Daniel Egtvedt

Dan was upset with all the fishy, late-night vote counting that lost President Trump the White House.  Enough so that he and thousands of patriots went to the rallies on January 6^th to try and right the wrongs.  And here’s what happened; Dan tried to enter the Capital building but was repelled by pepper spray. He was not wearing a mask or military style garb, but looked like a suburban dad wanting to get inside the “people’s house”.

While he did not assault anyone, police or otherwise, but when they tried to grab him around the waist to detain Dan, he broke free. 

The Epoch Times reports the incident this way:  ‘One of the most jarring new videos shows police giving protester Daniel Dean Egtvedt the heave-ho out the South Door, slamming him head-first into the outer doors and causing him to collapse. That incident happened after the man verbally abused and scuffled with police.

Mr. Egtvedt, 60, of Oakland, Maryland, was shown on bodycam and security video berating police officers in various parts of the Capitol.’

This was the crime: ‘resisting arrest’.  It probably wasn’t much of a struggle because the officer was female and about half his size. One report says that when Dan grabbed her to get loose and that injured her shoulder.  But no solid proof exists outside that single report.  U.S. Capitol Police Officer Melissa Marshall, who has since left the department and moved to New Zealand, said in a victim impact statement that she felt that, “…other Americans and elected officials had forgotten what happened on Jan. 6. I want to be clear that what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a domestic terrorist attack.”

Dan was arrested on February 16^th 2021. Then on April 4^th, 2021, since he was deemed a low flight risk the judge let him go home before his trial.  The Federal Prosecutors pushed back, wanting the most intense punishment possible. At pre-trial hearing they argued that Dan had mental health issues and would be unpredictable if released.  Their only evidence was that the day before he was arrested, Maryland State Police were called to the family’s home because he was threatening to physically stop his brother from taking their elderly mother to get a COVID-19 vaccination.  If that is the standard for unhinged, millions of Americans who refused “the jab” would be filling up the mental wards.

At the bench trial before U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, the DOJ requested a 64-month sentence arguing that Dan directly contributed to PTSD experienced by Officer Marshall.  Hard to prove but prosecutors in all of the J6 trials were swinging for the fences. But Dan was convicted on four felony counts and three misdemeanors, including obstructing the joint session of Congress (being challenged before the SCOTUS) and forcibly resisting or impeding law enforcement. He was acquitted of two additional counts of committing an act of physical violence and ruled prosecutors had not shown that Dan had assaulted any of the officers.

Ultimately, he was handed a 42-month sentence and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution for damage done to the Capitol. He will also serve three years on supervised release after he’s out. But Dan did not go down with a whimper.  Outside of court the day of his sentence, a local news station interviewed him on the steps of the courthouse.  Dan said that he and other Jan. 6 defendants would eventually be redeemed. “I think more will be revealed that’s going to vindicate us,” he said, and he’s correct.  There is a now a growing amount of evidence that elected officials and law enforcement personal held political views that offered extreme prejudice towards all the J6 defendants.