WASHINGTON — A federal judge Monday found Georgia attorney William McCall Calhoun, Jr., guilty of a felony obstruction charge and four misdemeanors related to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot.
Prosecutors charged Calhoun with obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony carrying up to 20 years in prison. But U.S. District Court Judge Dabney L. Friedrich on Monday said despite the felony conviction, she plans to diverge from federal sentencing guidelines and sentence Calhoun more in line with similar Jan. 6 defendants who had been charged with misdemeanors.
She said federal prosecutors proved the felony obstruction charge against Calhoun, but she wanted to maintain sentencing consistency with other defendants. She questioned why other defendants who conducted them similarly to Calhoun on Jan. 6 hadn’t been charged with more serious charges.
She expressed “frustration” with the inconsistency with how the Department of Justice had charged Jan. 6 defendants.
“This case in the court’s view appears to be much more in line with the misdemeanor cases it has seen,” Friedrich said.
Calhoun, a criminal defense attorney from Americus, Ga., was among the very first of the rioters to enter the U.S. Capitol through a breached door on the Senate side of the building, making it as far as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
In his trial held March 1-2, prosecutors seized on Calhoun’s social media posts to make their case that he came to Washington to attack the Capitol and stop the certification of the election and encouraged others to do the same.
Calhoun, who testified in his own defense, claimed he was merely following the crowd as it walked from the rally held by Donald Trump to the Capitol grounds.
“I did not and, even now, I don’t believe I did violate any felony statute because there’s nothing — there’s no act involved to commit a felony,” he said. “I mean, there’s not anything I did except walk through the Capitol.”
Calhoun, 59, is believed to be the only practicing attorney among the more than 800 Jan. 6 defendants across the country. He has continued his law practice in southwest Georgia, wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor as he awaited trial in Washington.
His felony conviction means his law license is jeopardy. He declined to comment after Monday’s verdict. A sentencing date has been tentatively set for July 6. Calhoun through his attorney told the court he may need more time to shut down his law practice.
He testified at his trial that his writing style on social media was intentionally overblown and hyperbolic. The judge said Monday his testimony lacked credibility.
Still, Calhoun had said at trial that his aggressive online rhetoric was more to “troll” his critics on the internet than to accurately reflect what he saw and heard while in the Capitol. He spent the month leading up to the November 2020 presidential election and the weeks that followed composing posts so laced with conspiracies, violent fantasies and threats of civil war to his thousands of followers on Facebook, Parler and Twitter that he was being monitored by the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service.
“We have a communist revolution happening before our very eyes to steal this election,” he wrote in a post a day after the presidential election. “Americans get ready to rise up and kill the Democratic communists before they do it to us.”
On Nov. 7, 2020, Calhoun wrote that he and others would go from door to door in Atlanta “and execute the (expletive) communists.”
After the riot, he described his actions that day in a post on Parler.
“We overran multiple police barricades and busted through,” he wrote on the social media platform Parler. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door and pushed down the hall towards her inner sanctum. The mob was howling with rage. Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
In his federal court case, Calhoun chose to bypass a jury and opted for a “bench trial,” taking his case directly to Friedrich, who took the next two weeks to formulate her verdict.
When the case appeared headed to a jury, Calhoun’s attorneys attempted to block prosecutors from using his social media posts as evidence. He also asked the court to return to him the firearms seized by the FBI. Investigators collected four AR-15 assault-style rifles, four shotguns and a 9 mm automatic pistol when they arrested Calhoun, and photos taken from his home show cases of ammunition.
Friedrich denied both motions.
Calhoun traveled to Washington with friend Verden Andrew Nalley, a construction worker from Buford with whom Calhoun had attended so-called “Stop the Steal” protests in downtown Atlanta prior to the Capitol riot. Unlike Calhoun, Nalley was offered a deal to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of illegally entering the Capitol and was sentenced last year to two years probation.
The fact that he was not given a similar deal appears to be one reason why Calhoun opted to take the charges to trial.
“They offered me a felony,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview last year. “I know I didn’t commit a felony.”
Calhoun’s defiance about the charges has been a constant element of his defense since his arrest.
“I posted photographs, and I posted videos because I did not do anything wrong. OK?,” he said in a March 5, 2021, bond hearing. “Maybe I trespassed. Big deal. Don’t steal elections next time.”
He has been under house arrest while not working in his law practice and has never tempered his opinion about the Capitol riot.
In a hearing before a judge in Cordele when one of his criminal defense clients asked to have him removed from his case, Calhoun complained about his arrest and incarceration.
“My position on that is somebody had to do it. OK? I would do it again 100 times if I were in the same situation,” he said, according to a transcript read during his trial in Washington. “That’s just how I feel about it.”
Calhoun sang a different tune when asked about the event during his own trial.
“I don’t believe I would come back to Washington, much less go into the Capitol if I had my way about things,” he said.
A felony conviction likely would mean years in prison and a certain end to his career as a lawyer.
The State Bar of Georgia has reportedly received several requests to revoke Calhoun’s license to practice law, but he remains in good standing with the organization. Jennifer Mason, spokeswoman for the State Bar, said the organization does not comment on grievances filed against attorneys, but she said lawyers are generally only held to account for their behavior while serving as attorneys.
“The Bar only has jurisdiction over lawyers in their professional lives, so the rules do not cover personal conduct unless a member is convicted of a crime,” she said.
Not everyone agrees with that position. In an interview last year with the AJC, former State Bar President Lester Tate said he was “shocked’ by the bar’s position, especially considering the deep dive the organization does into the personal lives of lawyers when they seek admittance to the bar.
“When you go to apply to be a member of the Bar, they do credit checks, all sorts of stuff in your background to make sure that you meet the standards to be a lawyer,” he said.
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