A United States jury has sentenced this Friday to seven years in prison a police officer who was fired after the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 for joining the mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump who broke into the Congress that day to stop the ratification of the votes that gave victory to Joe Biden in the presidential elections.
Thomas Robertson has been accused of breaking into the Capitol and participating in the assault and has become the second person to be convicted by a jury in connection with the case, according to information from the CNN television network.
The first to be found guilty by a jury was Guy Refitt, who received a similar sentence last July – just over seven years in prison -, the highest sentence for the assault on the Capitol.
District Judge Christopher Cooper has called Robertson’s actions “troubling” and has asserted that Robertson “considers politics to be factional warfare.” “Keep believing in the conspiracy theories. I think you would go again if there was a similar situation,” he said.
Robertson, a former Mount Rocky Police sergeant in Virginia, wrote a text message in March 2021 in which he stated that he could “kill any agent they send” and ruled out becoming a “political prisoner.”
During the trial, prosecutors detailed Robertson’s “preparations” for the assault and showed a series of writings made by the defendant a month before the incident, in which he spoke of an “armed rebellion.”
