Judge to grant request from ‘Qanon Shaman’ for organic diet in jail

A federal judge on Wednesday said he would order corrections officials to provide the Capitol rioter known as the “Qanon Shaman” with organic food, hours after his lawyers said that he had gone nine days without eating.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said during a hastily convened hearing Wednesday that the Bureau of Prisons should abide by Jacob Chansley’s religious dietary restrictions.

Chansley, who also goes by Jake Angeli, practices shamanism and believes “that non-organic food, which contains unnatural chemicals, would act as an ‘object intrusion’ onto his body and cause serious illness if he were to eat it,” according to an emergency motion filed by his lawyer Wednesday morning.

Pictures of Chansley inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 circulated widely on the internet, showing him shirtless in the halls and chambers wearing a fur hat with horns and red, white and blue face paint.

He is facing various federal criminal charges, including unlawful entry, obstruction of an official proceeding and witness tampering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

A Bureau of Prisons representative told Lamberth at Wednesday’s hearing that Chansley’s dietary request had been denied because corrections officials could not find any evidence that an all-organic diet is one of the tenets of shamanism.

Albert Watkins, Chansley’s attorney, had asked in his emergency motion that the court either order jail officials to provide him with organic food or otherwise release him entirely because of the danger he was in without sustenance.

Watkins said at Wednesday’s hearing that he would drop his request that his client be released in light of the judge’s order. Lamberth said that a written order would be forthcoming on Wednesday.