Trial for Jan 6er Sean McHugh starts today.
He has been waiting for 696 days in the DC gulag for this moment.
For Jan 6 defendants who have refused to accept prosecutors outrageous fantasies and taken their cases to trial, the consequences have been severe. Near-unanimously guilty verdicts have landed some of the longest sentences, more than double those of plea agreements with half a dozen more felony convictions to their records.
Sean McHugh is one such Jan 6er, who was attending a protest with his mother that was peaceful until she was attacked by multiple dangerous munitions before he could get her to safety.
What McHugh and his mother witnessed on the West Terrace plaza can be described as nothing short of horrific.
And after two years of quietly waiting and watching the lies and smears, McHugh’s mother wants the truth of what happened to her son to be released to the public instead of hushed up in a courtroom.
Read her firsthand account of a lawful demonstration that turned into a harrowing nightmare.
A verdict is expected later today.
Had I not been there at the Capitol on Jan. 6 from the onset of the deadly attack, I may not have believed somebody telling me that unarmed and peaceful protesters had been violently attacked for NO REASON by the USCP and the MPD officers. I would not have fathomed the truth to be that, by days end, the USCP and MPD officers had killed four people and seriously injured hundreds more.
However, I was there. I know what I witnessed with my own eyes, and SADLY it is the very disturbing truth; it is not something I will ever forget. On January 6th, 2021 my son, my son’s friend and I had attended President Trump’s rally at the Ellipse Park. There were people there who had come from every part of the country. It was an amazing crowd, and there were so many people. Very friendly, diverse, and mellow people who all had two things in common; the love we shared for our country, and the love we shared for President Trump because of everything he had done for our country! My son had a megaphone with him and because of this a man had approached him and asked him if he would announce to people that we would be going to the Capitol for a peaceful protest ‘immediately after Trump’s speech.’ My son agreed. It had been decided shortly after this man’s request that the three of us would be going to the Capitol as well.
** Sean McHugh had the misfortune of encountering Ray Epps on that fateful day. Read his full account here.
It was very cold that day, and before Trump had finished his speech, I left to retrieve my jacket from the hotel before going to the Capitol, telling my son that I would just meet back up with him and his friend at the Capitol after I got my jacket. The hotel was more than a mile, so I hurried back to the hotel, grabbed my jacket, a beverage, and headed for the Capitol to meet up with my son and participate in my first ever protest.
I had to walk down New Jersey Ave NW and cross over Constitution Blvd NW and I would be at the West side of the Capitol Building and only needed to walk across the lawn to the concrete stairs leading up to the plaza on the outside of the building where my son and his friend should be. Still on New Jersey Ave, before I even got to the lawn of the Capitol, I could see a very large group of people, much larger group than I had expected would go to the Capitol after the rally.
I started across the lawn and I couldn’t help but notice there were random clouds of smoke wafting through the air. As I got closer, I started to smell a chemical/smoke type of odor. It was almost like the odor you smell when the large fireworks are being fired off.
Because I had never been to any kind of protest before, I really didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what it would be like. What I walked into was nothing short of horrific.
Still walking across the lawn, I headed straight to the bottom of a paved set of stairs. As I approached, I saw a man standing at the landing above who had just been shot in his face by one of those rubber bullets and there was blood everywhere. I saw him put his hands to his face and fall to his knees, with blood squirting from his face. I instantly started shouting my son’s name over and over as loud as I could because now I could see that there were bullets being fired into the crowd flying by. I had just arrived, but I was already scared to death. I had to find my son.
** McHugh’s mother is describing the assault on Joshua Black, which left a rubber bullet lodged in his face and a large pool of blood on the plaza steps. Video of the graphic scene is here.
Mini explosions were going off everywhere because of all the flash bangs being fired into the crowd. Whatever they were firing made it hard to breathe. Sure, I hadn’t really known what to expect but I inherently knew that it wasn’t something like this. Something bad was happening; something was not right.
I observed the hellish scene all around me. I noticed someone lying on the ground near the grass line to my right. There were a handful of protesters standing around the person; they were all yelling at the police to help them, they were yelling for anybody to help. Smoke was wafting in the air all around me. People were shielding their heads with their arms, pulling their hoodies up over their heads if they were wearing them, and ducking away in different directions. They were shielding themselves from the incoming rubber bullets and flash bangs being fired by the police. We were all getting nailed, and if you were up toward the front, which I was, you were trying to catch your breath because the police were spraying something that made it really hard to breathe. The bullets just kept flying into the crowd one after the other and always making contact with somebody’s face or body. The crowd was frenzied.
