On Dec. 8, President-elect Donald Trump said in an NBC interview that he plans to pardon those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol on his first day in office. What shape that pardon takes — whether Trump issues a full pardon or a limited one, or simply commutes some of the defendants’ sentences — is uncertain, but experts on extremism fear that the move may legitimize political violence.
Jan. 6 defendants face a variety of charges as the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeks to hold participants in that day’s events accountable. All face some form of trespassing or disorderly conduct charges, totaling at least 1,583 charges filed for crimes related to Jan. 6, according to the DOJ’s most recent report today. An estimated 608 defendants have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement agents, and 174 have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
According to the DOJ’s January report, 1,009 have pleaded guilty: Around 327 defendants pleaded guilty to felonies while 682 pleaded guilty just to misdemeanors. One hundred and seventy-two individuals have pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers while 69 have pleaded guilty to doing so with a dangerous or deadly weapon. Four defendants have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, and 10 have been put on trial for seditious conspiracy and found guilty.
The DOJ estimates that over 140 police officers were assaulted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and courts have found that a variety of different weapons were used and carried into the building, including firearms, pepper spray, edged weapons such as swords, axes and knives, as well as all manner of makeshift weapons.
In total, 221 individuals proceeded to trial and were found guilty in U.S. District Court for crimes related to Jan. 6. (Very few defendants facing federal criminal charges ever reach trial. In 2022, Pew Research found that 89.5% of defendants in federal cases pleaded guilty, 8.2% had their cases dismissed at some point before trial, and only 2.3% of cases were tried.)
Katherine Keneally, Director of Threat Analysis and Prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told New Lines that a pardon for Jan. 6 defendants would legitimize the crimes committed that day and the conspiratorial beliefs around election denial that inspired the storming of the Capitol. “It will essentially send the message that what they did was OK, while validating the conspiracy theories that have spread or that led people to get involved that day,” Keneally said.
Moreover, defendants pardoned for violent crimes related to Jan. 6 would avoid accountability for their actions. “It decreases the deterrence effect when people commit crimes and they are released after they were found guilty,” Keneally added.
Ford Fischer operates the independent news outlet News2Share. A self-described “primary-source documentarian,” he has spent over a decade filming large demonstrations and political activism across the U.S.
Fischer told New Lines he noticed a pattern in which extremist groups, white nationalist groups and neo-Nazis mobilize, show up at public demonstrations, are held accountable when they commit crimes and then go into hiding until another event emboldens them.
Fischer points to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as an example of this pattern, albeit with a few differences from Jan. 6.
“When it came to the event in Charlottesville, it was really only the most extreme things that caused arrests,” Fischer said, “but they did not go and hunt down people who participated in fist fighting and so forth, whereas they did that as it relates to Jan. 6.”
Those groups involved in violence at Charlottesville faced lawsuits and criminal charges afterward, but other groups, such as those involved in militia movements, came out unscathed, partly due to their limited presence there, Fischer said.
Similarly, after Jan. 6 the two largest named groups believed to be involved, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, faced massive arrests which Fischer said sent the far right into decline.
“You have your people who are the most willing to participate and fight and so forth [and] are self-selecting to go do the things that then get you arrested,” Fischer said in a phone interview. “All of the leadership who are willing to participate in that kind of thing, many of the types of people who would be fighting on the front lines of this type of stuff — hundreds of people are getting arrested, and there’s an increased sense of paranoia.”
That paranoia took the form of conspiracy theories that federal agents were involved or that antifa was behind the mayhem; in either case, the logic followed that those who showed up to the Capitol to stop the electoral certification were the ones being blamed.
“The far right became not only defanged because all their people were getting arrested,” Fischer said, “but they became deeply paranoid and scared that any future event might be some kind of bait to get them into trouble, or that they would get in trouble either way.”
These conspiratorial explanations for why those involved in Jan. 6 began facing consequences for their actions have been echoed frequently by right-wing media personalities like Tucker Carlson as well as by Trump, who referred to those convicted as “hostages” during the 2024 campaign.
In March 2023, Carlson, in a segment on his Fox News show, aired footage provided to him by then-Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that downplayed the violence that day and claimed participants were given access to the Capitol by federal authorities.
Trump praised Carlson’s segment at the time and, in his recent NBC interview, repeated false claims that the Jan. 6 crowd had been infiltrated by law enforcement and anti-Trump operatives.
The conspiracy theories that originally purported to explain why Jan. 6 participants were facing consequences for their actions became a partisan tool used by the GOP to reshape perceptions of the events that day.
There are also a few select cases where Jan. 6 defendants were not Trump supporters, Fischer says, and so Trump may not wish to pardon them. For example, Salt Lake City resident John Sullivan was sentenced to six years in prison for his attempts to incite those around him to violence. While not a Trump supporter, Sullivan claimed on video that was played before jurors that he aimed to “make those Trump supporters fuck shit up.” He has since become the focus of conspiracy theories that allege violence was committed by the president-elect’s critics rather than his supporters.
“In individual cases like that I would guess that Trump wouldn’t want them to sort of benefit from his generosity,” Fischer said.
A recent DOJ report found that over two dozen FBI informants were in Washington ahead of Jan. 6, but there were no undercover agents present during the storming of the Capitol.
The distinction between confidential informants and undercover agents is made blurry by Fox News coverage of that report, echoing conspiratorial claims that it was not the participants themselves but law enforcement that was responsible for the violence on Jan. 6. This is significant insofar as President-elect Trump pays close attention to Fox News for his own media diet, having recently nominated Fox’s Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.
In the NBC interview, Trump also mentioned that some of the defendants were held “in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
The D.C. jail where several dozen Jan. 6 defendants have been held before their trials is unsafe and poorly managed, having faced numerous public controversies over its facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Partisan attention to the treatment of Jan. 6 defendants has inadvertently cast some light on larger structural issues around American criminal justice, if only selectively.
Following Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tour of the jail, Democratic officials did their own tours, after which they emphasized that Jan. 6 defendants are held in an isolated, newer wing. Jasmine Crockett, the Texas Democratic representative, said in a press conference outside the jail that those held in other parts of the facility typically face worse conditions. The New York Times’ reporting on politicians touring the jail reveals how the detainees’ treatment was brought into the national spotlight but filtered through partisan politics.
Overall, the revisionist history of Jan. 6 flies directly in the face of the empirical record of what happened that day.
Keneally said a full pardon would yield consequences beyond involvement in extremist groups, noting that a mass release without systems in place for reentry into society could pose problems.
“The prison system is already not great by any means when it comes to reentry into society of those who have been released,” she said, “And so, I think there’s a genuine concern that the release of a large number of people who have been increasingly radicalized over the last however many years, depending on the sentence, could have significant implications.”
Extremist groups tend to go into hiding when their members are held accountable for their actions. A pardon for the Jan. 6 defendants would send the opposite message. The ramifications of such a pardon for future political violence are unclear, but the signs are ominous.
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