WASHINGTON – The defendant in the Capitol riot, who was tear gassed behind a crowd of supporters of Donald Trump who chased police officers in the US Capitol building on January 6, has gone to trial. Georgia House district runoff GOP primary election Tuesday, NBC News projects.
Charles Hand III, who goes by Chuck Hand, pleaded guilty to a felony in connection with the Jan. 6 attack. He is running for the Republican Party nomination Georgia’s 2nd Congressional Districtcurrently held by Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop.
In Georgia, if no candidate can pass the 50% barrier in the primaries, the two places with the most votes go to the second round. Hand will face Wayne Johnson, who worked in Trump’s Department of Education on June 18 and led Tuesday’s vote count.
The resulting GOP winner will face Bishop in a solidly Democratic district in the general election.
As part of the October 2022 agreement, Hand accepted After the attack, he said he saw a crowd “rushing the Capitol Police” and wrote that “tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, etc. didn’t stop them.” Hand and his wife, Mandy Robinson-Hand, drove from Butler, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., and headed to the Capitol, where Hand admitted to “breaking off a piece of metal fencing and putting it in his back pocket” during the chaos. They continued to enter the Capitol.
Video personnel Hand and his wife appear to have fallen under a locked upper emergency door that officers were trying to close as gang members chased officers inside the Capitol. Several members of the Proud Boys were around them at the time. Hand admitted that he walked into the altercation between law enforcement and rioters inside the Capitol, but that his wife “dissuaded him from intervening.”
After the riot, Hand reached out to a cousin in local law enforcement and told him, ‘The feds are slow,’ and they’ll come to you, just wait.” memo in his case. Hand was arrested in March 2022 and sentenced to 20 days in prison in January 2023.
Hand wrote to the court that he had “no desire to return to Washington” and that after the sentencing he would “get in my truck and go back to Georgia, where I belong, and unless the voters of Georgia decide, he will never come back to Washington.” To send me back as their representative at some point in the future.’
Al also talked about the “stigma” associated with the job.
“I now know that I should never have entered the Capitol, and I fully understand the impact of my actions,” Hand wrote. letter to court. “I am very sorry, this experience has affected my life more than I could ever imagine.
Al is not the only January 6th rioter trying to return to the Capitol as a member of Congress. January 6 suspect in the crime last week Derrick Evans — who was a member of the West Virginia legislature when he stormed the Capitol — lost the Republican primary to incumbent Carol Miller.
More than 1,400 people were charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, and more than 1,000 were convicted. Hundreds of defendants received probation on Jan. 6, but more than 500 defendants were sentenced to terms ranging from several years behind bars to 22 years in federal prison.