WASHINGTON — A federal judge sentenced a Marine Corps veteran to five years in prison and a $200,000 fine Thursday for assaulting police and brandishing a crowbar to encourage the mob at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Ryan Taylor Nichols, of Longview, Texas, pleaded guilty in November to two felony counts of obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting police. Under the terms of the plea, Nichols avoided a more serious charge of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon for spraying a large canister of pepper spray toward officers who were defending the Lower West Terrace Tunnel.
Nichols’ plea agreement originally contemplated a sentencing guidelines range of 78-97 months, or roughly six-and-and-half-to-eight years , in prison. However, in March, the D.C. Circuit ruled two significant enhancements were improperly used in hundreds of Jan. 6 cases, including Nichols’. In a sentencing memo filed Tuesday, prosecutors said that would reduce his guideline range to 51-63 months. Despite that, prosecutors said, Nichols’ conduct was so outrageous it warranted an upward variance to 83 months, or just under seven years, in prison. Nichols' attorneys asked for a time-served sentence of approximately 28 months.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth sentenced Nichols to 63 months in prison, the top of the guidelines range, and a fine of $200,000 — the largest fine in any Jan. 6 case to date. Lamberth said Nichols had failed to provide financial information during the presentencing investigation and hadn't shown he couldn't afford to pay a fine. Nichols also raised more than $230,000 in donations from a GiveSendGo page in which he and his wife described him as a "Patriot Prisoner."
Lamberth, who was nominated to the federal bench by former President Ronald Reagan, said he had doubts about Nichols' late-in-the-game expressions of remorse based on comments made throughout the pendency of his case. He also said Nichols' conduct on Jan. 6 wasn't comparable to other defendants who may only have gotten caught up in the moment.
"Arriving at the protest wearing a ballistic plate carrier and armed with a crowbar," Lamberth said, "this is not a case where it's just a political protest gone awry."
In their memo, prosecutors described how Nichols, upset by former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, began preparing and calling – “repeatedly and voraciously” – for violence in the weeks before Jan. 6. On Christmas Eve 2020, Nichols posted, “It’ll be fixed January 6th, or the Patriots will fix it ourselves. When the Patriots move to fix it, we’re bringing the wrath of God, and there’s not a F***ING thing you can do to stop it.”
Nichols then posted an image of a bullet with the caption, “By Bullet or Ballot, Restoration of the Republic is Coming!”
Nichols also recruited a fellow Marine Corps veteran, his co-defendant Alex Harkrider, to come to come to D.C. with him on Jan. 6 – describing the event as “front seat tickets to the REAL revolution.” Nichols also discussed building a gun container in his truck which he used to transport firearms to the Greater Washington D.C. area as well as the need for body armor. On Jan. 6, Nichols in fact wore a ballistic plate in a plate carrier as he faced off with and ultimately assaulted police.
Once in D.C., Nichols can be heard on numerous videos – including several he recorded himself – calling for violence beginning on Jan. 5 and continuing even after he’d returned to his hotel room on the evening of Jan. 6.
In a video recorded on the evening before the riot, Nichols can be heard berating police and warning of violence the following day, yelling at one point, “Heads will f***ing roll! We will not be told ‘no’ any longer!”
On the day of the riot, prosecutors said Nichols “bayed for the blood” of politicians, including then-Vice President Mike Pence. In a video he recorded himself, Nichols can be seen walking to the Capitol from the Ellipse alongside Harkrider and hundreds of others while he says, “I’m hearing reports that Pence caved. If Pence caved, I’m telling you, we’re going to drag motherf***ers through the streets. You f***ing politicians are going to get drug through the streets.”
At the Capitol, Nichols can be seen in multiple videos inciting the crowd. In one, he brandishes a crowbar while yelling, “This is our country!” In another, Nichols can be seen standing on a ledge near a shattered window and yelling, “If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon!” Nichols can also be seen using a large canister of pepper spray to assault police at the Lower West Terrace Tunnel.
Once he returned to his hotel room on the evening of Jan. 6, Nichols continued recording.
“So if you want to know where Ryan Nichols stands, Ryan Nichols stands for violence,” he said in one. “Ryan Nichols is done allowing his country to be stolen. And I understand that the first Revolutionary War, folks, it was violent. We had to be violent and take our country back. Well guess what? The second Revolutionary War, right now, the American Revolutionary War that’s going on right now, it started today on a Wednesday. It’s going to be violent.”
