who’s nonetheless inside, whose conviction stands as a trigger on the correct but stays proof of the lawlessness that Trump and his supporters have now tried to scrub away.
Lawyers for Barnett didn’t reply my questions on whether or not or not Barnett is in search of a pardon from Trump (though one among them did ship me a hyperlink to a fund-raising web site Barnett is utilizing).
Barnett himself declined my request to interview him.
According to prosecutors, physique digital camera footage and his personal phrases, Barnett entered Pelosi’s workplace suite with a flagpole and a stun machine hid in a strolling stick. He reclined at a desk, took an envelope bearing her signature addressed to former Representative Billy Long — now Trump’s choose to run the I.R.S. — and left a observe that learn, “Hey Nancy, Bigo was right here, you biotch.” When an officer directed him out of the workplace, he complied, however he urged her to “be a patriot,” and mentioned, “Don’t be on the fallacious facet, you would possibly get harm.”
In video footage captured on Jan. 6 by Ms. Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra, a documentary filmmaker, Ms. Pelosi mentioned at one level, “They’re clearly ransacking our places of work and all the remainder of that; that’s nothing. The concern we now have is about private security — it simply transcends all the things.”
Barnett left the constructing after he was hit with chemical spray. Outside on the Capitol grounds, he instructed a New York Times reporter what he’d finished — though he insisted he’d left 1 / 4 to pay for the envelope, and that he’d been pushed into the speaker’s workplace by the group.
“I’ll most likely be telling them that is what occurred all the best way to the D.C. jail,” he mentioned that day.
He was proper.
The crazy-uncle protection
After Barnett was charged with eight counts, he appeared to develop deeply pissed off with the system, at one level throwing a tantrum throughout a digital court docket listening to.
“They’re dragging this out!” he yelled from jail throughout a listening to that March. “They’re letting everyone else out!”
Later, it was prosecutors who have been irked. They mentioned in court docket filings that he had appeared on Russian state tv, offered autographed images of himself within the speaker’s suite — virtually presaging the flood of merchandise associated to Trump’s 2024 felony conviction — and thought of having his observe to Pelosi copyrighted.
Barnett pleaded not responsible. At his trial in January 2023, his lawyer tried a novel protection.
“He’s not a home terrorist,” mentioned Joseph McBride, “however he’s everybody’s loopy redneck uncle from out of city.”
Barnett himself took the stand and mentioned, utilizing an expletive, that he was responsible of being an “fool” however not of breaking the legislation.
The jury convicted him on all counts after two hours of deliberation.
“Barnett acknowledges no authority however himself and is keen to do ‘no matter it takes’ to get what he desires, even when it requires harming others, stealing or breaking the legislation,” prosecutors wrote in a memo earlier than Judge Cooper sentenced him to greater than 4 years.
Biding his time
Like Trump, Barnett has had some excellent news this yr. A Supreme Court ruling in June making it more durable to cost Jan. 6 defendants with obstructing an official continuing — a cost Barnett was convicted of — may assist him enchantment that cost, though a judge denied his request to be launched early from jail pending that enchantment.
And then, in fact, there was the election of Trump, which Barnett mentioned on X he had discovered about on a “low-cost static jail radio.”
“Congratulations Donald, Congratulations America, Congratulations to all my fellow J6’ers,” he mentioned in a submit on a verified account that bears his identify.
He seems to take care of an lively presence on X, the place he has weighed in to specific his disgust on the pardon of Hunter Biden and the spending deal that staved off a authorities shutdown. He additionally used X to announce in 2022 that he was going to develop a goatee “till all my fellow #J6political prisoners are free.” (I’m instructed it has gotten fairly lengthy.)
The jail doesn’t enable inmates to submit on X, however an individual accustomed to its interior workings instructed me the jail believes Barnett’s missives are being posted for him by somebody on the surface.
