Meet the January 6 Rioter Running for Marco Rubio's U.S. Senate Seat

On January 6, 2021, Jake Lang stormed the U.S. Capitol building armed with an aluminum baseball bat and a riot shield, which prosecutors say he used to beat officers who were guarding the Capitol entrance.

The day after the insurrection, the then-25-year-old took to social media to call the attack a "war" and proclaim himself "the leader of Liberty," while mistakenly tagging his location as the White House.

"Arrest me. You are on the wrong side of history," he dared.

Lang (whose real name is Edward Jacob Lang) was, in fact, arrested later that month on multiple charges of assaulting law enforcement officers, as well as felony charges of civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding. He sat in jail for nearly four years awaiting (and delaying) his trial, during which he hosted a weekly podcast for a conservative conspiracy website and dubbed himself a "political prisoner." In late January of this year, President Donald Trump pardoned him and hundreds of other violent January 6 rioters with the stroke of a pen.

Now back home, Lang has plans to return to the U.S. Capitol — this time, as a lawmaker.

In an interview with New Times, Lang confirmed that he's filed his statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run as a Republican for the U.S. Senate seat in Florida recently vacated by Marco Rubio. While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis chose Florida's attorney general Ashley Moody to temporarily fill the position, the seat will be up for grabs in the next general election in 2026.

"The people here in Florida are ready for a firebrand conservative to represent them in Senate instead of Ashley Moody, who's as establishment, kind of political insider as it gets," Lang says.

Lang, a New Yorker who became a prominent champion of January 6 defendants with his regular social media activity during his incarceration, says he now lives in West Palm Beach.

He says he decided to run for office in Florida instead of his native New York because he's "much more accepted here" than in his home state — calling Florida "the most MAGA state in the country" and "the new frontier."

Lang recalls being welcomed with open arms upon his arrival in the Sunshine State post-incarceration.

"They love the Jan. Sixers," he says. "As I've been going around these last 50 days here in Florida, making campaign videos and seeing business owners and friends of mine here and talking to strangers in the public, I've had dozens of people cry on my shoulder, come out and congratulate and hug and consider us to be patriot heroes and founding father-style leaders."

A nearly-complete website for Lang's campaign reads in large letters: "January 6th was a cry for change. And I am that change."

The site lists several policy priorities, including: "SEAL THE BORDER AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION," "PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE," and "END THE WEAPONIZATION OF GOVERNMENT AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE."

"My platform is not a moderate platform," Lang says. "My platform is heavy duty, conservative, patriot platform."

Agents followed a seemingly straightforward trail through Lang's public social media accounts to collect evidence for his January 6 case.

"THIS IS ME," he wrote over one video that showed a mob clashing with police officers outside the Capitol.

Prosecutors claimed that following his arrest, Lang didn't hesitate to "endorse the attack" on the Capitol or to state that he would do it again. In a 2023 phone interview with the USA Today Network, Lang said he had no regrets about his conduct at the Capitol.

"I don’t play the watered-down version of Jan. 6, the 'there was mistakes made that day.' No, no, I think that was well within our rights and constitutional duty to overthrow the chains of tyranny," Lang said in one podcast.

In June 2024, Lang tried to create a national militia from his jail cell using an invitation-only group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

ProPublica obtained thousands of messages from the Telegram chats; in one message, Lang wrote: "We need each person to go out and fight for new members of this Militia like our lives depend on it."

"Lang not only remains willing to engage in additional acts of violence whenever he deems such violence necessary, but continues to believe that such violence is justified," prosecutors wrote in a March 2024 filing. "For Lang, little has changed since January 6, 2021 or the days that followed when according to Lang, the next step was 'guns' and he tried to form an armed militia."

Lang says that he would "100 percent back the Trump MAGA agenda in United States Congress" if he wins against Moody, whom he calls a "Ron DeSantis loyalist."

"We have basically another DeSantis versus Trump type of election here," Lang says. "Ashley Moody is staunchly uniparty, RINO Republican establishment. And I am a political outsider, just like Trump."

He notes that several other "January Sixers" are planning to run for various government positions, including school boards, local sheriff's offices, Congress, and the Senate.

In a recent interview with New Times, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio, who Trump also recently pardoned and released from prison, weighed a future run for Matt Gaetz’s former District 1 seat near Pensacola, which Gaetz has said he has no interest in reclaiming.

"If I do run, I want to be in that building that they accused me of trying to storm," Tarrio said.