A Capitol riot defendant has lost his pretrial freedom over a binge of Mike Lindell’s flop “Cyber Symposium,” which promised and failed to show that China hacked and stole the 2020 election.
It’s a steep price to pay for Iowa man Doug Jensen (pictured above, center), who’s accused of chasing Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman up a flight of stairs during the Capitol breach.
Jensen had only been out of federal custody for a few weeks when a pretrial services officer found him in his garage, watching Lindell’s symposium on a cell phone — in breach of release conditions that forbade internet use.
As prosecutors put it, a mere 30 days after his release, Jensen “was found alone, in his garage, using a WiFi-connected iPhone to stream news from Rumble,” the internet streaming video site.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the Washington, D.C. federal district court said he’d restricted Jensen’s internet use as a condition of his release precisely because of the impact that online conspiracy theories appear to have played in his alleged actions.
“I ordered the various conditions of release in this case because of the role that the internet conspiracy theories appear to have played in Mr. Jensen’s alleged conduct — conduct that is alleged to be violent, conduct that is alleged to have been very serious, and played a major role in a very, very serious event,” Kelly said at a hearing Thursday.
Jensen’s own defense attorney compared the Lindell binge to a drug relapse, referring to it Wednesday as a “compulsion.” That tact didn’t seem to have worked in his client’s favor.
“This is not equivalent to a drug relapse,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Hava Arin Levenson Mirell told the court. “There is no chemical dependency here.”
Kelly pointed out that, in making his case for his initial release from jail, Jensen had said he’d gotten a “wakeup call” after the Jan. 6 attack, one that shook him from his earlier beliefs that he was a digital soldier fighting a war against the forces of evil.
“It’s now clear that he has not experienced a transformation that his lawyer described, that he continues to seek out those conspiracy theories that led to his dangerous conduct on Jan. 6, and he violated his conditions of release in the process,” Kelly said.
“I don’t see any reason to believe that he has had the wakeup call that he needs, and that he will comply with conditions of release in the future.”
