The former defense attorney for QAnon shaman Jacob Chansley is defending his comments last spring calling his client and other Capitol insurrectionists "short bus people."
Al Watkins, who represented Chansley at the time, set off a firestorm among advocates for people with disabilities and others when he went on an expletive-rant in May.
“A lot of these defendants — and I’m going to use this colloquial term, perhaps disrespectfully — but they’re all f*cking short-bus people,” Watkins said. “These are people with brain damage, they’re f*cking retarded, they’re on the goddamn spectrum. But they’re our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our coworkers — they’re part of our country. These aren’t bad people, they don’t have prior criminal history. F*ck, they were subjected to four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the world has not seen since f*cking Hitler.”
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On Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, Watkins defended the comments in an interview with St. Louis Public Radio, saying he was merely trying to draw attention to Chansley's mental-health problems after other efforts to do so failed.
“All it took was one carefully crafted, vulgar, inappropriate quote, well placed for maximum disclosure, to garner within 24 hours mental health care that my client needed, a psych evaluation ordered by the court, and steps of immediate measures to be taken to save my client from the proverbial mental abyss,” Watkins said. “Once it became clear what I was doing and once the diagnosis of [Chansley] was reconfirmed in 2021, and once the explanation for the basis of doing it came out, I garnered a remarkable amount of support from the very individuals who wanted to string me up by my nether regions."
Chansley pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 41 months in prison in November. He has since hired a new attorney and is appealing his sentence, claiming ineffective counsel. But Watkins maintains that Chansley got a good deal considering that he faced up to 20 years in prison.
Watkins also continues to believe that mental-health issues were a major factor in the insurrection — in addition to the stress of the pandemic, social media, and former president Donald Trump.
“They were invited,” Watkins said of Capitol insurrectionists. “They truly believe that they were there at a special instance, in calling of their president, they're there to save our nation, help our president to save our country. And we have to realize these are our neighbors, they are friends, co-workers or colleagues, sometimes our relatives, and but for all this collective combination of triggers, they wouldn't be there.”