An accused Capitol rioter broke the conditions of his pretrial release by bingeing pillow magnate Mike Lindell’s awful voter fraud symposium earlier this month.
The defendant, Douglas Jensen, acknowledged in a court filing Sunday that he’d broken the rules against accessing the internet. But he asked for the court’s lenience, comparing the incident to a drug user’s relapse. Jensen is pictured above in the “Q” shirt.
“If a drug abuser relapses, there is typically a sanction protocol in place to help the person deal with his/her substance abuse issues,” Jensen’s lawyer wrote. “Mr. Jensen requests that this Honorable Court treat his violation is a similar manner.”
Lindell’s symposium, like his other events before it, completely failed to produce the earth-shattering evidence Lindell promised that Donald Trump’s second term had been stolen by Chinese hackers. But that hasn’t discouraged the MyPillow CEO, who said recently of voting machines, “we have to melt down the machines and make prison bars out of them.”
The trouble for Jensen, who’s accused of possessing a knife in the Capitol and leading a mob that chased Capitol Police Office Eugene Goodman up a flight of stairs, began with a visit from his pretrial services officer earlier this month.
The report back wasn’t pretty.
“A mere thirty days after his release from the D.C. Jail, defendant Douglas Jensen was found alone, in his garage, using a WiFi-connected iPhone to stream news from Rumble,” prosecutors said in a filing Thursday.
“When confronted about this obvious violation of his release conditions, defendant provided his Pretrial Services Officer with one excuse after another.”
Eventually, prosecutors said, Jensen fessed up. He’d possessed an iPhone for two weeks. And he’d been watching Mike Lindell.
“Jensen eventually admitted to his Pretrial Services Officer that in the previous week, he had spent two days watching Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium regarding the recount of the presidential election,” the filing stated, asking the court to throw Jensen back in jail.
The violation came only a month after Jensen was released from jail against prosecutors’ wishes. He faces several felony charges, including aggravated assault, but he was released from custody in part based on the argument that he had only attended the Capitol riot because he’d been duped into becoming a “true believer” of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
After months in detention, Jensen’s lawyer said his client felt deceived, “recognizing that he bought into a pack of lies.”
But the Lindell binge showed that the sob story was “just an act,” prosecutors said — “that his alleged epiphany inside the D.C. Jail was merely self-advocacy; and that, at the end of the day, Jensen will not abandon the misguided theories and beliefs that led him to menacingly chase U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up the Senate staircase on January 6, 2021.” Separately, the filing referred to Jensen’s beliefs as a “QAnon addiction.”
Responding to prosecutors in a filing Sunday, Jensen’s lawyer Christopher M. Davis said Jensen conceded that he’d violated his pretrial release conditions, but tried to downplay the infraction.
“Jensen had been working in the yard that week, cutting down a large tree,” Davis wrote. “It was exceptionally hot, and he would go into the garage to cool down. While in there, he would listen to the radio.” (The “radio” was a bluetooth speaker streaming audio from an iPhone that Jensen’s daughter had been using, Davis said.)
Jensen took issue with the government’s assertion that his actions endangered the community, Davis noted, because he did not post anything on social media or encourage anyone to accept “conspiracy lies.”
“The condition of no internet access is really to ensure Mr. Jensen does not become overly influenced by conspiracy theories circulating on the internet,” a footnote in the filing read. “It is not internet access that the government is worried about, it is misinformation that could influence Jensen to engage in conduct similar to what occurred on January 6. However, he remains on GPS monitoring and any violation of that condition is immediately known by Pre-Trial Services.”
The filing concluded by asking for another chance, invoking the penalty awarded to lapsed drug addicts who receive sanctions, rather than re-incarceration pending trial.
“Mr. Jensen asks this Court to accept his apology and allow him to remain in home incarceration, with a sanction, if this Court deems such is appropriate,” Davis wrote.
