Federico Guillermo Klein, a Donald Trump appointee to the State Department, is seen at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 (via FBI court filings).
A former State Department employee appointed by Donald Trump will spend nearly six years behind bars for his role in the violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Federico Klein, 45, was sentenced to 70 months in prison on Friday after being convicted of fighting with police during the Capitol attack. According to prosecutors, Klein was among a group of rioters that overwhelmed police on Capitol grounds before joining the mob at the tunnel entrance of the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol building. He was accused of fighting with police trying to keep the crowd from breaching the building and repeatedly participating in the “heave-ho” effort to push past law enforcement.
At one point, he pushed a stolen police riot shield against the line of cops and used his body weight to press forward. He also used a stolen riot shield as a wedge in an attempt to stop police from closing a door against the crowd. After he was ejected from the tunnel, prosecutors say he remained at the front of the mob for almost an hour, using the stolen riot shield to push against police.
“Your actions on January 6 were shocking and egregious,” U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden said at Friday’s sentencing hearing, according to CNN.
“This is a government of laws, not of men,” the judge also said.
According to NBC News, Klein did not speak on his own behalf at his sentencing, and McFadden, a Trump appointee, noted that the one-time political appointee didn’t show any remorse for his actions.
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Klein was convicted in July of eight federal charges, including six counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, civil disorder, and obstruction of an official proceeding. The verdict came after a bench trial before McFadden, who was the first among federal judges in the District of Columbia overseeing the Jan. 6 cases to acquit an accused rioter. He faced a maximum of 20 years behind bars.
The 70-month sentence is well below the 10 years sought by prosecutors, who argued in court documents that Klein engaged in a “prolonged and violent attack against officers protecting the Capitol on January 6 in order to prevent the peaceful transition of Presidential power to reflect the results of a free and fair election.”
The government also said that Klein violated his obligations as a federal appointee.
“As an employee of the federal government, Klein was endowed with the trust of the American people and to uphold the law,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “He violated that trust on January 6 when he attacked the very country for which he was paid to work. His federal employment also means that Klein was likely motivated by a personal benefit – namely, continued employment as a political appointee – when he attacked the U.S. Capitol.”
Through his lawyer Stanley Woodward, Klein requested a sentence of 40 days in prison, which according to court documents is the exact length of time he spent in pretrial detention before being released.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Klein was described in federal documents as a “Schedule-C political appointee who began working at [the State Department] in 2017 in the office of Brazilian and Southern Cone Affairs.” He was identified to federal investigators by a co-worker, who recalled that Klein stayed on at the State Department until Jan. 19, 2021, shortly before President Joe Biden was inaugurated.
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