Authorities in Texas say they have captured a convicted US Capitol attacker who was pardoned by Donald Trump at the start of his second presidency and then went on the run from unrelated, unresolved charges of having solicited a minor.
Andrew Taake, 36, was arrested on Thursday in Leon county in connection with charges filed about 120 miles away in Houston before the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack, according to a statement from prosecutors.
Taake assailed police with bear spray and a metal whip on the day he and other Trump supporters descended on Congress in a desperate attempt to keep him in the Oval Office despite losing the presidency to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, according to prosecutors.
While chatting with a woman on the dating app Bumble, Taake bragged about those crimes and was arrested in July 2021 after she reported him to the FBI.
Taake pleaded guilty in federal court to assaulting police with a dangerous weapon and received a sentence that would have left him in prison until 2027 as well as on supervised released until 2030.
Nonetheless, federal prison records show that Taake was released from a correctional center in Fort Worth, Texas, on 20 January, when Trump retook the White House after winning November’s election against Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris.
Taake was among 1,500 people who were charged or convicted in the Capitol insurrection and controversially received blanket pardons or commutations upon Trump’s return to power. But the president’s clemency did not bring all of Taake’s legal problems to an end, as has been the case for other pardoned Capitol attackers.
Court documents show that state prosecutors in Houston charged Taake in 2016 with going online and soliciting a person he thought was “younger than 17 years of age” while anticipating the contact would culminate in a sexual encounter. Taake – then 27 – would have committed child molestation or worse had such an encounter occurred, and he was charged with a third-degree felony carrying up to 10 years in prison.
Houston criminal court records show that case pending when Taake, while out on $20,000 bail, took part in the Capitol attack. According to the Houston Chronicle, he was considered a fugitive wanted on that charge after his pardon-triggered release from federal prison.
The Harris county district attorney’s office in Houston said on Thursday that “a surveillance operation” conducted on 4 February confirmed Taake was staying at a home in Leon. Members of the Harris district attorney’s fugitive apprehension section then worked with local and state officials in Leon to arrest Taake, whom prosecutors’ statement described as “a suspected child predator”.
His bail in Harris has been revoked as officials work to transfer him there from Leon’s jail.
Taake is one of a number of pardoned Capitol attackers who have made headlines over unrelated brushes with the law.
Another was recently handed a 10-year prison sentence for killing a woman in a drunk-driving crash. And police in Indiana shot yet another pardoned Capitol attacker to death during a traffic stop.
