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WASHINGTON — A host of the far-right media outlet InfoWars will be sentenced on Tuesday for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Owen Shroyer is one of only a handful of Jan. 6 participants charged with a crime despite neither entering the Capitol building nor being accused of committing violence or destruction on Capitol grounds. Prosecutors charged Shroyer because he had previously signed a deferred prosecution agreement after interrupting a congressional hearing in 2019 and had agreed as part of that case not to utter “loud, threatening, or abusive language, or to engage in any disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place upon the United States Capitol Grounds.”
About 1,100 defendants have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack, and more than 600 have been sentenced, including more than 370 to periods of incarceration.
“Democrats are posing as communists, but we know what they really are: they’re just tyrants, they’re tyrants,” Shroyer said on a bullhorn as he led a crowd to the Capitol on Jan. 6. “And so today, on January 6, we declare death to tyranny! Death to tyrants!”
The government sought 120 days of incarceration for Shryoer, saying that while he did not step foot inside the Capitol, “many of those who listened to him” did.Shroyer’s defense team said that the case had been “characterized by a cooperative spirit between the defense and the Government” and asked that he be spared prison time. When he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Shroyer “wore two hats: one was that of outraged citizen who believed that an election had been rigged, the other as full-time journalist and commentator who sought a front-row seat at an historic event,” his defense team wrote.
During Tuesday’s sentencing hearing, Shroyer told the court, “I was not a part of any larger plan for illegal activity or violence that day.”
Shroyer will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who last week sent Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio to federal prison for a record-setting term of 22 years.
CORRECTION (Sept. 12, 2023, 10:38 a.m.): A previous version of this article misstated when Shroyer interrupted a congressional hearing. It was in 2019, not 2020.
