The man who became the face of the Jan. 6 riot is ready to rule.
Jacob Chansley, aka "QAnon Shaman," entered the Capitol building back in 2021 clad in fur pelts and horned headdress at the dais where Vice President Mike Pence had moments before been presiding at the certification of the 2020 election.
Now he wants to become a change agent for Arizonans.
He officially filed a statement of interest to run for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District in Congress, according to News 12.
The move comes only months after the 35-year-old was released from a Phoenix halfway house having served about 27 months of his 41 month sentence.
Senior U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth described Chansley as the “very image of the riot” in November 2021 before imposing his sentence as part of a plea deal for obstructing an official proceeding.
“Chansley worked diligently during his period of confinement to take advantage of the opportunities accorded by his plea deal to reduce the time he was required to serve,” Chansley’s attorney Albert Watkins said in a statement at the time.
The searing image of Chansley yelping “time’s up [sic]” as he entered the Senate chamber, was one that epitomized the historic day.
And months before the insurrection, Chansley had posted rhetoric on social media.
“We shall have no real hope to survive the enemies arrayed against us until we hang the traitors lurking among us,” he wrote in a Nov. 19, 2020 Facebook post.
When interviewed by NBC News, he described the riot where mobs stormed the Capital building a “win.”
“The fact that we had a bunch of our traitors in office hunker down, put on their gas masks and retreat into their underground bunker, I consider that a win,” he said. Notably, as a convicted felon, Chansley is forbidden from voting. However he is free to run, the network reported.
As a felony convict, Chansley can run but not vote in the election.
