By Alan Feuer
President Donald Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Trump’s moves amounted to an extraordinary reversal for rioters accused of both low-level, nonviolent offenses and for those who had assaulted police officers.
And they effectively erased years of efforts by federal investigators to seek accountability for the mob assault on the peaceful transfer of presidential power after Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. As part of his pardon order, Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss “all pending indictments” that remained against people facing charges for Jan. 6.
Sitting in the Oval Office, Trump said he hoped that many of the defendants could be released from prison as early as Monday night.
“They’ve already been in jail for a long time,” he said. “These people have been destroyed.”
The pardons Trump issued — “full, complete and unconditional,” he wrote — will touch the lives of about 1,000 defendants accused of misdemeanors like disorderly conduct, breaching the Capitol’s restricted grounds and trespassing at the building. Many of these rioters have served only days, weeks or months in prison — if any time at all.
The pardons will also wipe the slate clean for violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.
Moreover, Trump pardoned Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy — a crime that requires prosecutors to prove that a defendant used violent force against the government.
A representative for Tarrio said he had been released from a federal prison in Louisiana and was expected to return to Miami, his hometown, by Tuesday afternoon.
Trump’s actions drew an immediate firestorm of criticism, not least from some of the investigators who had worked on Jan. 6 cases.
“These pardons suggest that if you commit acts of violence, as long as you do so on behalf of a politically powerful person you may be able to escape consequences,” said Alexis Loeb, a former federal prosecutor who personally supervised many riot cases. “They undermine — and are a blow to — the sacrifice of all the officers who put themselves in the face of harm to protect democracy on Jan. 6.”
In a separate move, Trump commuted the prison sentences of five other Proud Boys, some of whom had been convicted at trial with Tarrio. He also commuted the sentences of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and eight of his subordinates.
Altogether, the commutations erased more than 100 years of prison time for the 14 defendants, almost all of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
The twin acts of clemency were greeted with jubilation by several Jan. 6 defendants, their families and the activists who had worked on their behalf, seeking to push Trump toward issuing the broadest version possible. Many Jan. 6 rioters had been riding high ever since Trump won the election in November, convinced that he would come to their aid and pardon everyone involved in the attack.
Trump’s actions were in essence his boldest moves yet in seeking to recast his supporters — and himself — as the victims, not the perpetrators, of Jan. 6. By granting clemency to the members of a mob that used physical violence to stop the democratic process in its tracks, Trump gave the imprimatur of the presidency to the rioters’ claims that they were not properly prosecuted criminal defendants, but rather unfairly persecuted political prisoners.
As a legal matter, the pardons and commutations effectively unwound the largest single criminal inquiry the Justice Department has undertaken in its 155-year history. They wiped away all of the charges that had already been brought and the sentences already handed down while also stopping any news cases from moving forward.
Starting virtually from the moment the Capitol was breached, investigators spent more than four years obtaining warrants for thousands of cellphones and Google accounts, scrolling through tens of thousands of hours of police body-camera and surveillance camera footage, and running down hundreds of thousands of tips from ordinary citizens.
Their work resulted in charges being brought in U.S. District Court in Washington — just blocks from the Capitol itself — against almost 1,600 people. More than 600 of those defendants were accused of assaulting or impeding law enforcement officers, many with weapons that included hockey sticks, firecrackers, crutches and broken wooden table legs.
More than half of the nearly 1,100 people who have been sentenced for their crimes were sentenced to at least some time in jail. Tarrio received the longest prison term of any defendant. He was followed closely by a Proud Boys member from California, David Dempsey, who had attacked the police with his hands, his feet, a flagpole, pepper spray and other weapons and was sent to prison for 20 years.
Both of those sentences will now be erased, along with others for far-right leaders like Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder, who was serving an 18-year prison term when the commutations were issued.
Trump appears to have decided to grant an expansive form of clemency relatively recently and after a debate among his advisers. In recent months, he has said different things to different people about how he planned to proceed, sometimes suggesting he would grant pardons to violent offenders, sometimes indicating that they would be reserved for those who did not act violently and were only charged with misdemeanors.
A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance said on Fox News that rioters who had assaulted the police would most likely not get pardons.
“If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” Vance said, but added that “there’s a little bit of a gray area there.”
Vance’s comments elicited almost immediate outrage among many of the rioters.
“J6 defendants are very angry at JD Vance,” Philip Anderson, who was accused of taking part in a violent scrum in a tunnel outside the Capitol, wrote on social media. “All J6 defendants need to be saved.”
Vance quickly tried to walk back his remarks.
“I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up,” he wrote on the social platform X. “Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial.”