Rioter caught in attack on woman on dating app Bumble sentenced to prison on Jan. 6

WASHINGTON — A Donald Trump supporter who attacked law enforcement officers with bear spray and a metal whip — and was arrested thanks to a woman's sting operation on the app of Bumble dating — was sentenced Wednesday to just over six years in prison.

Andrew Taake was arrested in 2021 and pleaded guilty in December to assaulting police officers with a deadly or dangerous weapon. Having already been convicted of a crime — and having been out on bail for soliciting a minor at the time of the Capitol attack — Taake was one of a handful of Jan. 6 defendants who were being held pretrial.

Prosecutors sought a 6.5-year federal prison sentence for Taake. A court filing also said prosecutors would highlight a disciplinary investigation accusing Taake “of fighting with another inmate on December 14, 2023” at the Washington prison where Taake is being held.

Taake was sentenced Wednesday to 74 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee who questioned the use of obstruction of an official proceeding in cases from Jan. 6, an issue that is now before the Supreme Court.

Nichols said Taake's actions were “as serious as those of any other Jan. 6 defendant I have convicted” and that “others must be deterred” from similar behavior in the future. Officers spraying bears and carrying a metal whip, Nichols said, “is the furthest thing from the expression of the First Amendment.”

Taake was scheduled to be sentenced in April, but complications arose after Nichols suggested in court that he thought a harsher sentence should apply, even though the terms of the plea agreement prevent the government from explicitly advocate for this measure.

Nichols relied on a statement from one of the officers Taake hit with bear spray. The officer wrote in a victim impact statement that he was “immediately”, but temporarily, “blind” after being hit and that it was the worst pain he had ever felt in his life, saying it was “like experiencing death”.

Federal prosecutors argued in their sentencing memo that Taake “continually shifted blame for his criminal actions on January 6 to victim officers, members of Congress and the media” in the three years since his arrest. .

“His persistent narrative is that he and other “patriots” were heroes and that he is an unjustly detained victim of “selective persecution.” He has not shown the slightest ounce of remorse for his actions, nor accepted responsibility, going so far as to deny responsibility even after pleading guilty,” they wrote. “And based on information gathered during his While in pre-trial detention, he began to use violence against other inmates to relieve his frustrations over his self-inflicted predicament.”

In court Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Madison Mumma said Taake committed at least six assaults on Jan. 6, including four using bear spray. Taake, she said, believed Trump's election defeat was the “beginning of the end for the United States” and promised to take the fight “directly to the swamp creatures.”

Taake was arrested following a sting operation launched by a young professional working in the nation's capital on dating app Bumble after the Jan. 6 attack.

The woman, referred to as “Witness 1” in an FBI affidavit, previously recalled how a bit of “comically minimal ego stroking” on her part led Taake and other Jan. 6 participants to divulge information about their activities during this attack.

“I felt a little bit of 'civic duty,' I guess, but truth be told, I was mostly angry and thinking, 'F— these guys,'” said the woman, who spoke anonymously out of fear. online retaliation. These men wanted to “regurgitate” lies they heard from prominent Republicans about the 2020 presidential election, she said.

The woman's strategy, she recalled, was to say, “Wow, crazy, tell me more,” over and over until she had enough to send to the FBI.

“It certainly didn’t take a lot of pressure to get them to start talking about it.” Basically, I'm like, “Wow, that's so cool, so what?” What else?' That was about all it took,” she said. “A friend of mine said to me, 'You basically got all these confessions just by saying, 'Haha! So what ?'”

After Taake's sentencing Wednesday, the woman told NBC News that she thought the sentence was “strong,” especially from Nichols, and that she was happy to see Taake held accountable.

“I'm glad at least one of the guys I met on Bumble is getting jail time,” she wrote in a text message. “I'm glad I was able to help the online detectives do all this picture matching work, but mostly I'm just glad it's done now and I can stop thinking about this man! Glad to hang up my Witness 1 hat after all that.”

Taake, dressed in prison orange, spoke before the sentence was imposed, saying he was “not a violent, threatening monster” and he apologized to the victim officer who was in court.

“I never tried to say I was innocent,” Taake said. “I messed up. I did things I shouldn't have done.

Taake said he was “seeing red” when he committed the assaults and “got caught up in the moment”.

More than 1,400 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, and prosecutors have won convictions against more than 1,000 defendants. About 500 defendants were sentenced to periods of incarceration ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in federal prison.