Meet the Jan 6 political prisoner who's now running for Congress

Once a lawmaker in the state of West Virginia, Derrick Evans has now done a stint in prison.

His crime? Being at the Capitol on January 6.

Evans served three months in prison after pleading guilty to one count of civil disorder, but his lawmaking career isn’t over yet. Evans is running for a House seat in 2024.

“It was the most patriotic day of my life,” Evans tells Pat Gray after noting that the reaction to January 6 completely ignores the fact that the “Democrats bombed the Capitol in the 80s.”

“There were patriots from all over this country waving flags. There were women and children. There were veterans in wheelchairs, by and large, no pun intended, a mostly peaceful protest,” Evans explains.

Evans recalls being outside the east rotunda doors when they opened up from the inside. That’s when he decided to walk through the doors, before thanking a police officer.

The recent political prisoner caught himself on video telling the police officer “God Bless” and receiving a friendly fist bump from him, inviting Evans into the building.

“It’s all on video so people can watch it,” Evans explains.

“I spend less than 10 minutes inside the public rotunda area reminding people to be peaceful and non-destructive, walked back out the same set of doors I entered and ultimately found myself facing 24 years in prison as the weaponized deep state came to my house, and took me away from my wife and my four young children and threw me in prison,” he recalls.

After January 6, Evans was de-platformed from social media. He had around 70,000 followers on Facebook and had livestreamed the entire event.

“It didn’t take them long to find me because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I thought maybe I would get like a $100 ticket,” he tells Gray.

Evans was arrested two days after January 6.

“The heinous crime, truly, in the eyes of the government,” Evans says, “is being an elected representative who had the courage to go into the middle of the swamp and speak out against the tyranny that we find ourselves living under today.”

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