A rioter who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 has been sentenced to 60 days behind bars.
According to the HuffPost, on Thursday (Nov. 4), U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said Jenna Ryan, a Texas real estate agent who flew to Washington D.C. on a private plane to partake in the insurrection, played a “lesser role in the criminal conduct that took place,” however, “that does not mean that you don’t have any culpability in what happened that day.”
“I don’t think you could have missed the fact that this was no peaceful protest,” Judge Cooper added. “You were a cheerleader, you cheered it on.”
Ryan faced four charges, but she pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count, acknowledging that she “paraded, demonstrated, or picketed” inside the government building without authorization.
She tried to minimize her actions on Jan. 6 in a letter to Judge Cooper, writing that she only “wanted her voice to be heard” and that her voice and cell phone were her only weapons. Ryan also addressed a now-viral tweet that she composed back in March, which read, “Definitely not going to jail. Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I’m not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade. I did nothing wrong.”
The realtor denied implicating that she was above the law in that tweet. “I wasn’t saying I was above prison, I just felt that it would be unlikely since I was pleading to entering the Capitol for 2 minutes and 8 seconds,” she wrote. “Now I realize that was a false notion, but having a false notion does not automatically mean I deserve incarceration. A tweet of me taking up for myself against a bully who is harassing me does not indicate that I feel above-the-law.”
Check out Ryan’s tweet below.