On Monday, Jan. 6 insurrectionist Richard “Bigo” Barnett was convicted by a jury on “all eight counts in his indictment including felony charges of civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding.” You likely remember Barnett as the guy who had pictures taken of him with his feet up on then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and subsequently bragged about taking mail from Pelosi’s office and leaving a note saying, “Nancy, Bigo was here, you b!@#!”
The 62-year old ‘s initial defense was that he didn’t physically open the doors of the Capitol building and really just went inside to use the bathroom, and therefore anything that he happened to do once inside was not his fault. He also whined about being imprisoned as a result of his actions. By the time Barnett was in court, his defense amounted to the idea that his alter ego, aka “Bigo,” broke all the laws but he himself did not. In fact, Barnett said that guy—Bigo—was simply a “fucking idiot” and shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions. Real manly stuff. It’s sort of a reality television defense. Obviously, the jury did not buy the idea that saying you were play-acting at being an insurrectionist gives you immunity from breaking the law.
Barnett faces a wide gamut of sentencing possibilities. When leaving the courthouse after the verdict, Barnett and his legal counsel had an even newer defense that they hope to gin up some money for an appeal.
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Barnett came outside and said his conviction was the result of an unfair trial. What was unfair about his trial? According to “Bigo,” the jury was not a cross-section of his “peers.” CBS Congressional News Reporter Scott MacFarlane was outside of the courthouse and asked Barnett what he meant by that. Barnett’s attorney Joe McBride decided to step in here to explain:
MCBRIDE: Number one, Washington, D.C. is not a state; number two, he’s not surrounded by a jury of his peers, a jury of people from Arkansas. A place where he came from.
Hmmm.
MCBRIDE: Or a jury with a political composition of anything that’s like the rest of the United States. Washington, D.C. is something like 95, 96 percent Biden voters, right? So that we believe that plays a crucial role in the political factors ever present in these cases.
The proportion of votes Biden received in D.C. in 2020 was 92 percent, for your information. But considering it was an Arkansas judge who originally released Barnett into the custody of his aiding and abetting girlfriend before a federal judge threw him into a jail to await trial, I can see why wanting to get some cover away from the place where you broke the law might be appealing. McBride goes on to basically say a change of venue will be every convicted Jan. 6, client’s basis for appeal.
So to summarize: The only way that Barnett and his attorney believe he can get a “fair” trial is if the jury is made up of anti-Joe Biden Arkansans from the area where Barnett “came from.”
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