June 26, 2023 11:28 AM UTC

Four Years For One Of Colorado's More Notorious Insurrectionists

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Here’s a photo of Robert Gieswein posing with his fellow “Three Percenters” in front of Rep. Lauren Boebert’s now-shuttered Shooters Grill:

The town of Rifle is no longer Boebert’s militia Mecca.

And that’s good, not even Three Percenters deserve food poisoning.

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Colorado Public Radio’s Tony Gorman reports on the 48-month sentence handed down against Robert Gieswein of Woodland Park Friday, who pled guilty earlier this year for his violence against U.S. Capitol Police during the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol:

According to court documents, the Woodland Park resident, then 24 years old, was dressed in a camouflage paramilitary kit and wielded a baseball bat as he entered the U.S. Capitol. Gieswein allegedly sprayed an aerosol irritant at police officers and injured several. He also pushed against a line of police officers with other rioters.

Federal authorities believe Gieswein is affiliated with the radical militia group the Three Percenters. The group advocates for resistance to the U.S. federal government policies it believes infringe on personal, local, and gun ownership rights. They also say he runs his own private paramilitary training group, the Woodland Wild Dogs, in Colorado.

Gieswein, who received credit at sentencing yesterday for the two years he has already been in custody, asked to be released in November of 2021 saying he was “stuck in a bubble” of fellow January 6th rioters who were preventing him from potentially reforming himself:

In a handwritten letter to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan filed in court on Thursday, Gieswein wrote that he read a recent Vice News article about the “Patriot Wing” of the DC Jail, where he is housed with other hardcore perpetrators of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“I am not an expert in anything, but I do know it’s not healthy to spend every day in here like it’s Groundhog’s (SIC) Day, with people with the same viewpoint, in the same situation, because we are all portrayed by much of the media as one type of person,” Gieswein wrote. “It is natural in this environment for the conversation to turn to January 6, and for us to look to each other for strength.”

Ahead of his sentencing Friday, as the Colorado Sun’s Olivia Prentzel reports, Gieswein–via his lawyers, seeking a lighter sentence–did express his share of remorse:

In a memorandum filed in U.S. District Court last week, Gieswein’s attorneys wrote that he “lives with great regret for his actions and has accepted full responsibility for the crimes he committed on January 6, 2021…”

“I was very emotional and I was not behaving appropriately,” he wrote. “It was not my intention to hurt the police. I was mad and wanted them out of the way.”

Now that Gieswein has been sentenced, he can finally be transferred to a regular federal prison to serve out his remaining two years–so no more singing the national anthem with the rest of the “hardcore perpetrators” housed at the D.C. Jail. As for whether Gieswein’s remorse is genuine, we’ll have to seen when he’s released whether he goes right back to the militia side gig he had going before January 6th.

And again, Gieswein was a low-level thug in a much larger plot. If Gieswein deserved four years in prison, what do the people who incited Gieswein to storm the Capitol deserve?

Increasingly, and fortunately, it doesn’t look like accountability will stop with the thugs.