Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs The photograph was an immediate symbol of Jan. 6, 2021: a man in bluejeans and a thick plaid overshirt reclining in the chambers of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with a smile on his face and his boot resting atop a black spiral notebook on a corner of a desk.The smirk and the lug-soled boot belonged to Richard Barnett, a 64-year-old former window salesman from Gravette, Ark., who goes by Bigo. He used his time in the office to pocket an envelope with the speaker’s letterhead and scrawl a crude note to Pelosi herself. But it was the photo of him that really lasted, maybe because of the way it mixed vandalism with the threat of violence — he had a stun device on him — and encapsulated the rioters’ mockery of the country’s democratic institutions.Washington looked nothing like that on Monday, as lawmakers in a quiet and snow-covered Capitol certified President-elect Donald Trump’s November victory. The Bigos of the world have no complaints about this election. But the tale of his last four years — in which he was convicted and sentenced and seemingly tried to trade on his fame — is just as revealing as that first picture. He spent today in a low-security federal prison in Seagoville, Texas, a place where inmates aren’t allowed to have internet access but from which he manages to transmit his thoughts on social media all the same. These days, he’s a hero on the right whose fortunes may well be tied to those of a president-elect who has promised to pardon people like him.What happens when you put your boot on a desk in the speaker’s office?“For better or worse you have become one of the faces of Jan. 6,” Judge Christopher Cooper told him last year, “and I think you enjoy it.”‘Bigo was here’Over the past four years, almost 1,600 people have been prosecuted in connection with the riot at the Capitol, including Trump himself, and hundreds of those convicted have already returned to their previous lives. My colleague Alan Feuer, who covers federal law enforcement, published a series of fascinating interviews with eight of them today.I wanted to look at the story of someone who’s still inside, whose conviction stands as a cause on the right yet remains proof of the lawlessness that Trump and his supporters have now tried to wash away.Lawyers for Barnett did not answer my questions about whether or not Barnett is seeking a pardon from Trump (although one of them did send me a link to a fund-raising website Barnett is using).Barnett himself declined my request to interview him.According to prosecutors, body camera footage and his own words, Barnett entered Pelosi’s office suite with a flagpole and a stun device concealed in a walking stick. He reclined at a desk, took an envelope bearing her signature addressed to former Representative Billy Long — now Trump’s pick to run the I.R.S. — and left a note that read, “Hey Nancy, Bigo was here, you biotch.” When an officer directed him out of the office, he complied, but he urged her to “be a patriot,” and said, “Don’t be on the wrong side, you might get hurt.”In video footage captured on Jan. 6 by Ms. Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra, a documentary filmmaker, Ms. Pelosi said at one point, “They’re obviously ransacking our offices and all the rest of that; that’s nothing. The concern we have is about personal safety — it just transcends everything.”Barnett left the building after he was hit with chemical spray. Outside on the Capitol grounds, he told a New York Times reporter what he’d done — although he insisted he’d left a quarter to pay for the envelope, and that he’d been pushed into the speaker’s office by the crowd.“I’ll probably be telling them this is what happened all the way to the D.C. jail,” he said that day.He was right.The crazy-uncle defenseAfter Barnett was charged with eight counts, he seemed to grow deeply frustrated with the system, at one point throwing a tantrum during a virtual court hearing.“They’re dragging this out!” he yelled from jail during a hearing that March. “They’re letting everybody else out!”Later, it was prosecutors who were irked. They said in court filings that he had appeared on Russian state television, sold autographed photographs of himself in the speaker’s suite — practically presaging the flood of merchandise related to Trump’s 2024 felony conviction — and considered having his note to Pelosi copyrighted.Barnett pleaded not guilty. At his trial in January 2023, his lawyer tried a novel defense.“He’s not a domestic terrorist,” said Joseph McBride, “but he is everyone’s crazy redneck uncle from out of town.”Barnett himself took the stand and said, using an expletive, that he was guilty of being an “idiot” but not of breaking the law.The jury convicted him on all counts after two hours of deliberation.“Barnett recognizes no authority but himself and is willing to do ‘whatever it takes’ to get what he wants, even if it requires harming others, stealing or breaking the law,” prosecutors wrote in a memo before Judge Cooper sentenced him to more than four years.Biding his timeLike Trump, Barnett has had some good news this year. A Supreme Court ruling in June making it harder to charge Jan. 6 defendants with obstructing an official proceeding — a charge Barnett was convicted of — could help him appeal that charge, although a judge denied his request to be released early from prison pending that appeal.And then, of course, there was the election of Trump, which Barnett said on X he had learned about on a “cheap static prison radio.”“Congratulations Donald, Congratulations America, Congratulations to all my fellow J6’ers,” he said in a post on a verified account that bears his name.He appears to maintain an active presence on X, where he has weighed in to express his disgust at the pardon of Hunter Biden and the spending deal that staved off a government shutdown. He also used X to announce in 2022 that he was going to grow a goatee “until all my fellow #J6political prisoners are free.” (I’m told it has gotten quite long.)The prison does not allow inmates to post on X, but a person familiar with its inner workings told me the prison believes Barnett’s missives are being posted for him by someone on the outside.
