Michael Joseph Foy was sentenced for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Photos from court documents)
A Marine Corps veteran from Michigan who assaulted officers with a “TRUMP 2020” flag attached to a hockey stick at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 learned his fate this week.
Michael Joseph Foy, 32, was sentenced to 40 months in prison and 24 months of supervised release by U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. Foy was convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers, both felonies, on June 22.
Foy apologized to the officers and “to my country” and thanked the judge for releasing him from pretrial custody in 2021, which allowed him to get a job, The Associated Press reported.
“You allowed me to build the life that I so desperately needed after I got out of the Marine Corps,” he said, the AP reported.
Chutkan, a Barack Obama appointee, who oversees former President Donald Trump’s election interference case, gave Foy less time than the prosecution’s recommended sentence of eight years and one month “with a heavy heart,” noting his positive turnaround. But she also said what he did was violent.
“You took an oath to serve your country, and you knew better,” she said, the AP reported. “What you did there on January 6th was not serving your country.”
Foy’s defense attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Law&Crime. His defense attorneys sought no prison time.
Foy traveled from Michigan to Washington for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally that day, planning to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election and to urge members of Congress to raise objections to or delay the official certification of electoral votes, authorities said.
Carrying a TRUMP 2020 flag attached to a hockey stick, he headed to the Capitol building at 2 p.m. with a large crowd. The group moved to “AREA CLOSED” signs and overturned metal bike rack barricades, then went to the Inaugural stage’s scaffolding before climbing to the Lower West Terrace.
At 4:25 p.m., Foy made his way through the mob of rioters in front of the Lower West Terrace tunnel, picked up a sharp metal pole and threw it over the head of rioters into the body of an officer, knocking the officer into the tunnel archway. Police body camera footage captured Foy using the hockey stick to attack police, swinging at officers at least 11 times. Court documents describe Foy swinging the stick over his head and down at officers as if he were “chopping wood with an ax,” court documents said.
One video from a police officer on the ground shows Foy attacking the officer in the face, head, neck, and body. Then he shouted at other rioters, “LET’S GO!” while pointing at the Capitol before climbing inside through a shattered window at 4:29 p.m.
The FBI arrested Foy on Jan. 21, 2021, in Michigan after he came to the attention of agents from a tip on the agency’s official Twitter account showing a photo of a man carrying a hockey stick.
“This is the man that killed the police officer. He hit him with a hockey stick over and over in the head,” the tweet read, which the FBI said they had no evidence that he killed an officer, saying they included the tweet in court documents to explain the investigative steps they took from that point forward.
As Law&Crime reported, the FBI identified a video on Jan. 16, 2021, from a New York Times article of the same man aggressively swinging the hockey stick at an individual lying on the ground and eventually identified him as Foy through his father’s Facebook page.
Foy was in the Marines from 2015 to 2020, when he was honorably discharged. The corporal was a supervisor on base in North Carolina and had been a heavy equipment mechanic in the U.S. and abroad.
Law&Crime’s Jerry Lambe and Matt Naham contributed to this report.
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