Jeffrey Sabol (courtesy U.S. Dept. of Justice)
Call it a stark remark.
In a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., a judge offered a blunt assessment of the future as he presided over the sentencing of Jeffrey Sabol, a Colorado geophysicist who assaulted police at the U.S. Capitol so violently he managed to lift one officer’s torso completely up off the ground merely by grabbing his baton.
Sabol, prosecutors and the judge concluded, did this and more because then-President Donald Trump and his allies had “spurred” the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Sabol himself had admitted to the FBI during his interviews that he was fueled by his own rage and that felt he was a “patriot warrior” who had “answered the call.”
“It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine a similar call coming out in the coming months,” U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras reflected on Thursday, first reported by NBC News.
Contreras sentenced Sabol to 63 months, or just over five years in prison following a stipulated bench trial, the Justice Department said in a statement Thursday. Court records, including the prosecution’s sentencing memorandum filed last week, detailed the depths of his participation in the attack on the certification of the 2020 election and his commitment to Trump’s disinformation about the process even after his arrest.
Sabol’s tear started at the West Plaza where he confronted police, broke up their lines in coordinated efforts with other rioters, and used police riot shields to slam and push into them. He used the brute force of his hands to push against riot shields, forcing police defenses to be bombarded as the mob swelled and flooded the complex.
He engaged in a “tug of war” with another officer over a helmet visor, prosecutors said, and he virtually anchored himself to the Lower West Terrace Tunnel where some of the worst violence occurred that day. Sabol was with the mob that had poured into the tunnel and was there when an officer was dragged out and into the crowd.
Sabol, who brought a buck knife, zip ties and a trauma kit to Washington, D.C., also assisted two rioters drag a police officer down the steps where that officer was beaten with a flagpole and baton as Law&Crime previously reported.
He was convicted on three felony counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting, federal robbery, and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers with a deadly or dangerous weapon and aiding and abetting.
Sabol tried to cover his tracks unsuccessfully; in the days after Jan. 6, he deleted texts on his cellphone as well as a selfie video where he had just been pepper-sprayed and admitted to trying to “rush the front gate, the front door.”
He destroyed his computer by popping it into a microwave oven before dumping his cellphone into “a body of water,” prosecutors said.
Before his arrest a few days after the attack on the Capitol, Sabol had tried to flee to Switzerland but was unable to board a plane. He was subsequently stopped by the FBI in a rental car as he was driving toward Westchester, New York.
According to a statement of facts, Sabol was found “covered in blood, suffering from severe lacerations to both thighs and arms. While officers aided SABOL, he made several spontaneous statements to include but not limited to: ‘I am tired, I am done fighting,’ ‘My wounds are self-inflicted,’ ‘I was “fighting tyranny in the DC Capital’, “I am wanted by the FBI.”
Sabol must pay just over $32,000 in restitution, the judge ordered Thursday. He must also stay on supervised release for three years.
Notably, the 53-year-old Colorado man, who has been in custody since his arrest days after the riot, has already served out most of his sentence pretrial.
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