A former State Department president appointed by former President Donald Trump on Friday complained about the conditions of imprisonment to a judge after being arrested for breaking into the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Federico Guillermo Klein, 42, became the first Trump administration official to be arrested for participating in the insurrection, during which he allegedly assaulted an officer with a gun. At his first appearance on Friday, Klein refused to enter an argument, but asked US magistrate Zia M. Faruqui to be removed from his detention center due to poor conditions.
“I wonder if there is a place where I can be detained where I don’t have cockroaches crawling over me while I try to sleep,” he said, according to the Washington Post. “I mean, I didn’t really sleep much, Your Honor. It would be nice if I could sleep in a place where there were no cockroaches everywhere.”
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Faruqui assured Klein that he would soon be transferred to a prison in DC and that the authorities would deal with the dirty conditions in his detention center.
“Very well, I appreciate that,” he said.
Court documents also accused Klein of opening a door and inciting the crowd to gather reinforcements during the siege. “We need new people, we need new people,” he said in the midst of chaos, according to the Publish.
At one point, Klein would have lost his Make America Great Again cap and grabbed the wrong one from the ground during the chaos.
In a statement, a State Department spokesman confirmed that Klein worked for the department between 2017 and January 19, 2021, when he resigned. He was still on the team when he participated in the rebellion on January 6. “This is being investigated by the FBI, and they are the appropriate agency to answer specific questions about the charges,” added the spokesman.
Trump appointed Klein shortly after his inauguration on January 22, 2017. According to ProPublica, Klein earned $ 66,510 in his role as a special assistant in the Office of Brazilian Affairs and the Southern Cone.
A spokesman for the FBI field office in Washington told the Politician that Klein was taken into custody in the state of Virginia.
Klein has been accused of several crimes, including interfering with the police during civil unrest, assaulting police officers, impeding official prosecution and knowingly engaging in any act of physical violence against any person or property in any restricted building or land.
The State Department refused Newsweek’s request for more comments.