The {photograph} was a direct 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 word to Pelosi herself. Nevertheless it was the photograph of him that actually lasted, possibly due to the best way it combined vandalism with the specter of violence — he had a stun gadget on him — and encapsulated the rioters’ mockery of the nation’s democratic establishments.
Washington appeared 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. However 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 at the moment 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. Today, he’s a hero on the appropriate whose fortunes could be tied to these of a president-elect who has promised to pardon individuals like him.
What occurs once you put your boot on a desk within the speaker’s workplace?
“For higher or worse you will have develop into one of many faces of Jan. 6,” Choose Christopher Cooper instructed him final 12 months, “and I believe you take pleasure in it.”
‘Bigo was right here’
Over the previous 4 years, virtually 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 regulation enforcement, printed a sequence of fascinating interviews with eight of them at the moment.
I needed to take a look at the story of somebody who’s nonetheless inside, whose conviction stands as a trigger on the appropriate but stays proof of the lawlessness that Trump and his supporters have now tried to clean away.
Attorneys for Barnett didn’t reply my questions on whether or not or not Barnett is searching for a pardon from Trump (though considered one of them did ship me a hyperlink to a fund-raising web site Barnett is utilizing).
Barnett himself declined my request to interview him.
Based on prosecutors, physique digicam footage and his personal phrases, Barnett entered Pelosi’s workplace suite with a flagpole and a stun gadget hid in a strolling stick. He reclined at a desk, took an envelope bearing her signature addressed to former Consultant Billy Lengthy — now Trump’s decide to run the I.R.S. — and left a word 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 improper aspect, you would possibly get damage.”
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 workplaces and all the remainder of that; that’s nothing. The priority we have now is about private security — it simply transcends every part.”
Barnett left the constructing after he was hit with chemical spray. Exterior on the Capitol grounds, he instructed a New York Occasions reporter what he’d achieved — 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 gang.
“I’ll in all probability 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 annoyed with the system, at one level throwing a tantrum throughout a digital courtroom 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 courtroom 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 regarded having his word 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 regulation.
The jury convicted him on all counts after two hours of deliberation.
“Barnett acknowledges no authority however himself and is prepared to do ‘no matter it takes’ to get what he desires, even when it requires harming others, stealing or breaking the regulation,” prosecutors wrote in a memo earlier than Choose Cooper sentenced him to greater than 4 years.
Biding his time
Like Trump, Barnett has had some excellent news this 12 months. A Supreme Courtroom ruling in June making it more durable to cost Jan. 6 defendants with obstructing an official continuing — a cost Barnett was convicted of — might assist him attraction that cost, though a choose denied his request to be launched early from jail pending that attraction.
After which, after all, there was the election of Trump, which Barnett mentioned on X he had realized about on a “low-cost static jail radio.”
“Congratulations Donald, Congratulations America, Congratulations to all my fellow J6’ers,” he mentioned in a put up on a verified account that bears his identify.
He seems to keep up an energetic presence on X, the place he has weighed in to precise 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 permit inmates to put up on X, however an individual accustomed to its inside workings instructed me the jail believes Barnett’s missives are being posted for him by somebody on the skin.
