June 21 (UPI) — A Trump supporter who used a stun gun on a Washington, D.C., police officer during the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, yelled “Trump won” after being sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison Wednesday.
Daniel Rodriguez, a 38-year-old California resident, had pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, tampering with documents or proceedings, and inflicting bodily injury on officers using a deadly or dangerous weapon.
Rodriguez and others communicated throughout the Capitol attack by cell phone and radio, the indictment said. Once rioters breached the Capitol Building, Rodriguez entered and was involved in multiple skirmishes with law enforcement officers.
When officer Michael Fanone, of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, was pulled from a line of police into the crowd of rioters, Rodriguez applied a stun gun to his neck and stunned him twice, leaving the officer unconscious.
Before and after the attack, Rodriguez posted messages to various pro-Trump social media groups calling for the violent removal of “traitors” and celebrating his actions on Jan. 6.
He posted he would “assassinate Joe Biden,” if given the opportunity. In reference to using a stun gun on Fanone, Rodriguez said he Tased “the blue.”
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Wednesday called Rodriguez a “one-man army of hate, attacking police officers and destroying property,” as she imposed his 151-month prison sentence.
According to NBC News, Rodriguez spoke for 20 minutes before his sentencing, saying that he thought a civil war was going to begin. He also refused to apologize for his actions against Fanone.
“Life has always seemed unfair to me,” Rodriguez said, speaking of inequality in the country before referring to himself as “an American supremacist.”
If allowed to go home, Rodriguez said, he would go back to “driving a forklift with my GED and living with my mom,” claiming that he did not present a future threat.
Fanone said Wednesday that Rodriguez’s “halfhearted attempt to apologize for his conduct” and later outburst showed that stiff sentences were “the best assurance that we have that this won’t happen again.”
“These are Americans that engaged in seditious activity,” Fanone said. “I believe that they were traitors, and they should be sentenced accordingly. We need to stop treating these people as anything other than enemy combatants of our democracy.”
