Instead, Mr. Shamansky mr. Thompson was portrayed at his trial this week as an impressionable man who filled his days of pandemic-driven isolation with a steady diet of electoral fraud conspiracy theories. Mr. Thompson agreed that a “perfect storm” of circumstances, as Mr. Shamansky put it, had caused him to fall prey to Mr Trump’s lies about the race and ultimately led him to the Capitol.
“It was just a terrible year – being unemployed, newly married, in quarantine, Covid,” he told the jury. “I don’t know where my head was.”
Before mr. Thompson offered his account, his wife, Sarah Thompson, took the stand.
Ms. Thompson, who works in the Victoria’s Secret offices, told the jury that she was a Democrat who had voted for Biden and never believed in the “conspiracy theories” material she saw her husband increasingly watching on YouTube. Twitter and various other websites.
Still, she said it had been “a difficult year” for the couple, who married in January 2020 after dating for 12 years. She told the jury that Mr. Thompson’s anger at the election appeared to have gotten worse as he was left home out of work.
“Dustin spent a lot of time on the internet,” she said.
When he left for Washington on January 5, she said, driving with a friend, Ms. Thompson didn’t think her husband would get in trouble. She was happy, as she put it, to be home with the ‘silence in the house’.
But on the night of the riots, Mr. Thompson showed her a video of himself wandering around the MP’s ransacked office with others. The room was littered with paperwork and fallen furniture.
Her response to him was simple and direct.
“I won’t pay bail,” she texted back.