WASHINGTON — A diehard fan of former President Donald Trump who spent most of 2020 traveling around the country to attend his political rallies – and then assaulted a police officer on Jan. 6 – was sentenced Friday to nearly three years in prison.
Jonathan Joshua Munafo, 36, pleaded guilty in April to felony counts of civil disorder and assaulting a DC Police officer during the Capitol riot. Munafo was arrested in April 2021 and denied bond. He was later sentenced while still in custody to 24 months in prison in Michigan for making “profane threats of violence” in more than 100 calls to a Michigan non-emergency dispatch center the day before Jan. 6.
Munafo appeared Friday afternoon before D.C. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg, who ordered him to serve 33 months, or nearly three years, in prison. The sentence falls near the middle of Munafoa's 30-to-37 month guideline range. Munafo will receive approximately nine months of credit toward his sentence for time already spent in pretrial detention, according to the Justice Department's sentencing memo.
In a memo filed this week, his attorney, assistant federal public defender Kevin Lerman, argued the time Munafo had already served behind bars had allowed him to receive necessary mental health treatment and is a sufficient punishment for his crimes.
“The hard-learned lessons a court may wish for incarceration to teach have surely been pummeled into Jonathan over the last 29 months at a pace and manner not contemplated by the Sentencing Guidelines,” Lerman wrote.
Before Jan. 6, Lerman wrote, Munafo had spent much of 2020 as a so-called “Front Row Joe” – one of a number of Trump supporters who traveled around the country and often camped out in order to be at the front of Trump rallies. Over months of driving around the country in isolation, she wrote, his mental state had deteriorated. According to Lerman, Munafo drove to D.C. from Florida on little-to-no sleep for Trump’s Jan. 6 speech and only went to the Capitol after Trump exhorted his supporters to march there from the Ellipse.
Once at the Capitol, Munafo made his way to the Lower West Terrace, where he used a metal flagpole to strike a window leading to a congressional office and then took advantage of the chaos amid the assault on DC Police Officer Mike Fanone to sucker punch a second officer, DC Police Officer Neil McAllister, and then take his riot shield. For that, federal prosecutors said in their own memo, Munafo deserved a top-of-the-guidelines sentence of 37 months in prison.
In a filing Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean P. Murphy said the assault on McAllister was the culmination of a string of “increasingly erratic and violent behavior” from Munafo over a period of years. The memo included a list of prior criminal cases, including an assault on his father with a metal vacuum handle and multiple charges for violating protective orders. Murphy said Munafo also had multiple outstanding warrants in cases that are still pending against him, including a 2020 case for allegedly assaulting a police officer and multiple other people in Massachusetts and another assault case also from 2020 for allegedly sparking a stun gun toward counter-protesters in D.C.
“Munafo’s crimes on January 6 were not an isolated event in an otherwise law-abiding life,” Murphy wrote. “They came after a long series of violent offenses and behavior that shows Munafo will do almost anything to anyone that stands between him and what he feels he deserves. Munafo’s criminal history demonstrates a troubling propensity towards violence, especially towards strangers and authority figures.”
While at the top end of Munafo’s sentencing guideline range, the Justice Department’s 37-month request wasn't abnormal for Jan. 6 cases involving assaults on police officers. In July, Peter Stager, of Arkansas, was sentenced to four years in prison for beating a downed officer with a flagpole. That same month, a New York man, Thomas Sibick, also received four months in prison for robbing Fanone of his badge and radio while he was being assaulted.