Capitol Rioter Risks It All For His Pillow Guy

Imagine being the lawyer who actually manages to talk a federal judge into letting your client go home after he broke into the Capitol with a knife in his pocket and chased a cop around. Now imagine that said client gets caught just a month later violating his parole so he can watch pillow loon Mike Lindell scream inanities about the election being hacked “cyberly.”

Client management, FTW.

Here’s an actual paragraph from attorney Christopher Davis’s brief arguing that his client Douglas Jensen should be released into his wife’s custody because he thought real hard about it in jail and decided that this whole Q-anon conspiracy thing was “a pack of lies.”

In one’s wildest imagination, no one could have predicted the events of late 2020, culminating on January 6, 2021. Neither Alex Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) nor George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), or for that matter, any futuristic novel since then would come close to foreseeing this future now present. A billionaire reality TV show host turned president becoming the savior to a disillusioned/pandemic-weary, largely blue-collar working-class middle America. The internet, with its lightning speed, and few if any reality checks, spawned yet an even more bizarre offshoot, QANON – described as an American far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles run a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against former President Donald Trump during his term in office.

Alex Huxley? Is he the new host of Jeopardy?

But it worked. On July 13, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly let Jensen go back to Iowa in the custody of his wife on the explicit instruction that he stay off the internet, where he might be exposed to more of those dangerous conspiracy theories, and that all internet-connected devices in the house be password-protected to shield him from temptation and corruption.

“A typical outcome if someone violates their conditions of release in a material way is that they’re just jailed again pending trial. Do you understand that, Mr. Jensen?” Judge Kelly asked at the hearing.

“Yes, sir,” Jensen agreed.

And yet when Pretrial Services showed up on August 14 to check on the defendant, they found him listening to the conservative streaming site Rumble on an iPhone, to which he had the password and on which he’d tuned in to Mike Lindell’s election fraud hootenanny for two straight days.

Darn you, internet, with your lightning speed and few if any reality checks!

A normal person might choose jail over being forced to listen to Mike Lindell, but it looks like Doug Jensen might get to do both, since the government is now demanding that he be returned to the hoosegow for blatantly violating the conditions of his release.

Noting that not only Jensen but his wife had flagrantly disregarded the court’s order, prosecutors cast doubt on his jailhouse repudiation of the Q-anon conspiracy theory.

“Contrary to what Jensen claimed at his bond hearing, he is still very much bought into QAnon’s ‘pack of lies,'” they wrote. “Indeed, the Court need look no further than Jensen’s virtual attendance at a symposium dedicated to challenging the legitimacy of the 2020 electoral election to know that Jensen will continue to let his loyalties to certain conspiracy theories prevail over his obligations to this Court and his family.”

Which just goes to show you how far THEY will go to suppress the truth, as Mike Lindell and Q prophesied. Alex Huxley would be proud.

US v. Jensen [Docket via Court Listener]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.