A former National Security Agency employee was sentenced to two weeks imprisonment for storming the US Capitol on January 6, with associates described by authorities as fellow followers of a white nationalist movement.
Paul Lovley, 24, lived in Halethorpe, Maryland, and was an NSA information technology specialist before the riot on 6 January 2021, prosecutors said.
On Tuesday US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Lovley to 14 days behind bars, to be served over seven weekends, and three years of probation, a spokesperson for the US attorney for the District of Columbia said.
Lovley pleaded guilty in February to parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum six-month sentence.
He was charged with four other men who prosecutors described as “members” of America First, a group led by the antisemitic internet personality Nicholas Fuentes, whose followers often call themselves “Groypers” or members of a “Groyper Army”.
Joseph Brody, Thomas Carey, Jon Lizak and Gabriel Chase were the other men charged. The five, all in their early 20s, gathered at Lovley’s Maryland home on 5 January 2021 then went to Washington to attended Donald Trump’s “Save America” rally, at which the then president advanced his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.
After other rioters breached the Capitol, the five men entered the building through the Senate wing, joined the mob in pushing past police officers and went into a conference room for the office of the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, prosecutors said. Brody broke off from the group and entered the Senate chamber while Lovley and the others remained outside.
After leaving the Capitol, Brody lifted a metal barricade and appeared to use it to obstruct or assault an officer, prosecutors said. Before leaving Capitol grounds, the group went to an area where rioters destroyed and looted media equipment.
“I am certain that I would not have even shown up if I had known that the day was going to turn into what it did beforehand,” Lovley wrote in a letter to the judge.
Carey, Lizak and Chase pleaded guilty to the same misdemeanor offense. Last Tuesday, Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Carey to three years of probation and 14 days of jail time. Chase is scheduled to be sentenced in July. A sentencing hearing for Lizak is set for October. Charges against Brody have not been resolved.
On Tuesday, David Walls-Kaufman, a 66-year-old DC-based chiropractor was sentenced to two months in jail by another US district judge, Jia M Cobb, for the same misdemeanor offense, the Washington Post reported.
Walls-Kaufman faces a wrongful-death civil lawsuit filed by Erin Smith, the widow of the Capitol officer Jeffrey Smith. The lawsuit accuses Walls-Kaufman of assaulting Smith, who later killed himself.
According to the Post, the suit says video footage shows Walls-Kaufman beating Smith with his own baton, resulting in a traumatic brain injury that eventually led to Smith’s suicide.
More than 530 people have been sentenced for crimes related to January 6 and more than 1,000 arrests have been made.
