Julian Khater of Pennsylvania and George Tanios of West Virginia are being held without bail by the federal government in a District of Columbia Department of Corrections (DOC) restrictive housing facility.
“Restrictive housing” is another way of saying “solitary confinement.” Khater and Tanios are restricted to their cells for all but one hour of each day, which is their only opportunity for physical exercise, talking with other inmates, or conferring with their attorneys.
Spokesmen for both the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and DOC didn’t respond to multiple requests from The Epoch Times to interview Khater and Tanios, or to answer questions about their cases.
Attorneys for Khater and Tanios declined to comment on the case. Their clients are charged with multiple felonies in connection with their participation in the Jan. 6 protests and breach of the U.S. Capitol.
Among the charges are “assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon, civil disorder, conspiracy to injure an officer, obstructing or impeding an official proceeding, physical violence while on restricted grounds and resulting in significant bodily injury, violent entry and disorderly conduct, an act of physical violence on Capitol grounds, and aiding and abetting.”
“During the investigation, it is alleged that law enforcement discovered video that depicted Khater asking Tanios to ‘give me that bear [expletive].’ Tanios replied, ‘Hold on, hold on, not yet, not yet ... it’s still early.’ Khater then retrieved a canister from Tanios’s backpack and walked through the crowd to within a few steps of the police perimeter,” the announcement reads.
“The video shows Khater with his right arm up high in the air, appearing to be holding a canister in his right hand and aiming it at the officers’ direction while moving his right arm from side to side.
“The complaint affidavit states that Officers [U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian] Sicknick, [C.] Edwards, and [Metropolitan Police Department Officer D.] Chapman, who were all standing within a few feet of Khater, each reacted to being sprayed in the face. The officers retreated, bringing their hands to their faces and rushing to find water to wash out their eyes.”
The Washington Post reported, referring to Khater and Tanios, that the ruling “will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death. Two men are accused of assaulting Sicknick by spraying a powerful chemical irritant at him during the siege, but prosecutors have not tied that exposure to Sicknick’s death.”
The two men are among the more than 400 arrested to date by federal authorities in connection with Jan. 6. Most of those arrested were released, pending their trials. But Khater and Tanios are still in custody.
Their plight has drawn public expressions of concern from two of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was a 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contender.
A Warren spokesman told The Epoch Times the senator had no additional comment on the issue or the status of Khater and Tanios in confinement.
Carvajal responded by calling solitary “our jail within the jail,” and “it should be a last resort, but there are people because of circumstances, or behavior, violence, things like that, there’s going to be a need for it.”
Attorneys for Khater and Tanios recently filed pleas with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for their release, but no decision has been rendered. Tanios’s attorneys were unable to complete their presentation.
Both pleas denied the government’s charges, claimed the two men are no threat of physical violence or failure to appear for their trials, and pointed to claimed weaknesses in the government’s case.
The Khater plea also noted that “many defendants charged with violent and/or aggressive behavior on Jan. 6 have been released, pending trial.”
The Khater plea also pointed to problems with the government’s case, including that Khater “appearing” to hold the bear spray canister is “less than definitive” evidence that he wielded the spray as a weapon.
In addition, the plea noted that “proof that he took aim at officers is, at best, equivocal, given the Government’s claim that he stood as much as ‘eight feet away from the officers’ and did not spray directly at them but only ‘in the officers’ direction.’”
The plea further argued that the fact that, according to the government, Khater was “moving his right arm from side to side,” undercutting the claim that he aimed at Sicknick or other officers.
