Trump Fanatic Sentenced To 3.5+ Years For Assaulting Police

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South Carolina resident and Capitol rioter Nicholas Languerand has been sentenced to over three and a half years in jail for assaulting police at the Capitol last January. Languerand’s exact sentence works out to 44 months, and like other defendants, he will be given credit for the months that he’s already spent in custody. (He has been jailed since last April.) As summarized in a Justice Department press release, Languerand “threw various objects at officers with the U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department, including an orange traffic barrier and two stick-like objects.” Notably, Languerand — who boasted on social media after the riot that he “got some good shots in” — joined the tumult well after it began. It was at around 5 o’clock in the afternoon that he committed his crimes.

The sentence, which was delivered by federal Judge John D. Bates, includes a $2,000 fine for Languerand and requirements for two years of supervised release after his prison term is up, in addition to 60 hours of community service. Languerand has a history of run-ins with the law; as summarized in The Post and Courier (a South Carolina newspaper), prosecutors observed “that he was the subject of a restraining order from a Vermont woman who accused him of stalking and threatening her. That he was charged with aggravated assault for an incident in which he beat an acquaintance while they were both riding in a car. That in the months before Jan. 6, Languerand yelled at Black Lives Matters protesters, left a threatening voicemail with a city employee in Vermont, and accused the owner of a nearby pizza joint of running a child sex trafficking operation out of the basement, a popular online conspiracy.”

As long as Republicans keep proving themselves to be apparently a-okay with Trump propping up people like Languerand — who, no matter the traumas in his childhood that were noted in his defense amid these court proceedings, chose to commit these serious offenses — the GOP’s supposed affinity for the police will continue to appear startlingly hollow. Going forward, some of the highest-profile criminal cases tied to the riot include a slew of seditious conspiracy charges that were recently doled out against individuals including Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of a violent, right-wing group known as the Oath Keepers. As of the middle of this week, observers were awaiting a judge’s decision on whether to keep Rhodes in custody pending trial.