Convicted Child Sex Predator Avoids Prison Thanks to Trump Pardon

Amid Donald Trump’s pardons of his fellow Republicans and corrupt business figures, one child sex predator has gotten a clean slate.

Andrew Taake, who was serving time for taking part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, benefited from Trump’s broad pardons in two ways thanks to an unusual deal first reported by The Daily Beast.

Taake was convicted of attacking a police officer at the Capitol with bear spray and a whip during the riots. He had also previously been charged in Harris County, Texas, with sending explicit photos and messages to someone who he thought was a 15-year-old girl, and he was out on bond when he took part in the riots. The “girl” on the Plenty of Fish dating site Taake was communicating with was an undercover police officer, and he didn’t stop messaging her after learning her age.

But thanks to the time he served for January 6 before Trump’s pardon, most of which was in pretrial detention, Taake accrued about three years and seven months of “credit,” for his earlier sex crimes, according to Harris County court documents. Taake was only sentenced for his crimes at the Capitol last summer, and thanks to Trump’s blanket pardon, was released from the federal ADX Florence supermax prison in January just months into his six-year term.

Taake was held in pretrial detention between his arrest and sentencing because of how violent his crimes were. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols called his part in the Capitol insurrection “the farthest thing from First Amendment expression.” In his sentencing memorandum last year, prosecutors said Taake “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.”

Now Taake walks free, not just for his violent actions for Trump in D.C. but also for being a convicted child sex predator. One wonders if Trump knows about Taake or how he feels about him, considering that the president was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll two years ago, and has numerous other sexual assault allegations against him.

Americans have lost so much faith in their government that they trust Congress less than they trust Immigration and Customs Enforcement—an organization already hated by the majority of the country.

New polling from the Institute for Global Affairs, a nonprofit at the Eurasia Group, raised the question: “For each group, how much do you trust that they act in the best interest of average Americans?”

Overall, Americans trusted the military at a 49 percent “net trust percentage.” They trust ICE at a negative 11 percent rate, and Congress ranks lowest at negative 32 percent.

The party breakdown for the answer is also revealing. Democrats have a negative 67 percent view of ICE, while Republicans have a 61 percent favorability of the agency. Independents were at negative 23.

This comes as the oldest Congress in history leads the country through an affordability crisis that has seen countless Americans, young and old, feel like they have no chance at achieving a better quality of life than their parents.

These numbers are particularly alarming given just how immensely unpopular ICE is, as federal agents descend upon communities and literally pull families apart to meet deportation quotas.

Read the full report from the Institute for Global Affairs here.

A group of Border Patrol agents decided to play tourists in Chicago and mock a neighborhood they hit with tear gas, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is not having it.

Pritzker called out the federal agents on X for posing for a photo early Monday morning in front of The Bean, an art installation in the Windy City’s Millenium Park, and shouting, “Everyone say, ‘Little Village!’” The agents were referring to a Mexican-American neighborhood six miles away that federal immigration authorities have repeatedly targeted in raids.

Over the weekend, the agents used tear gas on one of Little Village’s streets, following an earlier tear-gassing incident in late October, despite a court order against using excessive force. Their bosses in the Department of Homeland Security claim the agents were shot at, although none of them were injured. The alderman who represents the area, Mike Rodriguez, said he was nearby and never heard any shots fired.

“It was a reign of terror,” Rodriguez said. Pritzker concurred.

“Making fun of our neighborhoods and communities is disgusting,” Pritzker posted Monday afternoon, linking to an article from local news outlet Block Club Chicago about the callous photo op. “Greg Bovino and his masked agents are not here to make Chicago safer. As children are tear gassed and U.S. citizens detained, they are posing for photo ops and producing reality TV moments.”

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose tactics have drawn criticism and judicial rebukes, was at the front of the group on Monday morning with some guard dogs, and told his fellow agents to “mask up” because the media was present. Bovino didn’t seem to care that the media heard his agents mocking Little Village, or joking about their heavy-handed tactics. As Pritzker said, these agents only care about themselves.

President Donald Trump’s administration is desperately hoping that the Supreme Court will give it a free pass on funding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits for this month.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer on Monday reiterated the Trump administration’s intention to ask the Supreme Court to intervene over District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr.’s order requiring the government to pay full SNAP benefits for November.

After the Department of Justice leapt to challenge McConnell’s order last week, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued an administrative stay order Friday in order to give the court of appeals enough time to weigh in. On Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s motion to stay while it appealed the decision, triggering a 48-hour deadline on Jackson’s administrative stay. Her stay gave the government until Tuesday night to pay for SNAP in full, unless the Supreme Court decided to grant a longer stay.

In the filing Monday, Sauer said that the government intended to file a supplemental brief that afternoon, and he included “developments” to their application to the highest court in the land. He pointed to a federal judge in Boston who blocked a Department of Agriculture memo Sunday that ordered states to “immediately undo” steps to issue full benefits, though he did not say whether the government intended to challenge that order.

He also noted that the government shutdown, which had precipitated the funding lapse in the first place, might soon be coming to an end after a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers dropped their demand for Obamacare tax credits Sunday evening, in what some are calling a major betrayal to their party and the American people.

It was only a week ago Trump claimed it would be an “honor” to fund SNAP, should a court order him to do so. And it was the president’s own blatant unwillingness to follow through on that offer that signaled an “intent to defy” the judge’s order, prompting McConnell to demand the government pay up immediately.

Trump has repeatedly blamed the funding lapse on the shutdown, but with an end to the shutdown now on the horizon, it seems clear that Trump simply doesn’t want people to be able to buy food.

The Oath Keepers are coming back better than ever, according to the group’s founder.

Stewart Rhodes revealed to The Gateway Pundit Sunday that he’s “relaunching” and “rebuilding” the white supremacist organization that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

“They tried to take us out after January 6 but what man means for evil, God will use for good,” Rhodes told the podcast. “I came out stronger after it, and so my goal is to rebuild the organization stronger than ever because it’s an essential mission. Absolutely.”

Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for helping to orchestrate an insurrection designed to keep Joe Biden from taking office after he won the 2020 presidential election. Rhodes was also the first individual that Donald Trump pardoned when he returned to office on January 20, 2025.

The 60-year-old also signaled to Trump that the Oath Keepers were still “ready to serve” as his personal militia, just as they had done during the insurrection, encouraging the president to “order us all to come together in our counties under his command.”

“And one other thing I want to say is that President Trump, as commander in chief, always has absolute authority to call all of us up as the militia because every one of us—in federal statues defining the militia, it’s every able-bodied male from age 17-45. And for us veterans, it goes up to age 64 because of our prior training and experience,” Rhodes said.

The National Guard is part of that militia, according to the far-right leader, justifying Trump’s decision to send troops to U.S. cities.

Referring to the Insurrection Act, Rhodes argued that Trump can call upon a citizens’ militia for any one of three reasons: “to repel invasions, to suppress insurrections, and to execute the laws of the union.”

“And right now, we see all three of those in play,” Rhodes said.

This new chapter of the Oath Keepers will maintain the original organization’s mission—to “protect people against radical antifa and other leftist violence in the streets,” according to Rhodes—but will be built to outlast its creator.

“So we want to make sure it’s got resilience and redundancy built in that it can drive on strong,” Rhodes told the podcast. “I mean, I have to make sure that if I’m ever taken out again or if I’m or when I’m taken out again, that the organization can drive on without me. That’s not what happened last time.”