WASHINGTON — A Donald Trump supporter who attacked law enforcement officers with bear spray and a metal whip — and who was arrested thanks to a woman’s sting operation on the dating app Bumble — was sentenced Wednesday to just over six years in prison.
Andrew Taake was arrested in 2021 and pleaded guilty in December to assaulting officers with a deadly or dangerous weapon. Taake had previously been convicted of a felony — and had been released on bail on charges of soliciting a minor at the time of the attack on the Capitol — and was one of a handful of defendants in custody as of Jan. 6.
Prosecutors had sought a prison sentence of 6.5 years for Taake. A court filing also indicated that prosecutors would emphasize a disciplinary investigation accusing Taake of “fighting with another inmate on December 14, 2023” at the Washington jail where Taake was being held.
Taake was sentenced Wednesday to 74 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee who questioned the use of obstruction of an official charge in Jan. 6 cases, a matter now before the Supreme Court.
Nichols said Taake’s actions were “as serious as any other defendant I convicted on January 6” and that “others must be deterred” from committing similar conduct in the future. Spraying officers and carrying a metal whip, Nichols said, “is the furthest thing from the expression of the First Amendment.”
Taake was scheduled to be sentenced in April, but complications arose after Nichols suggested to the court that he believed an additional sentence enhancement should apply, even though the terms of the plea deal bar the government from explicitly advocating for it.
Nichols relied on a statement from one of the officers who hit Taake with bear spray. The officer wrote in a victim impact statement that he was “instantly,” but temporarily, “blinded” after being hit and that it was the worst pain he had ever experienced in his life, saying it was “like a living death.” .
Federal prosecutors argued in their sentencing memo that Taake has “continually shifted blame for his criminal actions on January 6 to victim officials, members of Congress and the media” in the nearly three years since his arrest.
“His enduring story is that he and other ‘patriots’ were heroes and that he is a wrongfully detained victim of ‘selective persecution.’ “He has not shown an ounce of remorse for his actions nor accepted responsibility – going so far as to deny responsibility even after his guilty plea,” they wrote. “And based on reports from his pre-trial detention, he has turned to using violence against other prisoners to alleviate his frustrations over the self-inflicted situation.”
On Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Madison Mumma said in court that Taake committed at least six attacks on Jan. 6, including four with bear spray. Taake, she said, thought Trump’s election loss was the “beginning of the end for the United States” and vowed to take the fight “straight to the swamp creatures.”
Taake was arrested as a result of a sting operation that a young professional working in the country’s capital launched on the dating app Bumble after the January 6 attack.
The woman, referred to in an FBI affidavit as “Witness 1,” previously recalled how a bit of “comically minimal ego stroking” on her part led to Taake and other Jan. 6 participants giving up information about their activities during that attack.
“I felt a little bit of ‘civic duty,’ I guess, but honestly I was mostly just angry and thinking, ‘F— these guys,’” said the woman, who spoke anonymously for fear of online reprisals. The men wanted to “regurgitate” the lies they had heard from prominent Republicans about the 2020 presidential election, she said.
The woman’s strategy, she recalled, was to repeatedly say, “Wow, crazy, tell me more,” until she had enough to send to the FBI.
“It definitely didn’t take much effort to get them to talk about it. Basically, I said, ‘Wow, so cool – so what? What else?’ was pretty much all it took,” she said. “One of my friends said, ‘You actually got all these confessions just by saying, ‘Haha!’ Than what?'”
After Taake’s sentencing on Wednesday, the woman told NBC News she thought the sentence was “solid,” especially from Nichols, and that she was glad Taake was being held accountable.
“Glad at least one of the creeps I met on Bumble is getting jail time,” she wrote in a text message. “Glad that I could help the online sleuths with all that searching, but especially glad that it is now done and I can stop thinking about this man! I’m glad I can hang up my Witness 1 hat after this whole thing.”
Taake, dressed in prison orange, spoke before the sentence was imposed, saying he was “not some violent, threatening monster” and apologizing to the victim officer who was in the courtroom.
“I never tried to say I was innocent,” Taake said. “I screwed up. I did things I shouldn’t have done.”
Taake said he “saw red” when he committed the attacks and “got caught up in the moment.”
More than 1,400 people have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, and prosecutors have secured convictions against more than 1,000 suspects. About 500 defendants have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in prison.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
