If you haven’t heard the name John Strand, here is a brief recap of his story:
Strand attended the Capitol on January 6 as the friend and bodyguard of Dr. Simone Gold, who was scheduled — and legally permitted — to speak on Capitol grounds that day. However, when the Oathkeepers and Strand escorted Dr. Gold to her speaking location, the chaos at the Capitol had already begun.
While Strand and Gold were uninvolved in the breaching of the Capitol building and never once participated in violence, they made the mistake of entering the building along with the crowd. They entered and departed peacefully like so many thousands of others, but this was enough to land both of them in hot water with the DOJ.
Both Stand and Gold were some of the first to be arrested and charged with four misdemeanors as well as the 1512 felony. While Gold took a plea deal, involving 60 days in prison, Strand, outraged by the obvious injustice, fought the charges. For his resistance, he was convicted on all charges and sentenced to 32 months in prison.
However, now that 1512 has been overturned by SCOTUS, Strand has been freed.
Just days out of prison, he joins Jill Savage and the “Blaze News Tonight” panel to recount his grueling experience behind bars.
“I was in HELL” – J6 Prisoner Gives FIRST Interview Post-Release
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For Strand, jail was “a very painful, miserable place.”
“God did a lot of great things, but it was terrible,” he tells Jill.
“My time in prison was actually split between two facilities — the first half in Miami, where I was actually viciously abused in an isolation environment for about four straight months, which was essentially like being waterboarded, and when I was released from there and transferred to another location, where it was a little less oppressive, it felt like I was trying to breathe the oxygen of freedom through a straw from underneath the swamp,” he recounts.
“You were being held in solitary confinement, which is essentially torture,” says investigative journalist and Blaze Media correspondent Steve Baker, adding that when Dr. Gold tried to sound the alarm on Strand’s abusive treatment, “There was a problem getting this message out” because “they tend to punish you more.”
“That’s exactly what happened to me,” Strand confirms. “They fabricated a whole series of ridiculous circumstances to put me in isolation for a couple of weeks basically to say, ‘Watch out, we’ll crush you if you look sideways.”’
“They pulled me out for a couple days and then a story that I had nothing to do with went viral on media. Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene reported on me being tortured and abused, and they put me in this interrogation room and grilled me about this, like I had something to do with it — like a scene out of a movie. And then they threw me back in, and I wasn’t seen again for three and a half months.”
“How did you mentally make it through that time?” asks Jill.
To hear Strand’s answer, watch the clip above.
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