Moments later, according to the complaint, Neumann grabbed a metal barricade and shoved it into a line of officers.
“After striking officers with the barricade and also with his fist, Neumann, now joined by others, broke down the barricades. He then used the barricade as a battering ram, rushing toward the officers,” the indictment alleges.
Throughout the afternoon of Jan. 6, according to the indictment, Neumann allegedly assaulted three officers from the Metropolitan Police Department and one from the Capitol Police. In the original complaint, he’d been charged with attacking just one officer. The December 10 indictment added new charges.
Facing prison time, Neumann made plans to get out of the country. After leaving his Mill Valley home — which has since been sold for $1.3 million — he was followed to San Francisco International Airport on February 16 by FBI agents, who questioned him, then let him go.
Snakes, spiders, quicksand
After visiting Italy, Neumann later told the Russian television network RT, he went to Ukraine to pursue “a business opportunity.”
While there, he noticed that he was being followed — presumably, he said, by members of Ukraine’s secret police, whom he suspected would turn him over to the United States.
With only “a few” countries that would “protect me from the United States of America,” he told RT, he decided to walk across the border to Belarus, an adventure that included passing through a swamp “with snakes and wild boars and more spiders than you could imagine.” At one point, he said, “I fell in quicksand.”
After requesting asylum, Neumann spent several days in a detention center before being moved to his current residence in Minsk, he said.
Describing the events of Jan. 6 to his Russian interviewer, Neumann recalled that police “were very aggressive where I was.” He spoke of seeing a man break a Capitol building window with a hammer, “then he gestured for us to enter.”
Based on the man’s action’s, Neumann continued, “he probably was not with the protests.”
“I can’t say who he was, or what organization he was with, whether he was with antifa, or BLM, or some other group.”
In addition to that 15-minute segment, Neumann was featured in the Belarus state television special, “Goodbye America,” in which he recalls that the doors of the Capitol “were opened from inside. We were invited to come in.”
Discussing his future with the reporter, Neumann said, “I’m an American, and I would like to go back to America, if I’m allowed.
“I also like Belarus. The country is very clean and orderly.”
The country had “done him a big favor” by taking him in. “And I want to return this favor by being a productive, good citizen.”
The orderliness Neumann so admires is a result, in part, of the Lukashenko government’s practice of imprisoning, and torturing those it views as a threat. Following the presidential election of August, 2020 — widely understood to have been rigged — Belarusian security forces detained and tortured thousands of people.
So there’s “more than a little irony,” noted Stephen Bittner, a Russia expert and history professor at Sonoma State University, “that this man has fled to Belarus in order to escape supposed torture in American prisons.”
Neumann’s slanted characterizations of the events of Jan. 6, along with his willingness to demean his native country, will prove useful to Lukashenko and Russian president Vladimir Putin, who enjoys “poking the West,” said Bittner, “pointing out that the West is guilty of many of the same things it accuses Russia of” — including human rights violations, crony capitalism and the erosion of democratic norms.
Neumann’s usefulness as a propaganda tool is limited, Bittner believes, by widespread skepticism of the media.
Younger, urban, educated Belarusians, in particular, “know that everything they get from state sanctioned media — all of that is false.”
Should Neumann end up staying in Belarus, he’ll be some 750 miles due east of his father’s old home in Marienburg, now part of Poland.
Even if he can’t get permission to visit Marienburg, Evan might peruse the pages of Claus’s memoir. Near the end of that book, Claus writes of lessons he’d learned from life as a boy in Nazi Germany, this among them:
“If we had not blindly followed our leaders, we could have avoided this.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.
