US Marshals’ efforts around Trump’s January 6 pardons were “highly unusual”

As the US Marshals Service prepared for Donald Trump’s expected pardon of January 6 defendants, officials went to unusual lengths to facilitate the defendants’ travel home from the DC jail, newly obtained records show.

The records, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by the ethics watchdog CREW, are yet another window into the unprecedented nature of Trump’s decision to pardon some 1,500 people who participated in the 2021 Capitol siege. They detail how the Marshals Service, the law enforcement arm of the federal judiciary, which had custody of January 6 defendants before and during their trials, was trying to navigate the situation.   

Of particular note, the records show that Ronald Carter, the US marshal for DC, sent an email on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, asking federal judges to issue an order that would allow the government to pay for pardoned defendants’ transportation home.

It’s normally up to defense attorneys to make such a request—not the Marshals Service, which is also tasked with providing security to judges and is generally deferential to them. Carter’s email is “highly unusual,” Robert Cindrich, a retired US district judge in Pennsylvania, told me.

Carter then visited the chambers of at least four federal judges the following day to ask about the status of January 6 releases, after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) complained they were happening too slowly. “We’ve never seen anything like this before—pressuring the court to issue a decision by a [certain] time,” one judge told the Washington Post, which broke the news of Carter’s visit to the judicial chambers.

Carter’s email, which has not yet been reported, was atypical, agreed Robert Ledogar, who worked as a supervisory deputy marshal in New York until 2020. “As far as the marshals asking for specific language in an order,” he said, “that’s weird.”

The pardons themselves could be described similarly. For most of US history, presidential pardons have been granted to people after they leave prison—and almost never to those who haven’t been convicted yet, says Margaret Love, a former US pardon attorney for the Justice Department. But Trump’s proclamation freed hundreds from prisons and roughly a few dozen defendants still in pretrial detention (in Marshals Service custody).

In other words, the marshals, who don’t normally play any role in pardons, were in uncharted territory. Complicating matters, some of the defendants in DC’s jail did not live in the area—they’d driven or flown in to storm the Capitol and were now stuck far from home.

Trump had promised them pardons during his presidential campaign, but it was one month after the election, in a December 8 Meet the Press interview, that he vowed to get the job done on his first day in office. On December 9, the Marshals Service set about figuring out what it would need to do to help, according to an internal summary of the agency’s pardon preparations.

The following week, according to the records, Carter and his colleagues held separate meetings with staffers from the Office of the Pardon Attorney and a lawyer from the DC Department of Corrections who advised the Marshals Service that it usually takes four to five hours to process someone out of jail, but that his team “would get it done sooner” for the J6ers.

Carter would also meet with the US Attorneys’ Office, the Federal Public Defender office, the district court Clerk’s Office, and the Pretrial Services Agency to discuss each organization’s role—the government would need to figure out where the various defendants were located, which were eligible for release, and how they would be freed.

Although Biden still had a month left in office at the time of these meetings, it made sense for the marshals to be thinking ahead, according to Christopher Schroeder, an assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2021 to 2023. “They would not want to be completely unprepared for what everybody knew was coming,” he said, particularly given all the paperwork and logistical questions involved. Although J6ers housed by the federal Bureau of Prisons would be released automatically after Trump granted them pardons, those in Marshals Service pretrial custody would go through a slower and more complicated process—they would need a judicial order for their cases to be dropped.

On the day after Trump’s inauguration, many J6ers were already leaving prisons across the country, but some of the pardoned defendants at the DC jail were still awaiting release. Supporters gathered outside and chanted, “Let our people go!” They included members of the far-right group Proud Boys and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who had also just received clemency and was released from a prison in Maryland.

It was earlier that morning that Carter, the marshal, had emailed Chief Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court in DC about the defendants’ transportation. (Boasberg would later draw Trump’s ire when he tried to block the administration from sending Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador.)

“Good morning, Chief,” Carter wrote. “Per our discussion, can you ask the Judges to consider adding the below language in orders to release the J6 defendants?” Carter then cited a federal statute that gives courts the discretion to direct a marshal to “furnish the person so released with transportation and subsistence.” The law applies to people detained but not convicted. “Thank you in advance,” Carter wrote.

