Alabama resident Lonnie Coffman has been sentenced to 46 months in prison for weapons offenses directly tied to the January 6 attack on the Capitol last year. Coffman parked his pickup truck full of weapons near the Capitol as the time approached when violence ended up breaking out; on January 6, the vehicle — which contained an array of weapons — was apparently less than half a mile from the Capitol building. According to the Justice Department, Coffman’s truck was discovered to contain “several loaded firearms within arms-reach of the driver’s seat, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, large-capacity ammunition feeding devices, a crossbow with bolts, machetes, camouflage smoke devices, a stun gun, and a cooler containing 11 mason jars filled with ignitable ingredients for Molotov cocktail incendiary weapons.”
Federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who handled Coffman’s sentencing, said the defendant “had almost a small armory in his truck, ready to do battle.” The judge sentenced Coffman to several months more than prosecutors had sought in his case; he was initially arrested on January 6 of last year after returning to his parked vehicle that law enforcement had discovered, and he’s been jailed ever since. He will be receiving credit for the time that he’s already spent in custody. Coffman’s vehicle was stumbled upon by D.C. officers combing the inside of a security perimeter that had been established after pipe bombs were discovered at the D.C. headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic national committees. Coffman didn’t end up participating in the Capitol attack, although he was obviously part of the broader surge of pro-Trump violence in D.C. that day. Whoever planted those pipe bombs has never been discovered, according to publicly available information.
When Coffman was taken into custody after returning to his parked truck on January 6, he was also discovered to be carrying a loaded handgun and a loaded revolver. Although he originally faced additional charges, Coffman pleaded guilty to two federal criminal offenses and a local charge; the federal offenses included two counts of possession of an unregistered firearm, which covered Molotov cocktail components uncovered in his truck and Alabama residence. Coffman also pleaded guilty to a D.C. offense of carrying a pistol without a license; on that charge, Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Coffman to 15 months in prison, but his local and federal jail sentences will unfold simultaneously.
There’s more to the story — Coffman was also discovered on January 6 to possess a card listing contact info for a right-wing militia known as American Patriots. Back in 2014, he went — armed — with members of the group to an apparent patrol of the border between the United States and Mexico. Because of that previous trip, Coffman had been on the FBI’s “radar,” as CNN summarizes it. The weapons that Coffman had indicate how much more serious that the already serious events of January 6 could have gotten. Joshua James, a member of the far-right group called the Oath Keepers, recently pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection to the Capitol attack — and in his plea agreement, James admitted that group leader Stewart Rhodes “instructed [him] and others to be prepared and called upon to… use lethal force if necessary” amid attempts to help keep Trump in office. Oath Keepers members believed Trump could invoke the federal law called the Insurrection Act that lets presidents call up militias. People in the organization were prepared to be the militia.
