OAN’s Noah Herring
1:18 PM – Thursday, May 25, 2023
An Arkansas man who was photographed putting his feet up on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
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Richard “Bigo” Barnett was convicted on eight counts related to the U.S. Capitol breach on January 6th, including obstructing an official proceeding and carrying a dangerous weapon in a restricted building.
Barnett was sentenced to four and a half years in prison along with three years of supervised release, despite Federal prosecutors asking the judge for seven years prison time and three years of supervised release.
The Capitol protest happened on the day that Congress had convened to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.
Barnett claimed he was looking for a bathroom inside the Capitol when he accidentally entered Pelosi’s office to find two photographers. He claimed that one of the photographers instructed him to “act natural” prompting him to sit in her chair and kick his feet up on the desk.
Prosecutors stated that Barnett was armed with a stun gun at the time he entered Pelosi’s office. While in the office, prosecutors said that Barnett took some of Pelosi’s mail and left a note saying, “Nancy, Bigo was here.”
“We took back our house, and I took Nancy Pelosi’s office,” Barnett said, according to prosecutors, when he gave a speech to the crowd outside the Capitol.
Barnett claimed at his sentencing hearing that he “wasn’t treated fairly,” and that “they want me to be remorseful for things I did not do.” According to Jonathan Gross, Barnett’s defense attorney, “The government was mad because Richard Barnett was sitting at a desk.”
“The worst accusations against Mr. Barnett amounted to 20 minutes of nonviolence in the Capitol, a stolen envelope, and literally seconds of verbal altercation with a police officer,” his defense attorneys wrote. “Mr. Barnett never called for violence. Never called for insurrection. He was mad, but even in his anger his rhetoric was restrained and he never called for actual violence, not on January 6 and not for any time in the future.”
Barnett said that he adamantly regretted traveling to Washington and putting his feet on Pelosi’s desk, when he testified in his own defense at the trial.
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