WASHINGTON — A Donald Trump supporter who bashed in a Capitol window, assaulted police officers with pepper spray and urged the mob to “pull the cops out” during the brutal battle at the lower west tunnel on Jan. 6, 2021, is asking a judge to grant him early release, saying he was “manipulated” by the former president and Fox News.
Mitchell Todd Gardner, who was wearing a Trump hat and a “Reagan Bush ’84” sweatshirt during the Capitol attack, yelled “pull the police out,” “pull the cops out,” and “grab their hands and pull them out” during the battle, and then unloaded a fire extinguisher-sized canister of OC spray on officers in the tunnel, according to evidence shown at trial. He then bashed a Capitol window and entered into a suite of Senate “hideaway” offices that were assigned to Republican senators, including one belonging to Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho.
Gardner wrote a memo, styled as a “Motion for Compassionate Release and/or Reduction of Sentence,” that was filed on the docket in his criminal case this week. In it, Gardner states that he and “so many other Americans” were “persuaded by then President Donald J. Trump that he had irrefutable evidence that he had been cheated by a ‘rigged election.’”
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In his memo, Gardner writes that “a large group of hard working red blooded Americans” were influenced by Trump and “felt obligated to act on his behalf” to save the country.
Gardner’s memo cites the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s “2023 Criminal History Amendment,” which went into effect on Nov. 1, in arguing for a sentence reduction, though it is unclear if Gardner would actually be eligible under that amendment. Gardner, representing himself pro se, wrote the memo from the low-security federal prison at Fort Dix in New Jersey, where he’s being held.
Judge Amit P. Mehta, in March 2023, sentenced Gardner to 55 months, or about 4.5 years, in federal prison. With good time and credit for time served, the 36-year-old is currently scheduled for release on July 15, 2025, according to Federal Bureau of Prisons records.
Trump, Gardner wrote, was “the most powerful man in the world” and used his influence “to manipulate others in carrying out his missions while staying above the ‘fray.’” Gardner wrote that he and others felt “it was an obligation or patriotic duty to ensure the saving of the republic.” Jan. 6 rioters thought they were patriots, he wrote.
Now, Gardner says, he realizes “the nature of his crimes against the United States despite having been mislead [sic] to believe that they were acts of patriotism at the time.” Gardner wrote that he will live forever with “a cloud of shame over” his head.
Referring to himself in the third person, as is common in court filings, Gardner said his mind was “skewed by misinformation” and that he went to the Capitol on Jan. 6 “with the mind set of saving the republic from what he considered was some imaginary force that was set to destroy it.”
Gardner said it was “easy for many” to ask how he could have “listened to one man and been so naive,” but said there “was a collective of individuals that were highly prominent that promoted this idea that the government was under attack.” Gardner said he saw those people as “patriotic,” and that he “trusted the information that they were giving was solid.” He said he’s since learned better.
Gardner wrote that had it not been for the disinformation “peddled by powerfully influential people and news outlets such as ‘FOX NEWS’ that encouraged such actions on January 6,” he would be an employed American citizen paying his taxes.
“If these influential individuals had not peddled such fraudulent claims he would have been there for his grandparents that both passed away on this year,” Gardner wrote. “In addition to this he would have been in the lives of his children both physically and financially to support them from home.”
Fox News and the voting machine company Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement earlier this year, just moments before the case was set to go to a jury. Discovery in that case revealed that several Fox News hosts knew that the claims being spread by Trump and by the network were bogus, and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch acknowledged that some of his hosts had “endorsed” what he called “bulls— and damaging” conspiracy theories.
“The petitioner can assure the court that he would never allow himself to ever again be manipulated in such a manner and intends to spend the rest of his life making a full faith effort to right this wrong and be acknowledged once again as a law abiding citizen,” he wrote.
More than 1,200 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, and more than 400 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration. On Thursday, the FBI arrested David Paul Daniel, a 36-year-old North Carolina man who, federal authorities said, helped lead “a violent push against the barricaded Senate Wing Door and the police officers attempting to hold them closed.”
Trump, the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, is currently facing four criminal prosecutions, and his federal Jan. 6-related trial is scheduled to begin in March. That federal indictment, returned by a grand jury in August, alleges that Trump engaged in a conspiracy “to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified.” Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four cases.
