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WASHINGTON (AP) — Infowars host Owen Shroyer was sentenced on Tuesday to two months behind bars for joining the mob’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, which prosecutors said he “helped create” by spewing violent rhetoric and spreading baseless claims of election fraud to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Shroyer hosts a daily show called “The War Room With Owen Shroyer” for the website operated by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Prosecutors said Shroyer used his online platform — and later a megaphone outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — to amplify lies that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump, who was the Republican incumbent.
Shroyer didn’t enter the Capitol, but he led a march to the building and led rioters in chants near the top of the building’s steps. He’s among only a few people charged in the riot who neither went inside the building nor were accused of engaging in violence or destruction.
He pleaded guilty in June to illegally entering a restricted area — a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum sentence of one year behind bars.
Shroyer didn’t need to set foot inside the Capitol because many of his followers did, prosecutors argued. They said Shroyer spread election disinformation and “thinly veiled calls to violence” on Jan. 6 to Infowars viewers in the weeks leading up to the attack.
“Shroyer helped create January 6,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
Prosecutors had sought four months behind bars for Shroyer, 34, of Austin, Texas.
In December 2019, Shroyer was arrested in Washington after he disrupted a House Judiciary Committee hearing for then-President Trump’s impeachment proceedings. He later agreed to stay away from Capitol grounds, a condition of a deal resolving that case.
In the weeks before the Capitol riot, Shroyer “stoked the flames of a potential disruption of the (Jan. 6) certification vote by streaming disinformation about alleged voter fraud and a stolen election” on his show, prosecutors…
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