A Florida man who breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while wearing a costume panda head was convicted Friday of assaulting a police officer and other charges related to the events of that day.
The man, Jesse James Rumson, 38, who became known as Sedition Panda, was found guilty of eight total charges, two felonies and six misdemeanors after a bench trial in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
He was convicted by Judge Carl Nichols, who has garnered his own headlines for challenging the Justice Department’s use of a federal obstruction law to prosecute Jan. 6. rioters.
In a separate case, Nichols, a Trump appointee, dismissed a charge against another Jan. 6 defendant, Joseph Fischer, for violating a federal law that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding.
The judge dismissed the charge in that case on the grounds that the law strictly concerns white-collar crime, saying that it required a defendant to take “some action with respect to a document, record or other object.” An appeals court reversed the judge’s ruling, and Fischer successfully brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to release a decision this summer.
Prosecutors have invoked the obstruction law against hundreds of rioters, typically in the most serious cases. But prosecutors did not charge Rumson with violating that law, and Nichols did not appear to have any reservations about the applicability of the charges prosecutors did bring.
In court, Nichols called Rumson’s account of his actions at the Capitol “absurd” and “patently incompatible with the objective evidence and testimony,” according to prosecutors.
In response to questions about the conviction, Rumson’s lawyer, Anthony Sabatini, rebuked the Justice Department for its wider prosecution of people who stormed the Capitol.
“There are no fair trials in Washington for Jan. 6 protesters,” Sabatini said in a statement Friday. “We have not seen one yet.”
Rumson and a friend drove from Florida to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021. The next day, he donned a large panda head and attended Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse, according to court records.
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