WASHINGTON — A Capitol riot suspect who waded through tear gas behind a pro-Donald Trump mob chasing police officers into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 advanced to a Republican Party runoff in a Georgia House district on Tuesday, according to NBC News Projects.
Charles Hand III, who goes by Chuck Hand, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in connection with the attack on January 6, 2021. He is running for the Republican nomination in Georgia’s 2nd Congressional District, which is held by Democrat Sanford Bishop.
In Georgia, if no candidate meets the 50% threshold in a primary election, the top two votes advance to a runoff election. Hand will face off on June 18 against Wayne Johnson, who served in the Trump administration’s Education Department and led the vote counting on Tuesday.
The eventual winner of the Republican Party will be an underdog in the general election against Bishop in the solidly Democratic district.
As part of his October 2022 plea deal, Hand admitted that after the attack he wrote that he saw a crowd of people “storming the Capitol Police” and that “tear gas, rubber bullets, mace and the like did not stop them.” Hand and his wife, Mandy Robinson-Hand, traveled to Washington from Butler, Georgia and made their way to the Capitol, where, Hand admitted, he “broke a piece of metal fencing and put it in his back pants pocket” during the war. chaos before entering the Capitol.
Video shows Hand and his wife went under a closing emergency door that officers tried to close as members of the mob chased officers into the Capitol. There were several members of the Proud Boys in the area at the time. Hand admitted that he was inside the Capitol heading toward an altercation between law enforcement officers and rioters, but said his wife pulled him away and “prevented him from intervening.”
After the riot, Hand contacted a cousin who worked in local law enforcement, who told him “that ‘the FBI is slow’ and that they would come to you, just wait and see,” according to a sentencing memo in his case. was arrested in March 2022 and sentenced to 20 days in prison in January 2023.
Hand wrote in a letter to the court that he had “no urge to return to Washington” and that after his conviction he would “get in my truck and go back to Georgia, where I belong, and never again to Washington D.C. would return unless the voters of Georgia decide to return me as their representative some day in the future.”
Hand also spoke about the “stigma” associated with the case.
“I now know that I should never have entered the Capitol and I fully understand the impact of my actions,” Hand wrote in a letter to the court. “I deeply regret it, this experience has affected my life more than I could ever have imagined.
Hand isn’t the only Jan. 6 rioter trying to return to the Capitol as a member of Congress. Last week, defendant Derrick Evans, who was a member of the West Virginia Legislature when he stormed the Capitol, lost his Jan. 6 Republican primary to incumbent Carol Miller.
More than 1,400 people have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, and more than 1,000 have been convicted. Hundreds of January 6 suspects have been placed on probation, but more than 500 have been sentenced to prison terms, ranging from a few stints behind bars to 22 years in prison.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
