Pardoned Capitol rioter arrested outside Obama's home with firearms sentenced to time served

WASHINGTON (CN) — A Washington state man and former Jan. 6 defendant was sentenced to time served on Thursday in connection with his arrest outside former President Barack Obama’s home with a van filled with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, two guns and a machete.

Taylor Taranto was found guilty on two counts of carrying a firearm without a license, one count for unlawfully carrying ammunition and one count for creating a hoax after a bench trial before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in May.

Nichols, a Donald Trump appointee, noted that Taranto had spent 22 months in pre-trial detention at the D.C. Jail and that the sentencing guidelines recommended he be sentenced to 27 months in prison at most, thus making a five-month sentence unnecessary.

“Taranto’s conduct was serious, he engaged in dangerous conduct by suggesting his car was rigged with explosives,” Nichols said before handing down the sentence, before acknowledging that he never engaged in violence with the van or its contents, even if that was his intent.

In Taranto’s case — one of the few active criminal cases against a Jan. 6 defendant currently — the Justice Department echoed Trump’s view of the riot, which he has repeatedly described as a “day of love."

In the Justice Department’s initial sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday, Assistant U.S. attorneys Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White began the factual background by describing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as perpetrated by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters.”

They further detail how Taranto returned to Washington state, where he “promoted conspiracy theories about the events of Jan. 6.”

However, the filing was quickly retracted from the court’s public docket and placed under seal, a process that usually requires a motion to seal that must be approved by a judge. A replacement was filed Wednesday that wipes away the reference to Jan. 6, simply starting with Taranto’s June 28 livestream where he talked about outfitting his van with explosives.

The prosecutors, Valdivia and White, were placed on leave on Wednesday and taken off the case. They were then replaced by Assistant U.S. Attorney Travis Wolf and Jonathan Hornok, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office criminal division.

At the start of Thursday’s hearing, Nichols seemed concerned how the Justice Department sealed the initial sentencing memorandum and said that he planned to unseal it unless Wolf filed a motion and provided adequate justification.

While he did not directly reference their removals, Nichols made a point to share how much respect he had for Valdivia and White.

“I thought they did an excellent job,” Nichols said. “If not the best, they were some of best prosecutors I’ve worked with. In my view, Valdivia and White did a truly excellent job.”

When asked for comment after the hearing, Hornok declined to comment but told reporters to reach out later.

Taranto, among the over 1,600 individuals pardoned for their roles in the Capitol riot, drove to the District from Washington state with a van that he claimed was rigged with explosives during a 90-minute livestream.

When he was ordered to pre-trial detention in July 2023, Taranto was just the third Jan. 6 defendant to be detained due to concerns regarding the potential danger he elected officials and the public, in part due to his military training as an Iraq War veteran.

On June 28, 2023, he made several statements on the stream that indicated he planned on blowing up the building at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, leading law enforcement agencies to issue an alert to look out for Taranto’s van.

On June 29, Taranto streamed himself in the Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, claiming he was searching for secret tunnels that would grant him access to the homes of Obama and former White House Senior Adviser John Podesta before parking the van near an area restricted by the Secret Service. He began walking through the wood toward Obama’s home but was subsequently arrested by Secret Service agents.

Metropolitan Police Department and FBI bomb squads were called to the site due to Taranto’s explosive comments and conducted a sweep before searching Taranto’s van.

Taranto spoke briefly before his sentence was handed down and indicated he planned to appeal his sentence to the D.C. Circuit within the coming weeks.

He sought to explain the sort of issues he usually talks about on his livestreams and said he focused on “foundational fraud,” regarding the nation’s founding — causing Nichols to ask whether he’d spoken with his attorneys Carmen Hernandez and Pleasant Brodnax about, to which Taranto replied that they’d “said enough.”

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