The attorney for Jacob Chansley, aka the ‘QAnon Shaman’ is negotiating a plea deal with prosecutors after prison psychologists found that his client suffers from a variety of mental illnesses.
Chansley’s attorney Albert Watkins told Reuters in an exclusive interview that officials at the Bureau of Prisons have diagnosed his client with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.
Watkins said the findings suggest Chansley’s mental condition deteriorated due to the stress of being held in solitary confinement at a jail in Alexandria, Virginia.
“As he spent more time in solitary confinement … the decline in his acuity was noticeable, even to an untrained eye,” Watkins said.
He told Reuters that Chansley’s 2006 mental health records from the Navy shows a similar diagnosis to the Bureau of Prison’s.
Chansley, the most recognizable Trump supporter to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 was arrested and charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
He has pleaded not guilty.
Watkins previously said Chansley has Asperger’s syndrome, and that other participants in the riot have intellectual disabilities that were to be blamed for storming the Capitol along with propaganda from Trump, which he says “the likes of which the world has not seen since fucking Hitler.”
“Alot of these defendants–and I’m going to use this colloquial term, perhaps disrespectfully–but they’re all fucking short-bus people. These are people with brain damage, they’re fucking retarded, they’re on the goddamn spectrum,” he told Talking Points Memo in May.
