Trump pardon helps child sex offender avoid prison despite guilty plea

A serial criminal avoided prison for child sex offenses thanks to President Donald Trump's pardon for his violent role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Andrew Taake pleaded guilty in September to soliciting what he believed was a 15-year-old girl for sex, but The Daily Beast reported the 37-year-old was able to stay out of prison for the sex offense due to the "credit" he was given for time served behind bars for attacking a police office during the U.S. Capitol riot.

"Legal experts branded the decision 'exceptionally rare,'" the website reported. "Multiple attorneys told the Daily Beast that using 'credit' from a pardoned federal case for separate crimes to keep Taake out of prison on unrelated state charges was also 'ethically problematic.'"

”Especially moving from a political/protest crime to child exploitation,” Washington-based trial attorney Evan Oshan told the outlet.

The 37-year-old Taake was out on bond on the solicitation charges when he took part in the 2021 riot, at which he attacked police officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

Court documents show that he accrued 1,306 days, or about three years and seven months, of credit while serving in pretrial detention before he was sentenced for his role in the riot last summer, but he was among more than 1,500 people Trump pardoned for their roles in the Capitol attack shortly after returning to the White House in January.

He then struck a plea agreement with prosecutors in Harris County, Texas, and was required to register as a sex offender for 10 years, but his prison time related to the riot and Trump's ensuing pardon seems to have kept him out of prison in the sex case.

Prosecutors said Taake exchanged sexually explicit messages and photos with a person he believed to be a 15-year-old girl, who was actually an undercover police officer, on the dating website Plenty of Fish and continued the communications after he was told the person was underage.

Taake was identified as a Capitol rioter by a woman he matched with on the dating app Bumble, and she notified federal investigators that he had boasted about his role in the attack, according to an FBI affidavit.

“I felt a bit of ‘civic duty,’ I guess, but truthfully, I was mostly just mad,’” the woman said last year.