A participant in the Capitol riot from Colorado was sentenced in recent days to 30 months, or two and a half years, in prison.
Thomas Patrick Hamner, who was identified as 49 years old, received the sentence after pleading guilty to a single felony charge of interfering with law enforcement officers during a civil disorder. He could still face additional consequences in connection to his participation in the riot, as the Justice Department specifies that other charges he was facing weren’t dropped in connection to the plea deal, unlike with other riot defendants. Hamner’s original six charges, of which five remain pending, included five felonies, one of which was the subject of his plea agreement. That leaves four felonies, including assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon and aiding and abetting, alongside engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon.
At the Capitol — well, outside of the building, Hamner struggled with a pair of police officers, including one each from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police, who were trying to preserve a barrier of metal bicycle racks that law enforcement hoped to use in containing the crowd. Hamner, who was wearing a Christmas-style sweater that said “Guns don’t kill people — Clintons do,” worked to remove one of the racks as the involved officers tried to keep it in place. Hamner was also involved in pushing a large, metal, pro-Trump sign into a line of police participating in the attempted defense of the premises. The sign was huge — filings in another case pin what is apparently the same sign at some eight feet tall and ten feet wide. In that case, two defendants who vocally planned their participation in what became the riot and pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding each received 41 months.
The sign was on wheels, and an officer said more than a dozen personnel were required to remove the sign because of its size after rioters shoved it into cops. The large display, consisting of a massive frame with the Trump imagery on some material stretched across it, was the weapon referred to in Hamner’s charges. Hamner was originally arrested in November of last year in Colorado. In other riot-related news in court, jury selection in a case against members of the far-right group the Oath Keepers is starting this week. Defendants in the case include Stewart Rhodes, the founder and national leader of the organization, who’s charged with seditious conspiracy in connection to the riot.
