A local North Texas man has pleaded guilty to charges related to his actions during the events on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.
Daniel Ray Caldwell, a resident of The Colony, officially admitted wrongdoing recently after originally entering a not guilty plea in April 2021.
“I am pleading guilty because I am in fact guilty of the offense(s) identified,” Caldwell affirmed in the plea agreement.
The statement of offenses, which Caldwell also confirmed to be a true and accurate depiction, explained that “A line of officers was formed in front of Daniel Ray Caldwell and he stepped forward and sprayed the line of officers with chemical irritant spray.”
Court documents describe how Caldwell explained what happened in a video recording later that day. He claimed that police were “spraying mace towards him,” and he responded by threatening to spray them back with the chemical irritant.
Caldwell then claimed in the video that he proceeded to spray “around 15 officers” who were confronting the crowd.
Altogether, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
Concerns remain, however, over the potential political motivation of the prosecutions and the treatment of the defendants by the government.
For example, as previously reported by The Dallas Express, one protester named Ray Epps was recorded the day before urging the crowd to breach the Capitol the next day, saying, “I’m going to put it out there, I may go to jail for this … tomorrow … we need to go into the Capitol!”
The crowd responded to the suggestion by booing and calling Epps an undercover agent, chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed!”
Epps has routinely denied being an informant or agent for any branch of the federal government, but when Senator Ted Cruz asked the FBI’s Assistant Director for National Security Jill Sandborn about Epps and whether or not any federal informants participated or encouraged the protests, she responded, “I cannot answer that.”
Epps was never arrested or charged despite his documented actions encouraging the protests and had his name removed from the FBI wanted.
