Testimony will continue Wednesday in the trial of Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man who was photographed with his foot on a desk in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack.
A picture of Barnett reclining in the chair went viral and became one of the most recognizable images linked to the attempt to forcefully prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.
DEMOCRATS KEEP MEMORY OF JAN. 6 ALIVE AS PARTY LOOKS AHEAD TO 2024
Barnett’s trial began Monday after a nearly two-year delay and is expected to last a week.
He faces eight federal charges, including taking a stun gun into the Capitol, theft of government property, and obstructing Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote count. He initially had seven charges against him, but prosecutors on Dec. 21 added the eighth charge of civil disorder. Barnett could be sentenced to a year behind bars if found guilty. His lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to get two of the charges dropped.
Barnett, who goes by the nickname Bigo, has openly bragged about writing Pelosi “a nasty note” and putting “my feet up on her desk.” The note read, “Nancy, Bigo was here, b****,” prosecutors alleged. Before he left her office, Barnett grabbed letterhead and waved it around but insisted later he did not steal it because he “put a quarter on her desk.”
The government’s first witness was Emily Berret, the woman whose desk Barnett had placed his foot on. Berret described running out of the House chamber with Pelosi to safety. She also testified that she had sensitive materials on her desk, including a business card with her number on it.
Prosecutors have attempted to paint Barnett as a serial disrupter, looking for mayhem.
In July 2020, a woman called 911 to report a man matching Barnett’s description had pointed a rifle at her at a “Back the Blue” rally. Four months later, police were called to a “Save the Children” rally after someone claimed Barnett was carrying a gun and acting suspiciously.
Prosecutors said Barnett planned to attend the D.C. “Stop the Steal” rally weeks in advance and bought a 950,000-volt stun gun that he tucked into his pants.
“He came prepared for violence,” prosecutor Alison Prout said during opening statements.
Prout told jurors that Barnett had posted on Facebook that “my country will not be socialist as long as I am alive to fight.”
Authorities said that after the picture of him went viral, Barnett went back to Arkansas and tried to destroy evidence linking him to the Capitol attack but it was too little, too late. He turned himself in two days later.
In 2021, Barnett tried to raise money to offset legal costs and told potential donors that if they pledged $100 or more, he would send them a signed photo of him inside Pelosi’s office.
Since then, he has assembled one of the largest defense teams for an individually-charged defendant tied to the 2021 attack. One of his lawyers, Bradford Geyer, is a former federal prosecutor who represented Oath Keeper Kenneth Harrelson at his trial. Harrelson was acquitted in November of seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack but was found guilty of obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and on other lesser charges.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has made more than 900 arrests in connection to the Jan. 6 attack. About 440 have already pleaded guilty to various charges, and 29 have been found guilty in trials.
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Former president Donald Trump pledged he would offer full pardons to anyone convicted in connection to the U.S. Capitol attack if he were reelected to office in 2024.
