For those of you who have never heard of the name John Strand, here is a brief summary of his story.
Strand attended the Capitol on January 6th as a friend and bodyguard for Dr. Simone Gold, who was scheduled to speak inside the Capitol that day and was legally permitted to do so, but by the time the Oath Keepers and Strand escorted Gold to her speaking location, chaos had already begun inside the Capitol.
Although Strand and Gold were not involved in the breach of the Capitol and never participated in any violent acts, they made the mistake of entering the Capitol with the crowd. They entered and exited peacefully, just like thousands of other people, but this was enough to draw a rebuke from the Department of Justice.
Strand and Gold were among the first to be arrested and charged with four misdemeanors and 1512 felonies. Gold accepted a plea bargain that included 60 days in jail, but Strand, upset at the apparent injustice, resisted the prosecution. Having resisted, he was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to 32 months in prison.
However, the 1512 conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court and Strand was released.
A few days after his release from prison, he appeared with Jill Savage and other panelists on “Blaze News Tonight.” A tough prison experience.
“I was in hell” – J6 prisoner gives first interview since releaseClick here for details
For Strand, prison was a “place of great suffering and misery.”
“God has done a lot of great things, but it was awful,” he told Jill.
“My time in prison was actually split between two facilities. The first half was in Miami, where I was brutally abused for four months straight in an isolated environment – basically waterboarded. When I was released from there and moved to another location where it was a little less repressive, it felt like I was trying to suck the oxygen of freedom through a straw from under a swamp,” he recalls.
“He was in solitary confinement, which is essentially torture,” investigative journalist and Blaze Media correspondent Steve Baker said, adding that when Dr Gold tried to raise the alarm about Strand’s abusive behaviour, “he had problems getting the message out because they tend to be more punitive.”
“That’s exactly what happened to me,” Strand admits. “They invented a bunch of ridiculous situations, isolated me for a few weeks, and basically said, ‘Watch out, if you look away we’re going to beat you up.'”
“They took me out for a few days, and then a story that I had nothing to do with was published in the media. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene published a story that I was being tortured and abused, and they put me in an interrogation room and grilled me about it, like a scene from a movie, as if I had something to do with it. Then they threw me back in jail and I didn’t show up for three and a half months.”
“How did you get through that time mentally?” Jill asks.
To hear Strand’s answer, watch the clip above.
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