Days before the election, DOJ continues to prosecute new Jan. 6 cases

WASHINGTON — Standing inside a sparsely filled federal courtroom in Washington on Friday afternoon, another Donald Trump supporter who committed crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, because he believed the then-president’s election lies was sentenced to prison for participating in what his sentencing judge described as “a direct attack on the nation’s democracy.”

Wearing a blue suit as he shook, sniffled and fought back tears, 38-year-old Troy Weeks talked extensively about his rough childhood, bragged that he refused to take part in a walkout when he was in high school, quoted scripture and apologized to one of the few people in the courtroom gallery: former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, a military veteran who was repeatedly assaulted while protecting the Capitol nearly four years ago.

“I feel ashamed,” said Weeks, who pleaded guilty in May to two felonies, including assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers, as well as several misdemeanors.

The judge sentenced him to 21 months in federal prison.

In their sentencing memo, prosecutors sought more than two years in prison for Weeks, writing that he “encouraged other rioters to push against the police, pushed up against the police himself, and tried to grab a can of OC spray from a Metropolitan Police Department Officer.”

Gonell, in remarks he prepared to read for the judge, wrote that Weeks “assaulted us simply because we were doing our job” and “tried to steal our equipment and disarmed us to prolong the chaos and incapacitate the officers to hinder our response.”

“My family — my wife and son — nearly got to bury me because I was honoring my oath and being crushed by people like him, by the mob he joined,” Gonell wrote. “He knew what he was doing and didn’t care who he was hurting or if the officers had a family or if they were bleeding — as I was, from both my hands. His actions as a member of the mob contributed to the pain that my family and I have suffered, physically, mentally, morally and financially since Jan. 6.”

New arrests this week

Weeks wasn’t the only Jan. 6 rioter to face repercussions in the last week, just days before the 2024 election.

Edward Kelley, an anti-abortion activist who is separately charged with plotting to murder the FBI special agents who investigated him on Jan. 6 charges, was on trial last week in his Capitol attack case. There, an FBI special agent revealed for the first time that the bureau believes that Kelley — who evidence shows was the fourth rioter to breach the U.S. Capitol — was armed with a gun on Jan. 6. The judge in that bench trial has not yet issued a verdict.

Kelley is set to go to trial in the murder plot case in Tennessee federal court later this month. His co-defendant in that case has already admitted the duo plotted “to murder employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Robert Piccirillo was arrested in Florida on Monday. The president of the West Palm Beach chapter of the Proud Boys known as “Bobby Pickles” stood with his fellow members of the far-right group as they overtook the police line on Jan. 6, the FBI alleges. Piccirillo chanted, “We want Trump!” in front of a line of officers before entering a senator’s private “hideaway” office in the Capitol through a broken window near the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence took place that day, authorities alleged. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Richard Andrews and Keith Andrews, a father-son duo, were arrested in New Jersey on Tuesday. Richard Andrews faces felony charges of assaulting law enforcement officers and civil disorder, while Keith Andrews faces misdemeanors. Lawyers for the men told The New York Times they look forward to addressing those charges in court.

David Joynt, whom the FBI said was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat during the Jan. 6 attack, was arrested in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Authorities said he was near the bike racks as other rioters broke through the police line, and he then entered the building. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Also on Tuesday, Joseph Adams was arrested in West Virginia, with the FBI alleging he wore a motorcycle-style helmet and ski goggles and carried an American flag as he stormed the Capitol and pushed headfirst into officers inside the rotunda. “We are the people! We are the voice! We are the country!” he yelled before allegedly striking an officer with his flagpole. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Aaron Spanier was arrested in North Carolina on Thursday, with the FBI saying he was dressed in “a Colonial era outfit” when he stormed the Capitol through a damaged Senate wing door. He faces misdemeanors and was appointed a federal public defender who is not named on the court docket.

Andrew Shea was arrested in Illinois on Friday, with an FBI affidavit alleging that he stormed the Capitol with two friends on Jan. 6. Shea got on the FBI’s radar as they investigated those friends and uncovered messages from one of the men saying that he, Shea and another man “fought thru that shit as a three man wrecking crew” on Jan. 6 and that he was “so proud of my boys.” Shea faces four misdemeanors, and court records don’t yet list his attorney.

Many more arrests are expected to come. Hundreds of other Jan. 6 rioters have been identified by the FBI and online sleuths investigating the Capitol attack, but have not been arrested.

Federal prosecutors have secured over 1,100 convictions so far, and more than 600 rioters have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in federal prison for the head of the Proud Boys.

Trump promises pardons if re-elected

The fate of the Jan. 6 investigation hinges on the results of Tuesday’s election.

Trump has repeatedly said he would “absolutely” pardon Jan. 6 rioters and denounced the Justice Department’s investigation. His campaign has said those pardons would be made “on a case-by-case basis,” without getting into specifics of which of the more than 1,500 people charged in connection with Jan. 6 — over 570 of whom faced felony charges of assaulting or impeding law enforcement — could see their cases dropped. (That includes Kelley, who is still awaiting trial on charges of plotting to kill FBI agents; the campaign declined to comment on his case.)

Meanwhile, Trump has referred to the rioters, broadly, as “warriors,” “unbelievable patriots,” political prisoners and “hostages.”

Jan. 6 defendants were charged after federal authorities identified them on tape brandishing or using firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device during the brutal attack that injured more than 140 police officers and left several individuals dead.

Many Republicans have echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the Jan. 6 rioters, leading a Ronald Reagan-appointed judge who has overseen numerous Jan. 6 trials to call out “preposterous” attempts to “rewrite history,” saying that “such meritless justifications of criminal activity ... could presage further danger to our country.”

As for Weeks, he will be allowed to self-surrender sometime after Dec. 16, which is near the fourth anniversary of Trump’s “will be wild” tweet that helped put Jan. 6 in motion and which the far-right saw as a “call to arms.”

In Weeks’ comment, he cited a Bible verse from Judges that reads: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

Many people in the country, he said, feel as though the country’s leadership is not their leadership. He said he’d grown.

“Time,” Weeks said, “is the only thing that proves whether you’ve learned something or not.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com