A Jan. 6 defendant “simply invented” the medical emergency in a D.C. jail that led a federal judge to hold two top Department of Corrections officials in contempt earlier this month. On Oct. 13, after Worrell claimed officials had failed to turn over critical information needed to approve surgery for a broken pinky finger, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth furiously decried the delay. This week, the Department of Justice said that Dr. Robert Wilson, Proud Boy Christopher Worrell’s physician, determined that Worrell’s finger had healed normally after being treated with a splint cast. Instead, medical records have shown, Worrell had demanded surgery because he was “primarily dissatisfied with the appearance of his pinky finger.”

The defendant, who has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, also claimed his cancer medication was being withheld, and that he had had a severe case of COVID-19 that left him bedridden. The DOJ found little evidence to back up either assertion, though it did note that the government considered Worrell’s cancer “a dangerous underlying condition.” The Wednesday filing couched, however, that “the government has repeatedly been unable to sort fact from fiction in reviewing Mr. Worrell’s many claims of medical mistreatment, because those claims have often been refuted, or at least unsubstantiated, by the medical notes and records” it reviewed.