January 6 defendants leave jail as Trump pardons draw sharp reactions
More than 200 people convicted of the Capitol Hill riots have been released from custody within 12 hours of the US President’s inauguration.
Some of the highest-profile defendants convicted in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot were set free on Tuesday, local time, as President Trump’s broad grant of clemency drew mixed reactions within his own Republican Party and among those who stormed the building that day.
Those who walked out of prison included Enrique Tarrio, the pardoned former chairman of the far-right Proud Boys group who was sentenced to 22 years, and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whose 18-year sentence Trump commuted to time served.
Both were convicted of seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge stemming from the attack and one which required prosecutors to prove the men plotted to use force to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
“My son’s freedom...has been a dream come true! ” Tarrio’s mother, Zuny Tarrio, said in a post on X.
As of Tuesday morning, 211 people – every clemency recipient – who had been in federal Bureau of Prisons custody had been released, officials said, a process that took roughly 12 hours.
Trump’s stunning Day One move to give pardons or commutations to all of the roughly 1500 people charged in the attack instantly upended the largest investigation in the history of the Justice Department, whose lawyers spent much of Tuesday moving to dismiss a stream of pending cases – at Trump’s demand.
“Promises made, promises kept,” Rhodes told reporters Tuesday outside the local jail in southeast Washington, DC, where other January 6 defendants were starting to be released into the bitter cold.
Rhodes travelled there shortly after leaving a federal prison in Cumberland, Md., to show support for his fellow rioters.
Those released before he arrived included brothers Matthew and Andrew Valentin, who had been sentenced last week to 2½ years in prison for assaulting police during the attack.
Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” blared from a nearby speaker as a crowd awaited their release late Monday.
Trump’s clemency grant was far more expansive than even some of his allies had expected.
In the weeks before his return to the White House, Trump suggested that he would consider the January 6 defendants on a case-by-case basis.
Vice President JD Vance said days ago that people who committed violence that day “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned.
The move outraged Democrats and unsettled some Republicans who had hoped Trump would stop short of showing leniency to those who had attacked law-enforcement officers.
“For many of them, it was probably the right thing to do,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R. NC) told reporters on Tuesday.
“But anyone who was convicted of assault on a police officer, I just can’t get there at all. I think it was a bad idea.”
Trump allies in the House Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, travelled on Tuesday afternoon to the Washington jail in an effort to hasten the release of some defendants being held there.
“This was a politicised prosecution,” Rep. Chip Roy, (R., Texas) said on a Fox News radio show while waiting outside the jail.
“The president issued pardons, and these guys should honour that.”
The January 6 prosecutions represented a monumental four-year federal effort to hold Trump supporters accountable for trying to disrupt congressional proceedings to certify former President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland called the riot an attack on American democracy.
Federal prosecutors were still announcing charges against additional people in the final days of Biden’s presidency.
Trump’s newly installed US attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, a conservative activist who had advocated for the January 6 defendants, spent his first moments on the job moving to dismiss the pending cases.
Prosecutors’ work wasn’t undone because it created a robust public record “that will exist in perpetuity, documenting the facts of January 6, for anyone who actually cares to understand the facts,” said Matt Graves, the former US attorney in Washington whose office handled the cases.
Graves estimated roughly 250 people were still in jails or prisons before the clemency grant, most of whom were facing charges of or were already convicted of violent offences.
”This disproportionately benefits those who engaged in violence that day,” he said.
Some defendants on the receiving end of Trump’s mercy felt mixed emotions.
Doug Sweet, 62 years old, who pleaded guilty to two misdemeanours, said he was elated at being pardoned for his actions at the Capitol, where he says he told police officers he wanted to speak with members of the House or Senate about the 2020 election.
“Being pardoned is just icing on the cake,” he said on Tuesday from his home in southeast Virginia. “Not many people can say they got a presidential pardon. I guess I can.”
When he was sentenced in 2021, he expressed some remorse for his actions, and got three years’ probation and a month of home confinement. More recently, he has said he has no regrets and insisted he did nothing wrong.
But Sweet, a Trump supporter, said he questioned the decision to pardon people convicted of violence against police.
“I don’t believe in resisting arrest at all,” he said. “I think those who actually struck back at the police, I kind of feel like they ought to have some charges on their records. You can’t go punching the cops.”
Still, he said he understood why Trump opted for blanket pardons: “I think he wanted to get it done fast.”
Pam Hemphill, of Idaho, who served 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to misdemeanour charges, said she planned to refuse the presidential pardon.
“It’d be an insult to the Capitol Police and the rule of law, and to our nation,” she said.
“I pleaded guilty because I was guilty. I don’t want to be a part of contributing to them trying to rewrite history – that January 6 was not an insurrection. It was. It was a riot. And I think taking a pardon is like a message that what happened that day was OK.”
Hemphill, 71, a retired substance-abuse counsellor, likened the release of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys defendants to a “free ‘go ahead and abuse people’ card,” and said she worried they would disrupt peaceful anti-Trump protests.
A Wall Street Journal poll earlier this month found 57 per cent of voters were opposed to Trump pardoning those convicted in the Capitol riot and were only slightly more favourable to such a reprieve if it didn’t include those charged with violently assaulting police officers.
Trump voter Dorothy Whittaker, a 79-year-old retiree in central Florida, applauded the pardons, which she noted came after Biden pre-emptively pardoned several members of his own family.
She said Trump, in issuing the pardons, “went a long way to healing a wound that this country cannot afford to wash over and have it fester”.
To Whittaker, the January 6 prosecutions were tainted from the start by politics, so none of the convictions were valid, even for the truly guilty.
“It’s better that 10 guilty men go free than one sit in prison who’s innocent,” she said.
-C. Ryan Barber contributed to this article.
Wall Street Journal
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