Former Santa Rosa resident Evan Neumann, fugitive of charges from the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., speaks out from Belarus

While his convictions about the 2020 election haven’t changed much, Evan Neumann says that if he could do it again he would not have traveled to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, to protest Congress’ ratification of the vote.

Neumann still questions whether the election was fairly tabulated, despite the lack of any official or legal finding to the contrary. And, echoing conspiracies that have proliferated on the right, he suggests the crowd at the U.S. Capitol during the ensuing riot could have been salted with provocateurs who urged on the violence. Or, that the day was a “honey pot” operation, where law enforcement allowed crimes to be committed so they could punish the perpetrators later.

Three years later, Neumann is isolated from his family, wanted by the FBI and trying to build a new life in Eastern Europe. He misses his children, two young teenagers still in California, and he is unsure how to bring them over for a visit at this point.

“If I had some kind of a crystal ball to see the future, then I wouldn't have gone,” Neumann said. “But I never predicted this.”

Neumann spoke to a Press Democrat reporter by phone from Belarus. He has been living in that country, an ally of Russia, since August 2021, when he fled across the border from Ukraine. Belarus granted him political asylum, with media fanfare, in early 2022.

Neumann, 51, is charged with 14 crimes including “assaulting, resisting or impeding officers.” According to his indictment, Neumann assaulted four police officers over the course of the day with both his fists and by picking up a metal barricade and ramming it into a line of police.

With little belief that the charges against him will be dropped, and no apparent interest in coming home to face the justice system, he is settling in for the long haul in Brest, a city of cobblestone streets and Old World charm.

The former Santa Rosa hotelier — from 1996 to 2000, Neumann was general manager of the iconic Hotel La Rose in Railroad Square, then owned by his parents — is working to open a restaurant. It will serve American cuisine, Neumann said, but will be more upscale than hamburgers.

Neumann denies that he assaulted any officers and says the evidence against him is based off still photographs taken from videos without context. He said a photograph of his fist appearing to strike an officer is of his non-dominant hand and could have been an attempt by him to ward off pepper spray or stop himself from falling. While he gripped the barricade and it did move toward police, Neumann maintained it was a result of movement down the line of fence and that he did not use it as a battering ram.

According to his indictment, largely based on body camera footage, Neumann called police officers “little b-----s,” who “kneel to antifa” and said to one officer, “I’m willing to die. Are you?”

But, “I know that my frame of mind was of nonviolence and passive resistance,” Neumann told The Press Democrat.

Still, he has no intention of coming home and defending himself in the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., where more than 900 participants in the riot have pleaded guilty or been convicted of federal crimes so far.

“I would be found guilty regardless,” Neumann said. “There's a lot of a lot of people who have strong political views in Washington, D.C., and they're very anti-Trump and anti-Trump supporters. And so it doesn't matter really what the charges would be. I would not get a fair trial there.”

Neumann considers the effort to prosecute participants in the Jan. 6 riot politically motivated. The event was a protest, like others he has attended — he has previously stated he was present during the massive pro-democracy protests in Ukraine in the early 2000s.

And politics aside, Neumann notes, federal prosecutors aren’t often in the habit of dropping charges, once they’ve brought a case. He does not know what, if any, new charges he may have accumulated by evading justice and taking political asylum, he said.

Neumann does want the FBI to drop the “armed and dangerous” label from his fugitive status though. Though he owned a shotgun and pistol in the U.S., he did not bring them to D.C. (he flew) and has no guns abroad, he said. Neumann fears the label could lead law enforcement to shoot first and ask questions later, if they ever caught up to him.

A new life

If the restaurant works, it won’t be Neumann’s first success as an entrepreneur. He has sold a software program for hotel reservation data, amid other business successes — he sold a house in Mill Valley for $1.3 million after leaving the country, according to a Press Democrat profile from December 2021.

Neumann left the country for Italy a month after the riot. He says he was not fleeing at that point, but was on a business trip to check on the production of a line of purses. But he also conceded that “multiple factors” went into the decision to travel abroad at that point. If Neumann didn’t know the mounting legal trouble he faced when he booked his flight, he certainly knew after he was questioned, but released, by FBI agents at San Francisco International Airport.

From Italy, Neumann traveled to Ukraine, where he said he went to work for a stone quarry making sales into the American market. He fled that country on foot in August 2021, he said, after fearing he was to be arrested ahead of a summit between Ukrainian and U.S. officials. Neumann says he was followed, barely escaped arrest and feared being a bargaining chip as Ukraine sought American weapons — all claims The Press Democrat was unable to confirm.

