Judge grants ‘QAnon Shaman’ rioter’s request for organic food in jail

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A judge has granted the so-called ‘QAnon Shaman’ MAGA rioter’s request to receive organic food in jail after his lawyer said he hadn’t eaten in nine days and had lost nine pounds. 

DC federal Judge Royce Lamberth ruled on Jacob Anthony Chansley’s request on Wednesday, calling it ‘a choice between starvation, death, and consuming something contrary to his long-held faith’.

It came after Chansley’s lawyer, Albert Watkins, filed a motion asking for his client to be released on bond due to the fact that he hadn’t eaten in over a week because non-organic food is against his beliefs and makes him physically ill.   

Chansley was recently transferred to DC from a jail in Phoenix, where he was arrested on January 9 on six federal charges including violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. 

While he was in Phoenix, Chansley went on a four-day hunger strike until an Arizona judge ordered the jail officials to give him organic food on ‘religious grounds’.  

But jail officials in DC had refused to accommodate that demand, denying it in an email on Tuesday that was cited in Watkins’ motion. 

In the email the DOC said that Chansley ‘failed to identify a “faith/belief” upon entering DOC’s custody and DOC’s Religious Services staff were “unable to find any religious merit pertaining to organic food or diet for Shamanism Practitioner.”‘  

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A judge has granted the so-called ‘QAnon Shaman’ Jacob Chansley’s request to receive organic food in jail after his lawyer said he hadn’t eaten in nine days and had lost nine pounds. Chansley is pictured during the MAGA riots at the US Capitol on January 6

In the motion, Chansley’s lawyer Albert Watkins wrote that under his client’s belief system, ‘non-organic food, which contains unnatural chemicals, would act as an “object intrusion” onto his body and cause serious illness if he were to eat it’.  

Watkins emphasized the Arizona judge’s previous order as evidence that the request was reasonable.  

The lawyer had mentioned Chansley’s dietary restrictions during his arraignment last week, but the judge told him to hash the issue out with the DOC directly.  

In his request to DC jail officials, Chansley claimed that he has eaten strictly organic food for the past eight years and to be served organic canned vegetables or soups.

He wrote that he hadn’t eaten since the morning of January 25, before his transfer to DC.   

 ‘As a spiritual man, I don’t mind fasting,’ Chansley wrote, adding that the longest he’s fasted previously was five days.  

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Chansley is being held without bail on federal charges and faces 25 years in prison. Above, a court sketch shows him in a video appearance in Phoenix at a pre-trial detainment hearing

Federal prosecutors responded to Watkins’ motions by saying they were opposed to Chansley being released on bond. 

The prosecutors made no mention of the food argument but cited Chansley’s ‘fringe, extremist, anti-government views’, his incitement of other insurrectionists and the weight of the evidence against him. 

Chansley shot to worldwide infamy when he stormed the Capitol sporting face-paint, a fur hat and holding a Star-Spangled spear. 

Prosecutors have said he was one of the first people to breach the Capitol building, and that he left a threatening note for Vice President Mike Pence which read: ‘It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.’

But Watkins has sought to cast blame for Chansley’s actions on then-President Donald Trump, claiming that his client was ‘duped’ into participating in the riot. 

‘Mr Chansley is not alone. We all are compelled to be introspective about our role in creating and permitting an environment where believing the words of a president [is] criminally actionable,’ Watkins told DailyMail.com earlier this month.

He made those comments after Trump ignored Chansley’s pleas for a pardon before leaving office.  

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Chansley shot to worldwide infamy when he stormed the Capitol sporting face-paint, a fur hat and holding a Star-Spangled spear

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Jacob Anthony Chansley is pictured as he occupied the Senate dais at the US Capitol

The lawyer argued that Trump had drawn Chansley into a web of lies, but said that Trump’s lack of action during the riot and failure to issue pardons had been a wake-up call to his client. 

‘My client is understandably compelled to reconcile the words of the former president with the subsequent actions of the former president,’ Watkins said. 

‘The reconciliation of a betrayal necessarily requires the bellying up to the bar by the betrayed to acknowledge their role in making themselves ripe for betrayal.’ 

More than 180 individuals have been arrested and charged in connection with the riots, which led to the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer. 

Chansley and at least four others have suggested that they were taking orders from Trump, who is preparing to face an impeachment trial in the Senate on a charge of ‘inciting violence against the government of the United States’.

Last week Watkins said Chansley is willing testify at the impeachment trial, but it does not appear anyone in the Senate has taken him up on the offer.   

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