“This is a significant sentence,” District Judge Trevor McFadden said. McFadden criticized Hale-Cusanelli for his “sexist, racist and anti-Semitic comments” that the judge said prompted, in part, his actions that day. Hale-Cusanelli, who was convicted in May of all five charges he faced, including felony obstruction of an official proceeding, told the judge he would “never see my face again.” “I disrespected my uniform” on Jan. 6, Hale-Cusanelli added, asking the judge for mercy. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution. During the riot, the video shows Hale-Cusanelli yelling for the mob to “move on” before breaching the US Capitol herself and later signaling more rioters to join her inside. Hale-Cusanelli also tried to push another rioter away from an officer who was holding the person. “You absolutely knew what you and others were doing,” McFadden said Thursday, adding that Hale-Cusanelli lied during his trial testimony when he claimed he didn’t know Congress was in session on Capitol Hill, even though he told his roommate that he was just outside. the chambers of Parliament during the riot. McFadden repeatedly accused Hale-Cusanelli of making racist comments that “normalize violence,” pointing to the recent increase in anti-Semitic violence in the US. In their sentencing brief, prosecutors argued that Hale-Cusanelli should be jailed for 78 months and pointed to his desire for civil war and anti-Semitic conspiracies, saying Jews controlled Democrats, President Joe Biden and the entire administration. “It is well established in the record at this point that Hale-Cusanelli subscribes to White Supremacist and Nazi-Sympathizer ideologies that fuel his enthusiasm for another civil war and formed the basis of this Court’s preliminary ruling that Hale-Cusanelli was a danger for the community,” wrote District Attorney Kathryn Fifield. “What Hale-Cusanelli did on Jan. 6 was not activism,” Fifield added. “It was the prelude to the civil war.” During his trial, Hale-Cusanelli’s defense attorney, Jonathan Crisp, told jurors that his client was just saying these things to “upset” others and “get attention.” Hale-Cusanelli testified that he was half Jewish and not anti-Semitic. In his sentencing memorandum, another attorney for Hale-Cusanelli, Nicholas Smith, wrote that his client’s “upbringing was like something out of Oliver Twist” and that he was raised by “essentially career criminals” and drug users. Smith, in his testimony, asked that Hale-Cusanelli be sentenced to 20 months in prison with time already served.
JAN. 6 COMMITTEE WITNESS TAKES TEST
Stephen Ayres, who testified at one of the House select committee’s public hearings, was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation and 100 hours of community service. Ayres had pleaded guilty to one count of disorderly conduct in a restricted building in June and the government had asked for two months in prison at sentencing. Sentencing District Judge John Bates believed Ayres’ testimony in sentencing him, saying Ayres “has shown genuine remorse and remorse and that includes testifying before the January 6th select committee.” “I want to apologize to you and the court and the American people,” Ayres said at his sentencing hearing. “I went down there that day not with the intention of causing violence or anything like that, but I got caught up in all the stuff on the Internet, on Facebook, which I finally felt was leading me in the wrong direction.” During the hearing in July, Ayres testified that he was “outraged” by then-President Donald Trump’s speech and never planned to go to Capitol Hill, but was “following what (Trump) said” during his speech at the Ellipse. “It changed my life, not for the better, certainly not for the better,” he said. He added that he no longer believes Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, but warned that there are millions of people who still do, which poses a threat to future elections.