There’s reason to question Neumann’s belief that he avoided an unbearable prison sentence through flight abroad. He doesn’t think he would plead guilty in court, he said, “and even if I did, that would be decades in prison. And I'll be honest, I don't think I would survive decades in prison. I’m not that personality.”

Only a handful of the insurrection's most prominent leaders have faced long sentences, even after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and plotting for months to disrupt Congress.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the far-right militia movement the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison and three years of supervised probation for seditious conspiracy and other crimes. Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the former leader of the possibly even more violent Proud Boys, received 22 years for seditious conspiracy, perhaps the longest sentence.

Peter Schwartz, a Kentucky man who threw a chair at police officers and sprayed them with pepper spray, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. But Schwartz’s criminal record included 38 other convictions. Other rioters charged with assaulting officers have received sentences of less than five years.

Neumann has past convictions but nothing to the tune of Schwartz’s rap sheet. In 2007, Neumann was convicted on one count of illegal marijuana possession. In October 2017, after the Tubbs Fire destroyed his parents’ Fountaingrove home, Neumann and his brother were arrested when they crossed a National Guard barricade in an attempt to search the remains. He pleaded out to a misdemeanor and received two years of probation.

The average sentence for people who pleaded guilty to felonies in the 2021 insurrection has been around 2.5 years, according to data reported in The Washington Post, while the average sentence for those convicted at trial has been around five years.

Jonathan Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism who has been tracking the fallout from Jan. 6, said Neumann appears to be rationalizing his own behavior.

“He basically doesn’t want to go (to prison), which, super fair, but call it what it is,” Lewis said.

There are “certainly a lot of very fair conversations” that can be had about federal prosecutors’ charging decisions, Lewis said. But Neumann’s suggestions that the event was a trap or the prosecutions are intended to harm Trump’s political movement is in itself a belief with political motivations, he said, and one echoing right-wing media.

“For the vast majority of Jan. 6 defendants, especially those who are fugitives and on the run, there is a self-interest in seeing the justice system delegitimized,” Lewis said.

Neumann, Lewis said, “has to reject the very nature of everything that happened.”

The Belarus resident is in fact one of few fugitives left out of the Jan. 6 cases, and probably the only one who has received political asylum in another country, Lewis said.

Neumann is right, according to Lewis, not to expect the federal government to back off his case, at least under the current administration.

“The Department of Justice has shown a commitment to executing this stated mission of holding accountable every single individual who committed criminal activity on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol,“ Lewis said.

Most Americans consider the sentences for Jan. 6 rioters fair. Even most Republicans — 55%, according to a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll — believe the legal penalties for people charged with crimes for assaulting officers or breaching the Capitol are fair or “not harsh enough.” They share that view with 70% of independent voters and 90% of Democrats.

But the same poll indicated that many Americans, Republicans in particular, also say the nation’s leaders have made too much out of the riot and that it’s time to move on. Seventy percent of Republicans take that view, according to the poll, though the majority of Democrats and independent voters do not.

That division nods toward what Neumann sees as the one clear, prison-free route in which he could return the United States, something he says he very much wants to do: “Missing my children’s teenage years is very hard,” he said.

His best hope, he believes, is that Donald Trump is elected in November and, after his inauguration, makes good on his stump speech suggestions of pardoning everyone charged with crimes over storming the Capitol. But even Neumann, who wouldn’t be in exile if he didn’t entertain Trump’s false claims that the election was rigged, doesn’t put too much stock in the possibility of sweeping pardons.

“Trump is Trump,” Neumann said. “He may say something today and decide that it's not convenient tomorrow.”

Neumann puts the chances of the charges against him being dropped at about 25%, he said. “50-50 that Trump can get elected and then 50-50 that he can get amnesty,” he said.

He tries not to dwell too often on his decision to travel to D.C. in January 2021.

“That only causes depression,” he said. “I think about my future, my business. … I like the idea of bringing some nice food to the people of Belarus.”

Now that he has refugee papers, Neumann is free to move about the country and abroad, he said, though he has not left Belarus out of concern of being arrested and extradited. He likes Brest, he said, the city he waited in while his asylum processed, and has chosen to stay there.

The region is a food-producing one with beef ranching and forests full of wild berries like huckleberries as well as chanterelles, Neumann said.

There are no vineyards, he said, but with its natural and agricultural bounties, ”it’s a little bit like Sonoma County.“

This story has been updated to indicate that Evan Neuman previously stated he’d attended pro-Democracy protests in the Ukraine, as outlined in prior reporting in The Press Democrat.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on X (Twitter) @AndrewGraham88