Jason Riddle is shown holding a bottle of wine, left, and in the U.S. Capitol building, right, on Jan. 6, 2021. (U.S. Attorney’s Office).
A New Hampshire man who chugged from a bottle of wine he took from a lawmaker’s office during the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 rejected President Donald Trump‘s sweeping pardon of more than 1,500 people for their involvement in the insurrection.
Jason Riddle, 36, had choice words for the newly sworn-in 47th president.
“I don’t need to obsess over a narcissistic bully to feel better about myself,” Riddle told ABC News. “Trump can shove his pardon up his a–.”
“If I was one of the people who crossed the line into assaulting police officers that day, I’d probably believe I can get away with anything I want now,” he added.
Riddle, a failed 2024 Republican Party candidate for a seat in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District, said one good thing came from his crime: his rehabilitation from alcohol addiction.
In an interview with investigators, Riddle admitted he entered the Capitol building and “walked into an office and found an open bottle of wine on or in a refrigerator and poured himself a glass. Riddle then admitted to drinking the wine and then leaving the office after being told to do so by a police officer.”
He then posed for a photo in his red Trump hat, holding a bottle of wine that he had taken from the office.
He described his time there to a news station, saying he poured a glass of wine and “watched it all unfold,” according to court documents. He described others he saw committing crimes, saying, “[t]hose psychopaths going around breaking things and hurting people can rot in hell.”
Riddle was arrested the following month. He pleaded guilty to charges of theft of government property and picketing in a Capitol building and was sentenced to 90 days in jail.
“He was witnessing violence in front of him while he was chugging wine and celebrating,” U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, said when she handed down the sentence. “It is hard to fathom, given Mr. Riddle’s foreign military service and time in the Navy reserves,” that he would “celebrate this attack.”
Riddle joins another Jan. 6 rioter who has publicly rejected Trump’s pardon.
Pam Hemphill, 71, told the New York Times on Wednesday that she was turning down the pardon because it was “an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation.”
“If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6,” she said.
She said her therapist changed her mind by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”
“I lost my critical thinking,” she told the newspaper. “Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult.”
