'No evidence of reason': Trump-appointed judge shoots down MAGA rioter's latest plea
A federal judge appointed by President-elect Donald Trump is dashing the hopes of a Jan. 6 defendant.
Legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney found in a court filing that Mark Waynick and his son Jerry McKane Waynick were shut down when they tried to blame the FBI for starting the attack on Jan. 6.
The father-son duo was sentenced in November after being convicted of "11 felony offenses and three misdemeanors, including, among other charges, assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous weapon," the Justice Department said in a statement.
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But the men maintained a conspiracy theory that there were agents in the crowd and that without those agents egging participants on, the attack would never happened.
That theory was destroyed late last week when an Inspector General report revealed no FBI agents were in the crowd.
The nearly 90-page report said, “We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6.”
The report said that there were "informants" in the crowd, meaning people who provide information to the FBI — but they were not hired or trained employees.
Trump-appointed Judge Tim Kelly told the men that there was "no evidence any FBI source induced other people to commit crimes, let alone at FBI's direction," wrote Cheney on Blue Sky.
"First, Waynick argues the undisclosed presence and identities of FBI confidential human sources could have supported an entrapment defense," the filing reads. "But he has no facts to back up that theory. He offers no evidence or reason to believe that anyone—whether or not that person was an FBI confidential human source—induced him in some way to commit the crimes for which he was convicted. He offers no evidence or reason to believe that he spoke to or inter-acted with an FBI confidential human source on January 6. And he offers no evidence or reason to believe that an FBI confidential human source induced anyone to commit a crime that day, let alone that a source did so at the FBI’s direction."
The elder Waynick received 36 months of supervised release and a $2,000 fine, and the younger Waynick was sentenced to 30 months of supervised release and a $2,000 fine.