Horned Trump supporter asks Trump for pardon following riots

Jacob Anthony Chansley had a failed career as an actor and voice-over guy. The Trump lover is finally famous.

Jan 15, 2021

Jacob Anthony Chansley, also known as Jake Angeli, had a failed career as an actor and a voice-over artist.

Now, he is finally famous.

Photos of Angeli in his horned helmet and facepaint inside the U.S. Capitol Building during last week’s deadly insurrection have been splashed all over websites, newspapers and television.

Also supposedly known as “QAnon Shaman,” Chansley was arrested Saturday and charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, demonstrating in a Capitol building, civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding.

He is still in federal custody.

Now his attorney, Albert Watkins, is urging President Donald Trump to pardon Chansley for his role in the Capitol insurrection.

“My client had heard the oft-repeated words of President Trump,” Watkins said, according to Associated Press. “The words and invitation of a president are supposed to mean something. Given the peaceful and compliant fashion in which Mr. Chansley comported himself, it would be appropriate and honorable for the president to pardon Mr. Chansley and other like-minded, peaceful individuals who accepted the president’s invitation with honorable intentions.”

Watkins also claimed that his client “served honorably in the U.S. military.”

Chansley was, in fact, kicked out of the U.S. Navy in 2007 for refusing to take the anthrax vaccine, which protected military members against deadly anthrax spores used as a biological weapon. This may have been some of the first indications of his conspiratorial ideology.

Since he turned himself in at Phoenix’s FBI office upon returning from Washington D.C. on Saturday, Chansley refused to eat because the detention center housing him would not serve him all organic food. Monday, Judge Deborah Fine ordered that he be provided food in line with “a shaman’s strict organic diet.”

“He has zero criminal history,” Watkins claims of his client. “He is a lover of nature, routinely practices meditation and is an active practicer of yoga and eats only organic food. He took seriously the countless messages of President Trump. He believed in President Trump. Like tens of millions of other Americans, Chansley felt — for the first time in his life — as though his voice was being heard.”

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