Lawfare: Owen Shroyer Sentenced to 60 Days in Jan 6 Case
(Chaz Anon) Infowars host Owen Shroyer was sentenced on Tuesday to two months behind bars for reporting on the mob that rioted at the U.S. Capitol, which prosecutors said he “helped create” by spewing “violent rhetoric” and “spreading baseless claims” of election fraud to his millions of viewers.
Shroyer hosts “The War Room With Owen Shroyer” on Infowars. Prosecutors said Shroyer used his online platform — and later a megaphone outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — to amplify what the government claims is a lie, that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.
Owen Shroyer, a journalist, has now been sentenced to two months in federal prison for the crime of his speech.
— Harrison H. Smith ✞ (@HarrisonHSmith) September 12, 2023
He never called for violence, but because he expressed ideas that made people mad, he's responsible for, as they put it "stoking the flames" pic.twitter.com/tZr4KktSIh
Shroyer didn’t enter the Capitol, but he led a march to the building and led rioters in chants near the top of the building’s steps. He's among only a few people charged in the riot who neither went inside the building nor were accused of engaging in violence or destruction.
He pleaded guilty in June to illegally entering a restricted area — a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum sentence of one year behind bars.
Shroyer didn't need to set foot inside the Capitol because many of his followers did, prosecutors argued. They said Shroyer spread election disinformation and “thinly veiled calls to violence” on Jan. 6 to Infowars viewers in the weeks leading up to the attack.
“Shroyer helped create January 6,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
Prosecutors had sought four months behind bars for Shroyer, 34, of Austin, Texas.
In December 2019, Shroyer was arrested in Washington after he disrupted a House Judiciary Committee hearing for then-President Trump's impeachment proceedings. He later agreed to stay away from Capitol grounds, a condition of a deal resolving that case.
In the weeks before the Capitol riot, Shroyer “stoked the flames of a potential disruption of the (Jan. 6) certification vote by streaming disinformation about alleged voter fraud and a stolen election” on his show, prosecutors wrote. In November 2020, he warned that “it’s not going to be a million peaceful marchers in D.C.” if Joe Biden, a Democrat, became president.
An Infowars video promoting “the big D.C. marches on the 5th and 6th of January” ended with a graphic of Shroyer and others in front of the Capitol. A day before the Capitol riot, Shroyer called in to a live Infowars broadcast and internet program and said, “Everybody knows this election was stolen.”
Shroyer, who has worked at Infowars since 2016, said in an affidavit that he accompanied Jones and his security detail to Capitol grounds on Jan. 6.
“I walked with Mr. Jones up several steps and stood near him as he addressed the crowd from a bullhorn urging them to leave the area and behave peacefully,” Shroyer said.
Jones hasn’t been charged with any Jan. 6-related crimes.
Outside the Capitol, Shroyer stood in front of a crowd with a megaphone and yelled, “The Democrats are posing as communists, but we know what they really are: they’re just tyrants, they’re tyrants. And so today, on January 6, we declare death to tyranny! Death to tyrants!” Shroyer also led hundreds of rioters in chants of “USA!” and “1776!”
