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Left: Andrew Taake. Right: Taake seen holding a whip during a confrontation at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 (via FBI court filing).
Thanks to President Donald Trump, a Texas man who beat police officers with a metal whip and showered them with bear spray during the Jan. 6 riot had his more than six-year prison sentence ended.
But 36-year-old Andrew Taake may be headed back to jail anyway.
Taake made headlines at the time of his arrest because he was turned in by a woman he met on the dating app Bumble — and for the violence he inflicted on cops. Last year, Taake was sentenced to 74 months in prison followed by 36 months of supervised release, and he was ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution.
Last week, Trump wiped out that sentence with a “full, complete and unconditional” pardon of Taake and his roughly 1,500 fellow rioters.
‘Galvanized and ready’: Family members of Jan. 6 rioters and their victims say they’re ‘terrified’ of what’s to come now that Trump pardons actually happened
But Taake’s freedom might be short-lived.
At the time of the riot, Taake was on pretrial release for a 2016 charge of online solicitation of a minor out of Harris County in Houston. Now that his federal case is over, state prosecutors have picked up the solicitation case once again.
A Harris County District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman told Law&Crime that the agency has issued an arrest warrant for Taake. He remains at large as of Monday morning.
According to the Houston Chronicle, Taake was soliciting a person he “believed to be younger than 17 years of age.” He was 27 at the time. Taake faces a decade in prison if convicted. His lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.
In May 2016, Taake started talking on social media with an undercover cop posing as a 15-year-old girl, according to the Jan. 6 sentencing memorandum. After allegedly sending “multiple explicit messages” to the “girl” he asked for to meet up with her. He admitted he “could go to jail” for what he was doing. Taake went to the address the undercover provided and cops arrested him, the memo said. He then posted a $20,000 bond.
DA Sean Teare said in a statement that his office in 2022 put in a request with the federal Bureau of Prisons back in 2022 to put a hold on Taake once he finished his prison sentence. The DA once sent the BOP a certified warrant on Jan. 15, according to Teare. Nonetheless, Taake was released after Trump’s order on Jan. 20.
“Re-arresting individuals, like Taake, who were released with pending State warrants, will require significant resources,” Teare said. “Know that we are already in the process of tracking Taake down, as he must answer for 2016 charge of soliciting a minor online.”
As Law&Crime reported, Taake pleaded guilty in 2023 to one count of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon. He went to the Capitol ready for violence, armed with bear spray and a metal whip, prosecutors said.
He sprayed officers trying to hold the line with “bear-attack repellent spray” four times. Taake attacked an officer with a metal whip and threw a water bottle at the police line before scaling a wall, authorities said. He entered the Capitol through the Senate Wing Door soon after its initial breach and wandered around the building for 20 minutes, brandishing his metal whip, prosecutors said.
In the days following the riot, a witness who was messaging Taake on the Bumble dating app while he was in Washington alerted the FBI to Taake’s role in the chaos. According to court documents, this witness “said Taake admitted to being inside the U.S. Capitol for approximately 30 minutes.”
Court filings show that Taake portrayed himself to his would-be paramour as little more than an innocent bystander.
“I was pepper sprayed, tear gassed, had flash bangs thrown at me, and hit with batons for peacefully standing there,” he wrote in a text to the potential match. He then sent a picture of himself with a scarf or gaiter covering the lower half of his face, which he indicated was taken around “30 minutes after being sprayed.”
“Safe to say I was the very first person to be sprayed that day … all while just standing there,” he added.
The witness and Taake never met in person, court documents said.
When Taake was arrested in January 2021, the FBI recovered three loaded guns from his residence, even though he was barred from having them due to his status as a felon, authorities said. He was convicted in 2008 of driving under the influence and crashing into another car, seriously injuring a person.
He pleaded guilty in December 2023 to one count of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers using a dangerous weapon.
NBC News reported that U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols — a Donald Trump appointee — said at Taake’s sentencing that his crimes were “as serious as any other Jan. 6 defendant I sentenced” and said his actions were “the farthest thing from First Amendment expression.”
After Taake pleaded guilty, the Bumble user who tipped off the FBI reacted to the NBC News report, saying, “FINALLY.”
“It’s been wild to see him still defend that attack all this time and makes me even more glad he was caught for it,” she said.
Prosecutors said in court documents that ever since, “Taake has continually shifted blame for his criminal actions on January 6 to the victim officers, members of Congress, and the media.”
“His enduring narrative is that he and other ‘patriots’ were heroes and that he is a wrongfully detained victim of ‘selective persecution,”” prosecutors said. “He has not exhibited an ounce of remorse for his actions, nor accepted responsibility — going so far as to deny responsibility even after his guilty plea.”
They said that based on reports from his pretrial detention, he has “taken to using violence against other inmates to relieve his frustrations with his self-inflicted predicament.”
In April, Taake’s initial sentencing hearing went sideways after the judge wanted to add an enhancement that hadn’t been in the plea agreement.
