January 6, protester caught in sting on woman’s dating app Bumble, sentenced to prison

WASHINGTON – A Donald Trump supporter who attacked police officers with bear spray and a metal whip – and who was arrested thanks to a police raid against a woman on the dating app Bumble – was sentenced to just over six years in prison on Wednesday -fair.

Andrew Taake it was stuck in 2021 and pleaded guilty in December, attacking police officers using a deadly or dangerous weapon. Having previously been convicted of a crime – and having been released on bail on charges of soliciting a minor at the time of the attack on the Capitol – Taake was one of a small number of January 6 defendants who were held in pre-trial detention.

Promoters wanted a 6.5-year federal prison sentence for Taake. A court archiving also indicated that prosecutors would highlight a disciplinary investigation that accused Taake “of fighting with another inmate on December 14, 2023” at the Washington prison where Taake is being held.

Taake was sentenced Wednesday to 74 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee who questioned the use of obstruction of an official proceeding charge in the Jan. 6, an issue that is now before the Supreme Court.

Nichols said Taake’s actions were “as serious as any other Jan. 6 defendant I have sentenced” and that “others must be deterred” from committing similar conduct in the future. Bear spraying police officers and carrying a metal whip, Nichols said, “is the furthest thing from the expression of the First Amendment.”

Taake was due to be sentenced in April, but there were complications after Nichols suggested in court that he thought an additional sentence increase should be applied, even though the government is prevented by the terms of the plea deal from explicitly defending him.

Nichols relied on the statement of one of the officers Taake hit with bear spray. The officer wrote in a victim impact statement that he was “immediately” but temporarily “blind” after being hit and that it was the worst pain he had ever experienced in his life, saying it was “like living death.” .

Federal prosecutors argued in their sentencing memorandum that Taake “has continually shifted blame for his criminal actions on January 6 to victimized law enforcement officers, members of Congress, and the media” in the nearly three years since his arrest.

“His enduring narrative is that he and other ‘patriots’ were heroes and that he is an unjustly detained victim of ‘selective persecution.’ He has shown no iota of remorse for his actions, nor has he accepted responsibility – going so far as to deny responsibility even after his guilty plea,” they wrote. “And based on reports of his pre-trial detention, he began to use violence against other prisoners to alleviate his self-inflicted frustrations with the situation.”

In court Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Madison Mumma said Taake committed at least six assaults on Jan. 6, including four using bear spray. Taake, she said, considers Trump’s electoral defeat to be the “beginning of the end for the United States” and promised to take the fight “straight to the swamp creatures.”

Taake was arrested as a result of a sting operation that a young professional working in the nation’s capital launched on the dating app Bumble following the January 6 attack.

The woman, referred to as “Witness 1” in an FBI statement, previously remembered how a bit of “comically minimal ego stroking” on his part led Taake and other January 6 participants to provide information about their activities during the attack.

“I felt a little bit of ‘civic duty,’ I guess, but really, I was mostly angry and thinking, ‘Fuck these guys,’” said the woman, who spoke anonymously for fear of online reprisal. The men wanted to “regurgitate” the lies they heard from prominent Republicans about the 2020 presidential election, she said.

The woman’s strategy, she recalled, was to say, “Wow, crazy, tell me more,” over and over until she had enough to send to the FBI.

“It definitely didn’t take much effort for them to start talking about it. Basically, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s cool – so what? What else?’ it was pretty much enough,” she said. “One of my friends said, ‘You basically got all these confessions just by saying, “Haha! So what?'”

After Taake’s sentencing on Wednesday, the woman told NBC News that she thought the sentence was “solid,” especially for Nichols, and that she was happy to see Taake held accountable.

“Good thing at least one of the scumbags I met on bumble is getting jail time,” she wrote in a text message. “I’m glad I could help detectives online by doing all that legwork of image matching, but mostly I’m glad I did it now and can stop thinking about this man! Happy to hang up my Witness 1 hat after all this.”

Taake, wearing prison orange, spoke before the sentence was imposed, saying he was “not a violent, threatening monster” and apologized to the victim police officer who was in the courtroom.

“I never tried to say I was innocent,” Taake said. “I screwed up. I did things I shouldn’t have done.”

Taake said he was “seeing red” when he carried out the attacks and “got caught up in the moment”.

More than 1,400 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack and prosecutors have secured convictions against more than 1,000 defendants. Approximately 500 defendants were sentenced to periods of incarceration ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in federal prison.

This article was originally published in NBCNews. with