Later in the same video, Nichols picked up his crowbar and said, “So, yes, today, Ryan Nichols… Ryan Nichols grabbed his f***ing weapon and he stormed the Capitol and fought for freedom."
Even after Jan. 6, prosecutors said Nichols continued to discuss “recruiting more patriots” and suggested it was time to “get better organized and regroup for the 20th” – the day of the presidential inauguration.
“As a Marine, Ryan Nichols swore an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Douglas Brasher, Sarah Rocha and Sean McCauley wrote in their memo. “But on January 6, he broke his oath and became the domestic enemy against our constitutional order.”
In the defense’s sentencing memo, Nichol’s attorney, Joseph McBride, contested the Justice Department’s calculation of Nichols’ guideline range and, regardless, asked for a time-served sentence to account for the approximately 28 months Nichols has already spent in detention since his arrest. Nichols was ordered held without bond following his arrest in January 2021 but was temporarily released to house arrest under extreme restrictions in November 2022 to assist with trial preparations. He was ordered back into custody as a condition of his plea agreement in November 2023.
Prior to Nichols’ guilty plea in November, Nichols’ attorneys, McBride and Bradford Geyer, a former assistant U.S. attorney who joined the case last June, had argued repeatedly in court filings that Nichols was the victim of a government plot orchestrated by “provocateurs” and an unidentified man on a Zello chat, who they described as a possible “federal asset.”
Their claims of entrapment met with little success in court, however. As early as December 2021, U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan wrote in an order denying Nichols a bond review that McBride, who previously appeared in a Tucker Carlson documentary which promoted the unsubstantiated claim that federal agents incited the riot to entrap supporters of former President Donald Trump, had conceded on the record that his allegations of entrapment “lack any factual support.” And in an October 2023 opinion denying what he described as a “sweeping” set of discovery demands, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said McBride and Nichol’s claims relied on “mere speculation.”
“The basic idea is that the crisis at the Capitol was an elaborate setup by the United States government designed to ensnare peaceful Trump supporters such as Mr. Nichols,” Lamberth, who was nominated to the federal bench by former President Ronald Reagan, wrote. “On this view, shadowy teams of plainclothes government agents orchestrated the attack, leaving a far larger number of innocent Americans to take the fall. Mr. Nichols advances this theory at every turn.”
At his plea hearing last year, Lamberth confronted Nichols directly about whether he still maintained any claims of entrapment on Jan. 6.
"You are in fact guilty and have no self-defense you wish to assert?" Lamberth asked.
"Yes, your honor," Nichols said.
In his sentencing memo filed this week. McBride made no reference to his previous claims of entrapment. Instead, he described Nichols’ post-military work with a search-and-rescue non-profit he founded, Rescue the World, and said his service-related PTSD accounted for the “aberration” that was his behavior on Jan. 6.
“Ryan Nichols does not stand for violence,” McBride wrote. “The entire history of his life is one of service to others. Ryan is mortified by the videos and images depicting his outlandish January 6 behavior.”
McBride also decried what he described as a “pattern of deliberate indifference” to Nichols’ medical needs at the D.C. Jail. Lamberth has repeatedly spoken out about his concerns about conditions at the jail – including as recently as last week during the sentencing hearing for another Jan. 6 defendant, John Earle Sullivan – and in October 2021 held two D.C. Department of Corrections officials in contempt over what he described as “inexcusable” delays in getting medical care for Jan. 6 defendant and Proud Boy Christopher Worrell. Lamberth sentenced to Sullivan to 6 years in prison last week and Worrell to 10 years in prison in January.
As part of his sentencing materials, McBride also submitted a summary of Nichols’ June 2021 interview with the FBI in which he said he’d been influenced to come to D.C. by statements from Trump, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood and former Trump national security advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The 28-page defense sentencing memo did not include any mention of Trump.
Nichols did not mention Trump during a statement to the judge in court Thursday, either, but did apologize to members of Congress, police officers and their families for his actions. He said he was "deeply ashamed" of what he'd done and feared he would never again but able to return to the search-and-rescue work he once loved. Nichols also promised that, unlike some other Jan. 6 defendants Lamberth has sentenced, his expressions of remorse were real.
"Should I ever go back on my word, I would recommend you throw the book at me and bury me under the jail," Nichols said.
Nichols requested placement at the low-security federal correctional facility in Seagoville, Texas. He will receive credit for approximately 28 months already spent in detention.
Nichols' co-defendant, Harkrider, was convicted in January of multiple felony counts for carrying a tomahawk to the Capitol and was set to be sentenced on May 9.