A lawyer for an accused Capitol rioter claims his client suffered from “Foxmania” after reportedly spending a lot of time watching Fox News.
Anthony Antonio’s lawyer told a judge his client lost his job amid the COVID-19 pandemic and spent time at home with other people that watched Fox News a lot.
“For the next approximate six months, Fox television played constantly. He became hooked with what I call ‘Foxitus’ or ‘Foxmania’ and became interested in the political aspect and started believing what was being fed to him,” Antonio’s lawyer Joseph Hurley said, according to HuffPost.
Hurley also said his client believed he was following Trump’s call on his supporters to march on Washington. Last month, Antonio surrendered to Delaware police.
He is being charged with five federal crimes linked to his involvement in the insurrection, including disrupting Congress and damaging government property.
Antonio allegedly climbed the scaffolding outside the Capitol, broke into the Capitol through a broken window, and acquired a riot shield and gas mask, as the Huffington Post reports.
Five people lost their lives as a result of the riots.
Other Capitol rioters have said Trump contributed to their decision to storm the Capitol, including Jacob Chansley, the man known as the “QAnon Shaman,” as IJR previously reported.
During a “60 Minutes+” interview in March, Chansley said, “I developed a lot of sympathy for Donald Trump because it seemed like the media was picking on him and seemed like the establishment was going after him unnecessarily or unfairly, and I had been a victim of that all of my life, whether it be in school or at home.”
He added, “I identify with a lot of the negative things that he was going through.”
Chansley also said he believed Trump still “cares about the Constitution, that he cares about the American people, and that’s also why and you know it wounded me so deeply and why it disappointed me so greatly that I and others did not get a pardon.”