Daniel Rodriguez deserves 14 years for Jan. 6: Feds – Federal prosecutors want the Donald Trump supporter who admitted to tasing a police officer during the violent melee at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to spend more than a dozen years in prison.
Daniel “D.J.” Rodriguez was a particularly notorious figure to emerge from the Capitol attack, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters overwhelmed police and stormed the Capitol building as Congress had begun to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral win. In interviews with federal investigators, Rodriguez, 40, appears to have admitted to being the one who placed some sort of electroshock weapon to the neck of Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone.
Daniel “D.J.” Rodriguez at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 (via DOJ court filing).Daniel Rodriguez deserves 14 years for Jan. 6: Feds
“What do you want me to tell you?” Rodriguez told federal investigators said at the time. “That I tased him? Yes… Am I a f—— piece of s—? Yes.”
Fanone was dragged down the Capitol steps in the attack and viciously beaten as he pleaded for his life and memorably shouting to his assaulters that he had kids. He suffered a mild heart attack allegedly triggered by Rodriguez’s stun gun. He survived, but he retired from the force in 2021 and eventually testified before Congress about his experience.
In a filing late last week, federal prosecutors argued that he should serve more than a dozen years behind bars.
“For the defendant who conspired for weeks to travel across the country to stop the official proceeding on January 6, 2021, who battled members of law enforcement on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, tasing one of them in the neck, and who obstructed justice by conspiring with others to get rid of key evidence from January 6th, the government requests that this Court sentence Daniel Joseph Rodriguez to 168 months’ incarceration,” federal prosecutors say in the sentencing memorandum.
The government also seeks 36 months of supervised release and nearly $100,000 in restitution.
