A South Carolina man who had warned of a seizure on the U.S. Capitol if the votes don t go right, was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for the Jan. 6 attack, prosecutors said.
George Amos Tenney III, 36, of Anderson, was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty in June to two federal counts, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia said.
Tenney was among thousands of rioters who stormed into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and was the first rioter to open a set of doors to the Rotunda from inside, prosecutors said.
The attack on the U.S. Capitol occurred after a mob of then-President Donald Trump supporters attacked the building while Congress was counting the votes for Trump's defeat.
On February 28, Tenney said in a Facebook message that it was beginning to look like we might siege the capital building and Congress if the votes don't go right, according to court documents.
Federal defenders listed as representing Tenney did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.
His lawyers argued in a Nov. 27 sentencing memorandum that Tenney is deeply remorseful and misled by the rhetoric of politicians and others, and now knows he is wrong. They said that Tenney lost a good job with Sysco and his life has been upended.
He and the others in the Capitol were merely pawns for ill-intentioned politicians and far-right media personalities, his lawyers argued ahead of sentencing.
Prosecutors said that Tenney helped others into the Capitol that day, opened a door for them and held it open, and pushed a police officer aside. At one point he allegedly yelled stand up, patriots! The government argued in its sentencing memo filed Nov. 28 that Tenney played a key role in exacerbating the attack and forced open the Rotunda doors for the first time.
There were forty-eight rioters who got in and the Rotunda doors became a major entry point that day, prosecutors said in the memo. They asked for four years in prison.
Prosecutors called Tenney the original instigator of one of the two largest breaches of the Capitol Building that day. According to the Justice Department, Tenney pleaded guilty in June to interfering with law enforcement officers during a civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding.
After weeks of false claims about the 2020 presidential election, the pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.