A federal judge sentenced the Capitol rioter who gleefully posed with Speaker Pelosi’s podium to 75 days in prison on Friday, February 25, 2022 (story here). He also was hit with a $5,000 fine and 200 hours of community service.
Adam Johnson, 37, of Tampa, Florida — like most of the other rioters — didn’t try to conceal his identity. Instead, he mugged for the camera; and after the photo (below) went viral, he gloated on social media about being “famous” and “breaking the internet.” He was arrested two days later.
When his final day of reckoning came he told the judge, “I bear no ill will toward her or her office at all.” Cough, cough. That’s what they’ve all been coached to say when, tails between their legs, they must stand before a judge dishing out attitude adjustment. It is, without exception, a bald and insincere attempt to escape the punishment they richly deserve.
They say actions speak louder than words, and that being so, this remark is downright silly when put in context with what he actually did that day:
“He jiggled the door handle to an office that he believed belonged to Pelosi, but it was locked. Just across the hall … several of the Speaker’s staffers had barricaded themselves in a different office, terrified. As Johnson watched rioters trying to break down the doors to the House Chamber, where frightened lawmakers were trapped, he shouted that a bust of George Washington would make ‘a great battering ram,’ prosecutors said. ‘Thankfully, no one heeded his suggestion,’ a prosecutor wrote.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has tried to get away with calling these people “tourists.” The Capitol riot was a violent attack against the right of 81 million Biden voters to choose their own government. We treasure that right; people don’t get to do that in Russia or in Ukraine. What Adam Johnson and his fellow insurrectionists did was of a piece with what Putin is doing right now to the Ukrainian people with tanks, jet fighters, and missiles. They simply didn’t have the hardware, so they resorted to throwing furniture. They deserve whatever opprobrium lands on them.
Johnson didn’t have a job to lose; his wife’s an M.D. and he’s mom to their 5 kids while she brings home the bacon. Even so, his post-riot life hasn’t been a sleigh ride. His lawyer says they’ve received death threats (not good), her medical practice has suffered (not really fair to her), “and some of Adam’s oldest friends will no longer speak to him or his family” (can’t say I blame them).
The two-and-a-half months in prison is nothing, and the $5,000 fine (and lawyer fees) he has to pay out of his wife’s salary isn’t much, either. The harder part of Johnson’s punishment still lies in the future. Someday he’ll have to explain this to his kids; who, for now, may only know that daddy’s going on a trip and they can’t come along.