It seemed like the frontline of war zone, only there had been just one side firing on the other side. The other side that was being fired on was the protesters who didn’t have any weapons to fire back on what was clearly the enemy. All of the protesters had been UNARMED, but for some reason were under heavy attack.
Watch one example of an MPD officer’s bodycam footage which was among McHugh’s discovery showing a police officer shove a woman from behind (in purple puffer jacket) face-first into concrete as she was calmly walking:
I could see that there were several police officers pushing this barricade across the plaza toward the top of the stairs, obviously to form a wall around the perimeter of the Capitol. As they came close to the area near the top of the stairs they were plowing down anybody who is standing in their path. The thick crowd of protesters had been moving back and down the stairs on their own, but if you had not been looking forward (because maybe you had been shielding your face or something) and had not moved down the stairs and out of their path, you were going to be knocked down to the ground HARD.
I was panicking now and shouting my son’s full name. I saw him waving his arms trying to get my attention. He wasn’t that far away from me. I was standing on the first stair on the left side of the paved stairs, and he was near the top of the same stairs on the right. He motioned for me to stay where I was, that he would come to me.
My son had walked just a few feet ahead of me, scolding the cops behind the barricade about what they were doing and asking them why they were attacking the protesters like this, ‘Is this how you treat unarmed innocent American patriots?’ Right at that very moment, I saw a MPD officer, a real tall man, grab this female protester by her coat and slam her into the barricade; she was only half the size of this police officer! HER FACE, HER BODY and THE BARRICADE all violently slam into the pavement.
I noticed another protester who obviously hadn’t got out of the way of the police and their barricade because he was laying kind of on his side on the pavement at the top of the stairs and he had his foot stuck in between one of the gaps in the barricade. His foot or his ankle was going to be crushed once the police pushed each section of the barricade flush with each other and that was going to happen in just a matter of seconds.
I moved further up the steps to grab the protester with the stuck foot and I tried to pull him up and away from the barricade but his foot was wedged in pretty good. He was trying to get himself up this whole time but he couldn’t because the police wouldn’t stop pushing on the barricade and it was keeping him stuck. I began pleading with the officers to please stop for a moment while I helped this individual get his foot free; NOPE. It seemed like they started pushing the barricade harder, and now I am screaming, “Stop! Please, please, stop! You are going to break his ankle if you don’t stop pushing!” That is when I was blasted in my face, basically from point blank range, by a powerful stream of what I can only guess was some kind of pepper spray because of how it burned my skin and momentarily blinded me. I was shocked! I had done nothing to deserve being sprayed in the face like that; it was brutal.
Watch a video of the exact West Plaza scene Sean McHugh and his mother tragically found themselves in:
All I wanted to do was get my son and get out of there.It had only been maybe 5 minutes, if that, since I had walked into this totally surreal scene. My face was burning. I was still trying to help this protester get his foot unstuck, panicking. I kept thinking, “We just need to get out of here fast, I need to get my son and get the heck out of here!”
I had just barely composed myself after being sprayed in the face, and was still trying to help the stuck foot guy, when my son grabbed my arm, swung me around and away from the barricade and shielded me with his body. An officer was just a second away from spraying me in the face again, but now he was saturating my son’s back with that burning spray instead. I asked him what the heck was going on, “Why are the police throwing flash bangs and shooting rubber bullets at everybody, this isn’t normal, right?”
My son, having only been there just a few minutes longer than me, had already been sprayed with the high-powered streaming burning and blinding spray a couple of times and he was a little bit pissed-off I guess you could say. “No, this isn’t normal,” he shouted back. “They’re firing on the whole crowd for no reason. They have no reason to be firing on us, none whatsoever.” He was mad and I understood that, but still I just wanted to get the heck out of that nightmare and I told him that. If he hadn’t have used his body to shield me, I would have been sprayed at pointblank range for a second time. My son protected me from injury and we had to get out of there before we got hurt worse.
As we tried to orient ourselves out of the crowd, I was almost hit in the head with a huge metal sign that a group of protesters were carrying above their heads through the crowd. When I swerved away to avoid the metal frame hitting my face, I fell down on the stairs. My son was instantly there to help me up and he gave the sign a good shove in the other direction away from us.
Right then, I look up toward the Capitol building and I notice that there are police officers perched up in the balcony and a few perched on the façade; this must be where all the bullets were coming from, these officers were situated like snipers!
I was suddenly overwhelmed with a different frightful sense of reality; different from the reality I had been perceiving throughout this bizarre and surreal event unfolding at the Capitol. It was almost as if the ‘reality’ of what was going on had just sunk in and it hit me like a freight train.
