No, The QAnon Shaman Was Not Released From Prison Because of Tucker Carlson

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Jacob Chansley, more commonly known as the QAnon Shaman as photographed above in his now-infamous style choices during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was released from prison into a halfway house this week. That news has prompted several conservative commentators declared that he must have somehow been released early due to the video clips Fox News host Tucker Carlson featured on his show earlier this month.

This is not true, and even Chansley’s own attorney stated so.

Carlson’s Mar. 6 episode aired several clips out of the more than 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 video footage to which he was granted access by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and he used those clips to claim that the “overwhelming majority” of protesters were “peaceful,” “ordinary and meek,” and “not insurrectionists,” but “sightseers.”

I previously called Carlson’s dishonest attempts to rewrite the history that millions of Americans watched live on television — not to mention in subsequent news reports and the Jan. 6 House Select Committee hearings over the past two-plus years — a “steaming pile of rancid bovine excrement.”

Carlson showing video of moments where the Jan. 6 protesters happened to not be spraying cops in the face with bear spray, bludgeoning them with flag poles, shouting racial epithets and violent threats, dragging their unconscious bodies down stairs, etc. does not erase the video footage where all those things and more did actually happen.

Specifically regarding Carlson’s footage of Chansely, the federal prosecutors involved in the case lambasted Carlson’s slanted take, noting that he had not shown the clips where the heavily tattooed man in the horned hat was an active participant in the breaching of the Capitol as one of the first to enter, repeatedly “refused to be escorted out,” left a note threatening then-Vice President Mike Pence, and had to eventually be forcibly removed from the building.

Simply put, video of Chansley not breaking the law is not going to help exonerate him from the video that incriminated him and led to his conviction, and Carlson’s video charade would not be grounds for appeal or early release or any sort of legal procedure that would shorten or commute his sentence in any way.

But multiple conservative commentators, including Megyn Kelly and Outkick’s Clay Travis, credited Carlson’s video as being “exculpatory” and helping get Chansley out of prison.

The reality is that is extremely common for federal prisoners to both 1) have some time shaved off the end of their sentences for good behavior and 2) to serve the final part of their sentences either in a halfway house or under house arrest.

One notable example is domestic doyenne Martha Stewart, probably the most famous inmate ever of the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia after her 2004 conviction for lying to federal investigators during a securities fraud investigation into a stock sale she made. She served just under five months behind bars, another five months under “home confinement” with electronic monitoring at her residence in Bedford, New York, and two years under supervised release in which she was prohibited from associating with people with criminal records and had to get permission to leave the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Moreover, Chansley’s own attorney William Shipley poured a bucket of cold water on these hot takes in a series of tweets that both criticized the political commentators for misinterpreting the law and facts of the situation, and Chansley’s previous attorney Al Watkins, for his “horrible work” on the case and for not properly advising his client on what to expect.

“Let me make something CLEAR,” wrote Shipley. “The videos released and played on Fox News DID NOT play a role in any ‘early release’ for Jake Chansely.”

The “final 6 months are ALWAYS in a Halfway House by [Bureau of Prisons] police,” Shipley tweeted, so Chansley’s roughly 42-month sentence was always expected to include a “total custodial time” of a maximum 36 months.

“But there are programs in BOP that allow a prisoner to earn credit on his sentence beyond ‘Good Time’ credit,” he continued, and Chansley “took advantage of those opportunities.”

Watkins “never explained to [Chansley] how custodial time calculations work,” Shipley wrote. “Jake was released on exactly the time frame that I predicted to him, and the slight delay was only from getting some paperwork processed internal to BOP to give him credit for a program he completed.”

Shipley also wrote that they had “known the release date for a period of time, but kept it quiet so as to not have a crowd show up at either the BOP facility or the Halfway House.”

Mediaite reached out to Shipley and Fox News for comment, but did not receive a response.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.