“Incredibly damaging”: the fallout from Trump’s January 6 pardons

In the four years since Donald Trump set off an insurrection at the US Capitol, the Department of Justice and the FBI conducted one of the largest federal criminal investigations in history. Among the nearly 1,600 people charged, the DOJ successfully prosecuted scores of Trump supporters whose crimes on January 6, 2021, included vicious attacks on law enforcement. Many of those convictions were straightforward, due to extensive video footage and other clear evidence documenting the violence.

Approximately 140 police officers were injured that day, some severely; as a source familiar with Capitol Police operations told me recently, some officers suffered permanent disfigurement, debilitating cases of PTSD, and other lasting trauma. At least four officers who responded that day subsequently took their own lives. The Jan. 6 attackers—many of whom had gone to the Capitol prepared for violence—used weapons including chemical sprays, tasers, baseball bats, hockey sticks, pipes, metal flagpoles, and allegedly even explosive devices.

On Jan. 20, immediately after being inaugurated as the 47th president, Trump granted clemency to them all.

Convicts he freed from prison included those who dragged a police officer down the Capitol steps and others who attacked law enforcement using batons and shields seized from officers. With his clemency order, Trump also put an end to scores of Jan. 6 criminal investigations that were still open, including alleged attacks on police.

“It’s incredibly damaging—this was a major task force, an unprecedented effort, and now it’s all being thrown out as some supposed political witch hunt,” a source with direct knowledge of the sprawling investigation told me. “People need to understand the gravity of this. We’re already living in a heightened threat environment and now a social contract has been broken. Where’s the line now? This is deterrence thrown out and politically motivated violence being countenanced.”

“Think of all the specific video evidence of those attacks on cops at the Capitol,” the source added. “It’s undeniable, and those offenders were convicted in a court of law. Respect for the law and law enforcement will be diminished by this.”

Trump cultivated ambiguity after the presidential election about how far he might take his long-running vow to pardon J6 convicts, even suggesting that he might not include violent offenders. (A week before inauguration day, JD Vance went so far as to say on Fox News that violent peperpetrators “obviously shouldn’t be pardoned.”)

But the fallout from Trump’s brazen decision is clear in multiple ways. As my colleague Dan Friedman reported, the sweeping clemency also unleashed legal chaos, muddying cases of violent suspects who also faced additional charges for illegal weapons, obstruction, and plotting to murder FBI agents.

The blanket pardons—along with Trump freeing 10 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were imprisoned for seditious conspiracy—are part of a broad effort by Trump to cement a false narrative of his political career after his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020. As national security expert Juliette Kayyem told me last month about the imminent pardons: “He wants to erase his election loss and what really happened on January 6.” These efforts by Trump and his allies give his extremist supporters a narrative of martyrdom, she said, “a really good way to rebuild right-wing terrorist organizations.”

“The attempted rewriting of history is astounding,” the source with knowledge of the FBI investigation said, concurring that the clemency from Trump “is emboldening in a big way” for violent extremist groups who supported him.

Shortly after Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was freed from prison, he went on Alex Jones’ show and disparaged the criminal justice process, calling for retribution against the federal prosecutors who put him and many others behind bars. “Now it’s our turn,” Tarrio declared, thanking Trump. “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat.” Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers who was released from prison, also touted Trump’s baseless narrative of January 6 and called for payback, talking up Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, and urging him to “clean house.”

Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the clemency “a pretty catastrophic moment for domestic counterterrorism.” Ware told the Washington Post that members of these groups now see “the return of battle-hardened leaders, who in addition to having a kind of real-life legitimacy due to having actually fought the government, will also have a strong sense of victimhood and martyrdom, which will further radicalize and fuel recruitment platforms.” He said that this will “make combating terrorism far more difficult, not just over the next four years as groups feel like they have an ally in the White House, but beyond that as well.”

As an emboldened Trump tests the limits of his renewed presidential power on this and other fronts, the political response to his Jan. 6 pardons has been grim in its own right. Apart from a few tepid and qualified comments of disapproval, Republicans in Congress have done virtually nothing to push back. Lawmakers from what was once known as the party of “law and order” even voiced support for Trump freeing the police assaulters and seditionists—echoing Trump’s unsupported claim that DOJ acted corruptly, or baselessly suggesting that Trump had a mandate from voters for what he did.

Two days after Trump’s inauguration and the mass clemency, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson announced a new subcommittee whose purpose he claimed is to “expose the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee.” Johnson was referring to the bipartisan House committee that collected and made public in 2023 a large body of evidence on how Trump incited, and then did nothing to stop, the insurrection.

In the days since Trump ordered the mass pardons, several federal judges who presided over January 6 cases used further court proceedings to reject Trump’s revisionist history.

“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,” one judge wrote.

The mass pardons, wrote another, “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake,” further saying of the January 6 cases: “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”