I don’t know how much time had gone by before my son had managed to get sprayed in his face a few more times for doing nothing but standing to close to the unhinged officers. His eyes were swollen, bloodshot and glossed over. There were tears running down his face, drool coming out of his mouth and he was staggering. He was really a mess. It was time to go and it wasn’t a minute too soon. The police were blasting massive streams of that burning spray and it was showering every protester who was standing within 15 feet of the barricades; of course that included both my son and I as well.
. @DCPoliceDept Bagshaw 🎥
Bagshaw tells officers to lift up Trump sign, not push back
He proceeds to shower dozens w pepper spray, including near Ray Epps
Even protesters who had nothing to do with sign or bike racks get their faces shot full of pepper spray at point blank pic.twitter.com/EBC9Qcqp5l
— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) March 26, 2023
As I walked away from the Capitol that afternoon I was so confused by what I had just witnessed. I really didn’t know what to think or make of the whole thing, but I felt really frightened and really sad; I felt like I had been abandoned my country that I loved.
Still walking with my son back to the safety of our hotel it occurred to me that my son’s friend had not been with us at all while we were at the Capitol. I couldn’t believe that we had just left him there alone; I couldn’t believe I had never asked my son where he was.I was back in panic mode and yelling to my son that we have to go back and find his friend. As I’m running back toward the Capitol, my son is shouting at me, “Mom, mom, mom wait, just stop.” My son was shouting, “He is not there mom, he got hit with a flash bang right when we got there. It cracked his tooth and he stopped, he didn’t want to go any further; he said he was going to go back to the hotel.” I was speechless.
The protesters had done nothing that day to warrant such a violent and deadly attack waged on them from the USCP and the MPD officers.By 4:00 pm that afternoon there were four (4) protesters who had been killed at the hands of the police and hundreds more who had sustained serious to severe injuries.
To this day there hasn’t been a single officer held responsible for these deaths or bodily injuries.Instead, our government has decided to launch some fictitious ‘domestic terrorism’ crusade against the protesters who had been there that day and they concentrated their efforts on the protesters who had gone into the Capitol building even though over half of the protesters had been let into the building by the police.
Now after over a thousand plus arrests already made by the FBI from warrants issued by the DOJ, these corrupt parasites are looking to make possibly another thousand arrests.They are handing out prison sentences to innocent people after detaining these people in jail for the past two years without any due process.My son happens to be one of those people and they are trying to give him upwards of 20 years for crimes that they committed against innocent people, not the other way around.
These past two years have not been easy. Somedays I feel like I just have to accept defeat because nobody wants to come to the ring and fight for these prisoners lives. There hasn’t been anybody stepping up to fight against the injustices that are taking place and have taken our loved ones from us. A battle against the government is a big fight indeed; still, there are people out there that can help, I know there are! Our government’s malicious use of power is the reason that my son and so many others are being held as political prisoners unjustly, and it is the ultimate act of betrayal.
I am not the one who is locked up but it feels like I am just the same. I would do anything to be able to trade places with my son. He hasn’t even lived 37 years yet, but I have lived many. He deserves to live his life and be happy and take in all of the brilliance and beauty this life has to offer.
Our government has been using its own citizens as ‘sacrificial lambs’ at every turn to advance the self-serving agendas of a few, while destroying the lives and causing the deaths of many.I think at this point enough of us have been exposed firsthand to this profoundly twisted reality and know that it has to end.
I have not been able to see my son in almost two years and his trial is finally here.It tears me apart to know that just like this manufactured January 6th fiction is a sham, so are all the trials – just shams.And after you pay a defense attorney $50 large, you would think the attorney would do something or make some above-average attempt to mount a half decent defense for their client, but oh no. Even the defense attorneys for the most part have all been SHAMS.
We are kindly asking for your support to help us forge forward with our fight to reveal the truth about JANUARY 6th, 2021 and unmask the individuals responsible for the crimes perpetrated on the citizens of the United States of America on that fateful day.
Would you have tried to protect your mother from a pointblank assault under color of authority?
Would you have been frantic the sight of bloodied faces of those who had been singing and praying with you just moments before?
Would you want the truth to be told, the footage to be release, and the trials to be made public?
Sean has been taken from his longterm girlfriend Amy and four children, and any felony conviction will strip him of his professional licensure that is his livelihood and takes care of his family.
Please support Sean and his family as he takes the hard path through trial—and eventual sentencing—by donating here.
