Georgia attorney among those who broke into U.S. Capitol. From The Atlanta Journal Constitution
When hundreds of pro-Trump protesters stunned and horrified the nation by forcing their way into the United States Capitol Wednesday, self-described “Anti-Communist Counter-Revolutionary” McCall Calhoun was among the first through the doors.
“The Deep State cannot stop us,” he wrote on Parler, a social media network popular with Trump supporters, “They learned that today when we stormed the Capitol and took it. The word is we’re all coming back armed for war.”
Calhoun, a practicing attorney in Americus for 30 years, admitted his participation in the riot in an exclusive interview with the AJC in which he described the mob as patriotic and heroic.
“This was civil disobedience. Anyone who claims it was anything other than civil disobedience was not there, and they did not see it and they do not know,” he said, referring to the riot that left five dead, including a Capitol Police officer and a Kennesaw woman who was reportedly crushed to death in the crowd.
Calhoun, who said he primarily does criminal defense work in his south Georgia city, said the assault on Congress was done out of frustration over what he said was a stolen election.
“The crowd was of one mind. Everybody there had the same attitude. They felt they had been robbed of a fair election and the Congress wasn’t listening to them,” he said. “It probably wasn’t the best idea, but it was what this group of people did; they did it for the love of America.”
(snip)
Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor who teaches legal ethics, had another way to describe it.
“I would say what he did – I would say what all of them did that entered the Capitol —is the serious federal felony of sedition. It’s the domestic equivalent of treason,” he said. “It wasn’t a sit-in. They knew the Congress was convened to do perhaps the most important thing a Congress can do: preside over the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another.”
However, if Calhoun maintains it was an act of civil disobedience, Cunningham invited him to follow the practice of Gandhi and others and accept the legal penalty. For sedition, it’s a prison sentence of up to 20 years, he said.
“A central point of central disobedience is you accept the penalty of breaking the law,” he said. “That’s what makes civil disobedience, potentially, a virtuous act.”
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