Donald Trump calls them “patriots” and “hostages.” He says they could be pardoned within “nine minutes” after he sits in the Oval Office on January 20.
January 6, 2021, was “a day of love,” according to the president-elect. More than 1,500 people who have been criminally charged in connection with a mob’s assault on the Capitol — fuelled by his bogus narrative that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen from him — are now awaiting potential pardons for alleged crimes live-streamed to millions of viewers.
Defendants, many of whom have been banned from Washington, D.C., are increasingly asking judges for permission to attend Trump’s inauguration, while judges have quietly been raising alarms about looming pardons for some of the worst offenders.
Trump could issue mass amnesty to hundreds of defendants as soon as his first day in office, maintaining that even violent offenders could be granted clemency on a “case-by-case” basis.
The scale of legal absolution for January 6 defendants is still unclear, though his promised clemency and his re-election itself mark a symbolic victory for the movement that threatened to derail an American election.
In 2023, Trump appeared noncommittal about whether he would pardon some of the defendants charged with more serious crimes
“I don’t know. I’ll have to look at their case,” he said. “But I will say in Washington, D.C., you cannot get a fair trial, you cannot. Just like in New York City, you can’t get a fair trial either.”
Asked by NBC correspondent Kristen Welker after his election victory about the nearly 200 people who have pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement, Trump said “they had no choice.”
“Look, I know the system,” Trump said. “The system’s a very corrupt system.”
The leader of the far-right anti-government militia group was sentenced to 18 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of seditious conspiracy.
Stewart Rhodes and Oath Keepers members spent weeks discussing plans for their response to the 2020 election on encrypted messaging apps, then organized a weapons and supply cache at a nearby hotel before joining the mob.
Rhodes did not enter the building that day, but the founder of the group “not only contributed to the attack on the Capitol but helped to organize it,” federal prosecutors wrote in court filings.
Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the neo-fascist group, and three of his lieutenants who stormed the halls of Congress were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their roles in the attack. A jury did not reach a verdict for a fifth member of the group who was on trial.
Tarrio wasn’t even in Washington, D.C. on January 6, but the former leader and his allies “saw themselves as Donald Trump’s army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it,” according to federal prosecutors.