The statute is sometimes invoked to cover transportation for indigent defendants, though it’s unclear how many J6ers fit that criteria. Some had asked the government to cover their costs of traveling to DC for their hearings, but prosecutors generally opposed such requests, saying that if the defendant had enough money to come to the capital to commit their crime, they could afford to come back and answer for it.  

Boasberg declined to comment on Carter’s email. Speaking with reporters has become more dicey lately, a couple of retired judges told me; the judiciary has faced growing threats under the Trump administration, which loudly criticizes judges who slow down its agenda. Trump himself has attacked Boasberg as a “Radical Left Lunatic” and called for his impeachment.

Retired Judge Cindrich told me that in his decade on the federal bench, he never saw a marshal ask a judge to include any particular language in an order. And it appears the Marshals Service had been preparing for post-pardon transportation even before reaching out to Boasberg. As early as December 9, the documents show, agency staffers were planning to secure bus tickets for J6ers. By mid-January, the marshals had set aside $4,100 for ground transport and planned to arrange flights through an airline they manage, the Justice Prisoner Air Transportation System.

Ledogar, the former supervisory deputy marshal in New York, could only recall a few instances during his career when his team handled transportation for someone no longer in its custody. “It seems like an extraordinary bending over backward for people who were charged with attacking the Capitol,” says Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and assistant attorney general who now directs Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

Normally, if a defendant wanted the government to pay for transportation, their attorney would ask the judge. The marshals “are not lawyers—it’s lawyers who present papers to the court,” says Cindrich.

I also reached out to many of the defense attorneys for J6ers who were in DC’s jail at the time of the pardons. None said they’d asked the marshals to pay for their clients’ journeys home. “Marshals don’t volunteer to make such payments without a defense request and court approval,” said Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer who represented about 20 J6ers, some of whom were still in the DC jail at the time of the pardons.

A couple of hours after Carter sent the email, the records show, the office of Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime, contacted the Marshals Service and asked for a conversation about the timeline for the release of some January 6 defendants. Biggs would join supporters that day outside the DC jail, along with Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas).

While it’s not unusual for a member of Congress to seek information from a federal agency, the marshals don’t control the timeline of when defendants are released. That’s up to the judges.

In Trumpian circles, however, frustration was brewing over the pace of the courts. In addition to Biggs, per the Washington Post, someone at DOGE reached out to the Marshals Service to express concern that judges were releasing defendants too slowly—the DOGE staffer suggested that protests at the courthouse might follow if things didn’t speed up. (Some of the judges were unhappy about the pardons; District Judge Tanya Chutkan, for example, wrote in her release order that the pardon “cannot undo the ‘rampage [that] left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage’…and it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”)

On January 22, the day after Biggs reached out to the marshals, Carter visited the DC judicial chambers to check on the status of the cases and relay concerns about potential protests. DOGE’s apparent attempt, via Carter, to influence the judiciary “astonished and angered a number of judges,” the Post’s Ruth Marcus reported. Ledogar, the former supervisory deputy marshal, told me that Marshals Service personnel are supposed to communicate with judges about courthouse security, “but as far as speaking about working faster, that is totally out of the normal.” 

“It strikes me as a mob-like tactic, to get to the people who are responsible for protecting judges and use them to ‘send a message’ to judges that the president would like them to rule in a certain way,” David Noll, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies private enforcement of the law, told me.

It’s unclear who, if anyone, asked Carter to email Boasberg or visit the judicial chambers. But the Marshals Service, which reports to the Attorney General’s office, appeared to be cooperating with DOGE in other ways: In February, the marshals deputized members of Musk’s private security detail. In March, they helped DOGE barge into a federal agency that Musk wanted to dismantle.

The Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, which handles media inquiries for the Marshals Service and the Attorney General’s Office, did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear whether the marshals actually did pay the transportation expenses of any J6ers, and if so, how much that cost. A couple of defense attorneys I spoke with said their clients had left the jail with family or friends. The local NBC affiliate, News4, reported that January 6 supporters showed up at correctional facilities across the country after the pardons were announced, “ready with warm clothes, rides and even private planes” to help the pardoned prisoners get home. Said one of the freed J6ers: “It was just beautiful.”