The Trump administration has given a man convicted in the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol a job in the Pentagon’s policy office, according to officials and internal records.
“Mr. Elias Irizarry is a qualified, patriotic young professional, and we are proud to have him as a political appointee,” acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez said in a social media post this week.
Irizarry, whose appointment was first reported by The Washington Post, was convicted in 2023 of a misdemeanor trespassing charge after a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol. He showed contrition when he was sentenced to two weeks behind bars in 2023, court documents show.
Internal Pentagon records described to The Associated Press show that Irizarry has been assigned to the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy, which is tasked with providing national security advice and support on military strategy and planning to the defense secretary.
It was not clear from Valdez’s statement how long Irizarry had been in the post, and the Pentagon declined to provide more information.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on social media: “This administration thinks a convicted Jan. 6 rioter should be doing that kind of work?????”
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Irizarry was a 19-year-old freshman at the Citadel military college in South Carolina and a Civilian Air Patrol cadet when he joined the attack on the Capitol, court documents show. He climbed through a broken window, entered a conference room, carried a metal pole through the Capitol and took photos before leaving the building, the records say.
“Because of his training, Irizarry was undoubtedly aware of the safety threat posed by a mass of angry rioters to the Congressional members and staff inside the building,” prosecutors said in a court filing. Irizarry pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour trespassing charge in October 2022. In March 2023, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan sentenced Irizarry to 14 days behind bars.
Before learning his sentence, Irizarry told the judge that he brought “great shame upon myself, my family and even my country,” according to a transcript.
“The idea of Americans being willing to fight other Americans and tear down the very institutions that millions of other Americans sacrificed and built and protect is horrible. It is something I have to live with being a part of,” he said. Irizarry is not the only convicted participant of the January 6 riot to find a job within the Trump administration.
Jared Wise, a former FBI agent charged with joining the crowd, was hired at the Justice Department last year to serve as an adviser to the department’s pardon attorney.
Wise was on trial in Washington when Trump returned to the White House in January and immediately pardoned, commuted prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of cases for all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack. The case against Wise was dismissed before the jury reached a verdict.
He announced on social media in April that he had resigned from the department, saying: “I returned to Washington to fully expose the abuses by the FBI and DOJ against J6 defendants, but it became clear that this will only happen from outside of government. So I left and will do so.”
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