It’s been almost 19 months since Donald Trump pardoned every convicted and accused Jan. 6 rioter, and in that time, quite a few of those who received presidential clemency have run into fresh trouble with the law. Lawfare, a nonprofit publication covering the legal world, published a study in June that found at least 97 people who were charged with crimes in connection with the assault on the Capitol who have since been accused of new crimes.
Some of these cases, however, stand out.
A Maryland man named Bryan Betancur was already on probation for a 2019 burglary conviction when he traveled to Capitol Hill to join the Jan. 6 attack in early 2021. Betancur, described by the FBI as a “self-professed” white supremacist, was wearing a GPS-enabled monitoring device, which made it easier for prosecutors to prove he climbed scaffolding outside the Capitol before helping other rioters remove furniture from a conference room.
Betancur ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months behind bars, before later getting a pardon from Trump.
This week, the same pardoned rioter was convicted of a very different kind of charge. The NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., reported:
A man accused of touching women’s hair as he sat behind them on Metro trains — and posting video of the incidents to social media — was found guilty Wednesday of a single count of simple assault.
Bryan Betancur, of Silver Spring, Maryland, was found guilty in D.C. Superior Court of surreptitiously fondling a woman’s hair on a Red Line train back in February.
As part of the court proceedings, the judge in the case told the defendant, “It’s just a creepy thing to do.”
The same report added, “Betancur is also facing a stalking charge in the District, and an additional assault and battery charge in Arlington. That Arlington charge stems from an incident similar to the one he was convicted of Wednesday: He is accused of livestreaming himself fondling the hair of a different woman on a train there.”
In retrospect, the vetting of candidates for presidential clemency starts to look like a more compelling idea.
Indeed, I’ve documented quite a few Jan. 6 rioters who were re-arrested after receiving presidential clemency, but none of them faced accusations quite like this. (Trump’s pardons applied only to the assault on the U.S. Capitol and didn’t shield the insurrectionists from other prosecutions.)
Let’s not forget that right around the same time that Betancur was found guilty in a D.C. courtroom, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters that he and Trump are still determined to reward alleged victims of the Biden-era Justice Department, though it’s unclear whether Betancur would be among those in line for a taxpayer-financed payout.
Highlighting the broader pattern, the editorial board of The New York Times published an opinion piece in March that argued, “The American public deserves to understand the mayhem that the Jan. 6 pardons have unleashed.”
Given the circumstances, that appeal was hardly unreasonable.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post ‘It’s just a creepy thing to do’: Pardoned Jan. 6 rioter convicted in hair-touching case appeared first on MS NOW.
