WASHINGTON — A federal judge sentenced a former Navy Reservist to four years in prison Monday for obstructing the joint session of Congress — adding to a three-year sentence he's already begun for illegally possessing unregistered silencers.
Hatchet Speed, a former Navy Reserves petty officer first class previously stationed at the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia, was convicted in a March bench trial of one felony count of obstruction of an official proceeding and four misdemeanor charges. He was convicted separately in January in a Virginia case for possessing three unregistered silencers – which he told an undercover FBI employee he thought would be useful for holding “mock trials” for his enemies. Speed's term of service with the Navy Reserves expired in November.
A federal judge in Virginia sentenced Speed to three years in prison last month on the silencer charges. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden ordered Speed to spend another four years in prison on top of that for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, along with a $10,000 fine and $2,000 in restitution. McFadden, who served as a deputy assistant attorney general before being nominated to the federal bench in 2017 by former President Donald Trump, said Speed's anti-Semitic motivations for trying to stop the certification of the election were especially troubling to him.
"It seems to me you've gone down a rabbit hole of darkness and extremism over the past several years," McFadden said.
In their sentencing memo, prosecutors argued Speed had a “precise” understanding of what Congress was doing on Jan. 6 and nevertheless chose to join the mob that overran police.
“He hoped the mob’s resistance would spark a larger uprising that would so intimidate Congress that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi would ‘resign out of fear for her life,’” they wrote.
After Jan. 6, Speed, who had a TS/SCI clearance (top secret/sensitive compartmented information), told the undercover FBI employee he began “panic buying” tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of firearms and equipment. Prosecutors said that was part of a larger goal of “violent revolution” intertwined with intense antisemitism and effusive praise for Adolf Hitler. At one point, they said, Speed told the undercover employee the approach of jihadists would be an “effective way to ‘wipe out’ the opposition, referring to Jewish people.
Speed also described himself to the undercover employee as a Proud Boy and said he'd marched to the Capitol with other members of the group before entering the building. Speed did not dispute his membership in the group at sentencing on Monday.
Prosecutors said the four-year sentence they requested would send a message to others like Speed who might consider acting on their "racial or religiously motivated hatred" by taking the law in their own hands.
Speed was represented at trial by the D.C. Federal Public Defender’s Office. In the defense’s sentencing memo, his attorney, Courtney Dixon, asked for six months in prison to run concurrent with his firearms sentence in Virginia. Her memo included multiple character letters from friends and fellow service members discussing Speed’s multiple deployments and his Mormon faith.
“Hatchet Speed, as a 41-year-old military veteran, has spent his life in service – to his church, to his community, to the underserved, and to his country,” Dixon wrote. “For those who know him and describe him as thoughtful, caring, and considerate, his recent involvement with the criminal justice system and attendant publicity is shocking.”
Dixon also pushed back on the DOJ’s characterization of Speed’s goals on Jan. 6. He was not at the Capitol to obstruct the electoral process, she said, but “rather to see it through.”
“Most importantly, he told his brother why he was there,” Dixon wrote. “Mr. Speed went ‘…there to await the results of the joint session, not to interrupt the proceedings.’ And while the mood changed for Mr. Speed when he learned that former Vice President Pence had not chosen the Republican elector slates, his hope was to view the remaining proceedings from the public gallery.”
Dixon’s memo did not address Speed’s purported fascination with Hitler or comments he made to an undercover FBI employee about studying the writings of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Olympic Park Bomber Eric Rudolph.
Once released, Speed will have to serve three years under supervision. He will also have to complete mental health treatment as a term of his sentence in the silencers case.
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