A Jan. 6 defendant who spent two years and seven months behind bars said President-elect Donald Trump was supported by inmates and guards alike during his third run for the White House.
Barry Ramey, who was recently released from prison to a halfway house, said that hardened inmates and prison guards want Mr. Trump to shake up the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons.
“My whole experience in the BOP, both pretrial and being sentenced, it was almost hard to find someone in the prison system that didn’t support Trump,” Ramey, a member of the right-wing Proud Boys militia, said in an interview with The Washington Times.
“I even met illegal immigrants, gang members from South America that were going to be deported when their sentences were done that supported Trump,” he said.
As for the prison guards, they, too, were mostly pro-Trump, he said.
“Some who were more than willing to say, ’I’m MAGA. I don’t care. This is how I feel,’” he said.
On Election Night, Ramey and his cellmate were listening to a makeshift radio as the results came in.
“I just could not believe it,” he said. “They finally called the race for Trump. I was sitting up in bed. I was shocked.”
When Mr. Trump was declared the winner, he heard banging on nearby cell doors and fellow inmates chanting, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
“When the doors popped, and they unlocked us at 5:30 in the morning, there was a South American gang that congregated on the first floor in my unit every morning to watch the Spanish news,” he said. “And I walked out with a picture of Trump in my hand and threw my hands in the air, and they all started cheering for me.”
Before Ramey, a Florida resident, was arrested in 2022 on charges including assaulting police officers at the Capitol, he was an aircraft mechanic for private Learjet aircraft and had no criminal record.
Ramey said that inmates and prison guards hope that Trump would win and start to expose the problems in the Justice Department and the BOP and why “it has a 98.9% conviction rate of success,” Ramey, 41, said.
“Our system is corrupt, and Donald Trump was getting a taste of it, and hopefully, he’s going to remember these guys in prison that have all succumbed to this system as well.”
Four criminal indictments were filed against Mr. Trump in 2023, with two separate indictments on state charges in New York and Georgia and federal charges in Florida and the District of Columbia.
Since his reelection, the charges in Florida and the District of Columbia were dismissed.
In Georgia, Mr. Trump’s lawyers are still attempting to get his charges dismissed after an appeals court disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her team from prosecuting Mr. Trump.
In New York, state Judge Juan Merchan declined to toss out Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records involving hush money payments to a porn actress in 2016.
Ramey was denied bond twice and before ever facing a judge. He was in pretrial detainment after his arrest on April 21, 2022, and was transferred to correctional facilities around the country over a dozen times.
“They tried to say that this diesel therapy practice is something that they quit a long time ago. But I assure you, my situation is not [exclusive] to me. It happened to a lot of people,” Ramey said.
Ramey said the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, had the worst conditions. And he and other Jan. 6 inmates got into a violent skirmish with other inmates for wanting to watch Tucker Carlson’s television program when he was still on Fox News.
“There were multiple TVs in the unit, but a group of inmates from D.C. wanted to take our TV. I was stabbed in the face, and a big, pretty violent brawl broke out over pretty much essentially watching Tucker Carlson,” he said.
“They said that Tucker Carlson was racist, and it’s something that we watched every night together as a group. It was pretty bad.”
Ramey spent most of his prison sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami and was found guilty in 2023 of felonies, including civil disorder, assault and resisting or impeding certain officers.
Ramey said when he arrived at the Capitol grounds, he was unaware that the 2020 presidential certification was happening, and his initial intention was to protect men, women and children going from the Trump rally at the ellipse back to their vehicles.
A handful of Proud Boys suffered stabbing injuries during a brawl against antifa protesters a month earlier in Washington and wanted to come prepared.
“I was not a Proud Boy on Jan. 6, but I did join shortly after … and I was with them that day before Trump stopped speaking,” he said.
Ramey said he walked up the west side Senate staircase with others as police tossed flash bangs and munitions in their direction. He said he saw a man bleeding after being shot in the face with a rubber bullet and an elderly woman pushed to the ground by a police officer.
“At that moment, I became very angry. We were singing the national anthem. We were being peaceful. People were trying to talk to the police and say, ’Hey, look, we’re not here to fight with you guys. We’re not your enemy.’”
Ramey said a “barrage” of rubber munitions, flash bangs and tear gas were deployed at once and he let his anger get the best of him.
“I did assault a police officer with pepper spray. I am responsible for that. I am guilty of that. I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. What’s done is done,” Ramey said. “I was charged with assaulting two police officers. I never did make contact or touch a second officer. I did try to appeal that and lost in the D.C. District Court of Appeals.”
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.