As Jan. 6 leaders call for retribution, judges warn against revisionism
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, talks to the media outside the D.C. Department of Corrections after being pardoned for crimes related to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. (Photo by Allison Robbert for The Washington Post)
Two newly freed leaders of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups called for investigations into the prosecution of people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, assailing judges, jurors and prosecutors as they sought “retribution” after being granted clemency from President Donald Trump.
The statements by Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, released from sentences of 22 years and 18 years for seditious conspiracy, came before House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) on Wednesday announced formation of a new Judiciary subcommittee led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia) to investigate the House’s own investigation of the Capitol riot four years ago.
The moves underscored how the punishments of Jan. 6 defendants have become a rallying cry for parts of Trump’s base, and how his pardons of all of nearly 1,600 defendants—including, controversially, those convicted of political violence and assaults against police—have fed into GOP efforts to punish Democrats for what they call the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.
They also mark a deeper fight over how the history of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach will ultimately be written.
On Wednesday, several federal judges granted the Justice Department’s pardon-based requests to dismiss cases while saying in their rulings that the true story of Jan. 6 could not be whitewashed.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in dismissing one riot defendant’s case.
The record in these cases—thousands of videos, trial transcripts, verdicts and legal opinions analyzing the evidence through a neutral lens—“are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies,” the judge said.
President Donald Trump speaks to leadership with, from left, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), Vice President JD Vance, First Lady Melania Trump, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise as he signs documents after his swearing-in Monday. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post)The clash came as newly pardoned defendants and their allies used their freedom to flood airwaves and lobby Capitol Hill. Tarrio addressed reporters upon returning home to Miami after serving 34 months of a 22-year prison term for seditious conspiracy.
“Now it’s our turn,” said Tarrio, who received the longest sentence in the riot for mobilizing his right-wing group as an “army” to keep Trump in power through violence as Congress met to confirm the 2020 election. Trial evidence showed that he and his lieutenants, inspired by Trump’s directive to “stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate and join a “wild” protest on Jan. 6, drew scores of followers to Washington who helped instigate the mob at the Capitol.
Tarrio called into Infowars.com, the web stream hosted by pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, hours after his Tuesday release and claimed to be the victim of a campaign to put Trump supporters in prison. He called for imprisoning Biden attorney general Merrick Garland for “corruption” to “give him a taste of his own medicine.”
“The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars and they need to be prosecuted,” Tarrio said. “Success is going to be retribution.
“We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure that the next four years sets us up for the next hundred years.”
Rhodes, whose 18-year term was commuted after he served 2½ years, on Wednesday said he met with three GOP lawmakers at the Capitol, seeking to win a full pardon for himself and 13 others who received only commutations. He also sought relief from post-release supervision requirements and the loss of veteran disability payments.
“I want all 14 of the guys who received commutations to receive pardons,” Rhodes said. “And then after that, I want reform.”
Rhodes and his followers were convicted of stashing a “mini-arsenal” of firearms in hotels surrounding Washington for use at Rhodes’s call, hoping that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and deputize them in charge of private militia to keep him in office.
After his release the previous day, Rhodes maintained that the 2020 election was “stolen” and the Capitol riot the work of what one person who interviewed him described as “a Jan. 6 fed-surrection coverup.”
Asked outside the D.C. jail Tuesday if he would serve as Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” Rhodes outlined a plan to investigate police witnesses and prosecutors “on up the chain.”
Analysts warned that while pardons after violent moments in U.S. history—such as those offered to Confederate soldiers after the Civil War—were meant to be part of a process of reconstructing the country, Trump’s pardons seemed different. They said Trump’s decision appeared to be based on rewarding personal loyalty to himself and to validate his baseless claims that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by fraud.
“It is not clear from Trump’s statements that his interest in the January 6th convicts incorporates a larger vision about reconciliation or domestic tranquility after conflict or about the best path forward for American democracy,” said political scientist Julie Novkov, dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. Rather, they may align with “his pledges to pursue his perceived opponents and enemies.”
Novkov cautioned that if Trump reinforces his claims of election denialism and justification for violent popular resistance to the transfer of power, it might encourage other actors to take further measures in the hopes of winning his support.
How Jan. 6 will be viewed by historians “depends mostly on what happens next,” said Columbia University historian Eric Foner, one of the country’s leading experts on the Civil War and the Reconstruction.
“If Trump’s second term now turns out to be fairly normal—although Trump is not a normal character—then maybe the memory of Jan. 6 will just fade away,” Foner said.
But the idea of interfering in the electoral process—the peaceful transfer of power that had been the American experiment’s contribution to posterity—“is alive and well,” Foner said, “and if that continues and grows, that will be an unfortunate feature of American democracy going forward.”
In an opinion Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell dismissed cases against two pardoned Proud Boys members but declined to go along with a Trump Justice Department request to do so “with prejudice,” which would keep them from being charged again.
The distinction has little practical effect. The five-year statute of limitations on such charges ends Jan. 6, 2026, in less than a year, well before Trump’s term ends. Howell’s point was that prosecutors in citing Trump’s pardon declaration failed to provide any factual basis to contradict evidence the men submitted in plea papers.
Howell defended the work of the courts, prosecutors, defenders and other public servants in the criminal justice system, saying they had afforded “those charged every protection guaranteed by our Constitution.” And she rejected “the revisionist myth” in Trump’s pardon proclamation, which stated that it “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years” and “begins a process of national reconciliation.”
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Howell concluded. “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity.”
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