Jacob Chansley, also known as the QAnon Shaman, inside the Capitol on January 6.
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Jacob Chansley, a January 6 rioter known as the “QAnon Shaman,” has been released from prison early.
Chansley is carrying out the rest of his prison sentence in a halfway house in Arizona.
His new roommates told The New York Post on Sunday they had no idea who he was.
Jacob Chansley, an Capitol riot defendant known as the “QAnon Shaman,” has moved into a halfway house in Arizona after being released from federal prison early.
But his new roommates told The New York Post, who visited the premises on Sunday, that despite his notoriety, they had no idea who he was, saying that he is “quiet and [keeps] to himself.”
“What? He put on the horns? Holy shit,” Ernesto Leyva, one of Chansley’s housemates, told The Post, referring to the distinct horns and bearskin headdress Chansley was pictured wearing to the Capitol during the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Leyva added that Chansley is “alright” and that he lives in a room with six other people. The Arizona facility did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Another roommate, Shywanna Grimes, told The Post she wasn’t aware of who Chansley was either, because she just got out of prison herself, adding: “I didn’t watch TV.”
“We all have a background,” said Grimes, who was imprisoned for smuggling. “We are all human. We all make mistakes. We are not perfect.”
Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison in November 2021 after pleading guilty to one count of obstruction of an official proceeding for his involvement with the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
A prison spokesperson told Insider’s Natalie Musumeci that he was transferred from Arizona’s Federal Correctional Institution Safford to “community confinement” overseen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Phoenix Residential Reentry Management Office last week.
Chansley’s projected release date from any kind of federal custody is May 25, the spokesperson added.
The attorney who handled Chansley’s plea deal, Albert Watkins, previously told Insider that he attributes the early release “to be a function of the US Bureau of Prisons evaluating Mr. Chansley’s eligibility for release based on the plea agreement, the sentence imposed, the model behavior of Mr. Chansley while confined, the programs he completed and a host of factors routinely taken into consideration by the US Bureau of Prisons.”