The “QAnon Shaman” has done his time and now wants the government to return the horned fur headdress that made him the most recognizable figure of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“They’re keeping it like it’s evidence,” Jacob Angeli-Chansley told The Daily Beast. “The case is over, so there’s no reason for them to continue holding onto it.”
He is taking the position that the law is the law, the very same principle that led the government to prosecute him along with more than 1,000 other insurrectionists and has Donald Trump facing four indictments.
“It’s rather upsetting that they’re not doing what the government is supposed to do and returning the property,” said Angeli-Chansley, who has been convicted of obstructing democracy itself.
He said he bought the headdress online long before he joined the storming of the Capitol.
“Dude, I’ve been dressing that way for over 10 years,” he reported.
His cartoonish style made him stand out among the mob as he clambered onto the scaffolding outside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“The defendant was dressed in a viking hat with fur and horns, was shirtless, wearing red, white, and blue face paint, and carrying an American flag tied to a pole with a spear at the tip and a bullhorn,” prosecutors wrote in a pre-sentencing report.
Angeli-Chansley was among the first 30 rioters inside the Capitol, prosecutors said He strode alone into the Senate gallery.
“Time’s up motherfuckers!” he shouted before descending to the Senate floor.
Jacob Angeli-Chansely and other rioters confronted by police in the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The whole world saw him sitting bare-chested in his headdress at the dais where Vice President Mike Pence had been preparing to preside over the peaceful transition of power less than an hour before. Angeli-Chansley took selfies and wrote a note to Pence.
“It’s Only A Matter of Time. Justice Is Coming!”
That message can only be seen as threatening given Angeli-Chansley’s earlier declaration online: “We shall have no real hope to survive the enemies arrayed against us until we hang the traitors lurking among us.”
He would not be charged with personally engaging in violence, but he departed the Capitol having become an icon in an uprising linked to five deaths and the assaults on 174 police officers. The pre-sentencing memo filed by his attorney noted that images of him “have become to January 6 what the Swoosh is to Nike.”
As he was driving home to Phoenix the day after the riot, Angeli-Chansley learned that the FBI was looking for him. He says agents seized the headdress, along with the rest of get-up and his phone, when he turned himself in at the Phoenix field office two days later.
“I had it with me in the car,” he said. “They just took it.”
He was remanded and whined his way into getting federal Judge Royce Lamberth to order that he receive organic food in keeping with his professed shamanic diet.
A booking photo of Jacob Angeli-Chansley
Angeli-Chensley pleaded guilty to a felony count of obstruction and was sentenced to 41 months in prison. He apologized at the time, but has since expressed his continuing admiration for Donald Trump, who is under indictment for trying to overturn the election.
After 27 months behind bars, during which he compared himself to Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. in a podcast, Angeli-Chansley was granted supervised release for good behavior and is on probation for three years. He is barred from voting even though he was able to register online on Nov. 16 as a Libertarian candidate for U.S. congress in Arizona.
Asked by The Daily Beast if he intends to wear the headdress at campaign events if he gets it back, he said he was unsure.
“There’s been mixed emotions about it,” he said. “People say that I'm not being taken seriously. Other people are like, ‘Oh, I fricking love it!’”
Angeli-Chansley at a conservative event in December
But he is certain the seized property is rightfully his.
“They gave my mom the car back shortly after the investigation was over, but they refused to give me my headdress and my staff and my phone and my pants,” he said “So what’s up with that?”
His current attorney, Bill Shipley of Hawaii, told The Daily Beast in an email that the government “has given a variety of shifting excuses.”
In March, Shipley petitioned to have Angeli-Chansley’s plea and sentence vacated because the prosecution failed to turn over what he described as an exculpatory video. The government took the position that his property might be needed as evidence again if Shipley prevailed.
“So they refused to return it while the motion was pending,” Shipley told The Daily Beast.
The video, aired by “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on March 6, shows Angeli-Chansley striding through the Capitol in the presence of police, who chose not to confront him. Prosecutors said in court papers that the video shows Angeli-Chansley refused to be escorted out by the lone officer and left only when more cops arrived and forcibly removed him. Federal Judge Lamberth dismissed the motion to vacate in July, saying the video was “decidedly not exculpatory, especially when viewed in context.”
But Shipley says the government is still not ready to return the headdress.
“Now they have made a claim that it is subject to civil litigation, but without any explanation of what that involves,” Shipley told The Daily Beast. “So I'm trying to get additional information out of them in that regard before I take the step of filing a motion with the Court to obtain an order that they return his property.”
He added, “I think they are simply jacking him around at this point.”
Maybe it is just jacking around and shifting excuses. Or maybe there will prove to be legitimate reasons. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office did not respond to requests for comment.
In the meantime, Angeli-Chansley has a website hawking $30 T-shirts stenciled with images of what he calls himself now: “America’s Shaman.”
He is, of course, wearing the iconic headdress, complete with horns.
“Technically they're acrylic,” he said. “But they're supposed to be bison.”
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