A January 6 rioter who wore a Hitler mustache to work at a navy base claimed that he was invited to Trump’s inauguration and posted images indicating he was in Washington, D.C.
Timothy Hale-Cusanelli was identified as a white supremacist with admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler by prosecutors.
Hale-Cusanelli said on X that he was “Happy to say there was less Antifa this Inauguration than the one in 2017.” He shared an image of an invitation to the inauguration. It’s unclear who or what group invited him.
Hale-Cusanelli, along with others, overwhelmed police in the Capitol crypt during the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, according to The Washington Post. Videos revealed that he tried to get a rioter away from officers who were arresting the rioter.
He claimed that he was unaware that the officer was a member of the police and that he thought that the certification of the Electoral College vote would be “in a building called ‘Congress.’ As stupid as it sounds, I did not realize that Congress sat in the Capitol building.”
Hale-Cusanelli was sentenced to four years in prison, with Trump appointee U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden slammed the defendant for racist, sexist and antisemitic statements and also blasted him for his “decision to lie on the witness stand,” The Post noted.
After three years behind bars, Hale-Cusanelli was released in December 2023 and has taken to posting on X as “Tim Hale — Criminally Funny J6er.” He was only the seventh participant in the riot to go on trial, with prosecutors saying that he hoped for a second U.S. civil war.
Hale-Cusanelli was a Navy contractor with a government security clearance when he took part in the storming of the Capitol, the BBC noted in September 2022.
In an internal navy probe, 34 of his co-workers said he had “extremist or radical views pertaining to the Jewish people, minorities and women.”
A naval officer claimed that Hale-Cusanelli once said, ”Hitler should have finished the job,” in relation to the Holocaust.
Happy to say there was less Antifa this Inauguration than the one in 2017. pic.twitter.com/PtnHXK33wc
— Tim Hale - Criminally Funny J6er (@LouisofMonmouth) January 20, 2025
He took the stand in his trial, saying that he “didn’t know there was an actual building that was called the ‘Capitol’.”
“I feel like an idiot,” he said.
But government attorneys argued that he was lying, citing conversations between Hale-Cusanelli and his roommate following the attack on Congress where he said that getting into the Capitol complex was “exhilarating.”
“Hale-Cusanelli is, at best, extremely tolerant of violence and death,” prosecutors said, according to the BBC. “What Hale-Cusanelli was doing on January 6 was not activism, it was the preamble to his civil war.”
