Outside the Washington, D.C. jail, supporters of the Jan. 6 defendants have held a nightly vigil for the last two years. On Wednesday, they popped champagne.
“We got our country back!” said Nicole Reffitt, whose husband is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for bringing a gun onto Capitol grounds during the riot and threatening his children if they turned him into the FBI.
Federal prosecutors charged more than 1,500 people with crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Now, many of them are celebrating the election of Donald Trump, and anticipating that he will fulfill his promise to issue pardons to the people he calls “political prisoners.” Experts on extremism are concerned that pardons will essentially endorse the violence of that day, which injured approximately 140 police officers and interrupted the country’s peaceful transfer of power.
Reffitt said she is hopeful that Trump will make good on his promise to free people like her husband, Guy.
“President Trump is a man of his word,” said Reffitt, “and I feel like he will definitely take action when it comes to the Jan. 6 cases.”
The case against Guy Reffitt tore her family apart. Her son, Jackson, testified for the prosecution, and recounted that his dad told him “traitors get shot.”
“Trump being elected isn’t going to help put my family back together. But what it may do is maybe get Guy out so we can start that process,” said Nicole Reffitt.
Brandon Fellows also attended Wednesday night’s vigil. He was convicted of breaching the Capitol, celebrating as rioters broke down doors, and smoking marijuana inside a Senate office. He is currently on supervised release after receiving a sentence of three years in jail.
He’s confident that he’ll receive a pardon. And he told NPR he thinks the violence on Jan. 6 was justified.
“I want everyone to be pardoned, because the election was stolen and they had a right to fully overthrow it. I wish they did,” said Fellows.
Defense attorneys working on Jan. 6-related cases have already begun filing motions asking for the courts to delay court hearings because of Trump’s promise to issue pardons. Trump is also expected to dismiss any ongoing Jan. 6 prosecutions.
“We're certainly going to seek pardons for all of our defendants, regardless of what they were charged with or convicted of,” said attorney John Pierce, who has represented many Jan. 6 defendants with the organization he founded, the National Constitutional Law Union. “So we're going to start putting together packets of information with respect to each defendant so that we're ready to hit the ground running on day one to try to push those through as quickly as we can.”
Pierce said he hopes the Justice Department will agree to put off further Jan. 6 proceedings.
“We think it's just not a great use of resources either for the government or for these defendants to have to go through the process of spending the money on lawyer fees, costs, travel to have these things occur and then just to turn around and then seek pardons,” said Pierce.
Judge Reggie Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, rejected a different defendant’s motion for delay. “The potential future exercise of the discretionary pardon power, an Executive Branch authority, is irrelevant to the Court’s obligation to carry out the legal responsibilities of the Judicial Branch,” Walton wrote.
In court on Thursday, defendant Zachary Alam referred to Trump’s election at his sentencing hearing. Federal prosecutors called Alam “one of the most violent and aggressive” rioters and said he harassed police and pushed through barricades. Inside the Capitol, he smashed a window into the Speaker’s Lobby as members of Congress tried to flee. When another rioter, Ashli Babbitt, attempted to climb through the broken window, a police officer shot and killed her.
Alam told Judge Dabney Friedrich that he believed he was acting patriotically, and that he deserves a full pardon when Trump takes office. Friedrich sentenced him to eight years in prison. “Your actions were a full-throttle attack on the government” and “not the actions of a patriot,” Friedrich said.
The FBI calls the Jan. 6, 2021 attack an act of domestic terrorism. Among the 140 police injured was Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who was assaulted with pepper spray and died the following day. The medical examiner determined that Sicknick’s death was the result of two strokes, while also noting “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump embraced the Capitol riot defendants and called Jan. 6 a “day of love.”
Trump said he would issue pardons on his first day in office, but he has not specified what criteria his administration would use when evaluating cases.
“I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” Trump told CNN in 2023.
Earlier this year, he told an interviewer at the National Association of Black Journalists that he was open to pardoning defendants convicted of assaulting police, because “they were convicted by a very, very tough system.”
Trump’s promise to grant pardons resonated with many of the convicted Jan. 6 defendants after his election victory.
“IM COMING HOME!!!! THE JANUARY 6 POLITICAL PRISONERS ARE FINALLY COMING HOME!!!!” wrote Jacob Lang in a statement posted to social media. Lang has pleaded not guilty to allegations that he “repeatedly” assaulted police with a bat and shield and is currently in jail awaiting trial.
Christian Secor, a former UCLA student and supporter of the white nationalist and antisemitic extremist Nick Fuentes, pleaded guilty to an obstruction charge after he joined rioters pushing against police on Jan. 6 and breached the floor of the Senate. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
The day after the election, he posted an image of what appeared to be his court-mandated ankle monitor to social media.
“Come on Don get this nonsense off me!”
The man who picked up and carried former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern during the attack — and appeared in one of the most widely-seen photos of that day — wrote online, “Who wants to take a Captiol [sic] tour with me on inauguration day? I know my way around.”
The likelihood that Trump will pardon Jan. 6 defendants has alarmed experts on extremism.
“If those people are released, it will embolden extremist movements,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “It will embolden anti-democratic sentiment. It also makes a mockery of the rule of law and the Department of Justice's efforts to enforce those laws.”
Beirich said the government’s massive effort to arrest and prosecute people who attacked the U.S. Capitol successfully “decimated” the leadership of extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Juries in Washington, D.C. convicted top members of those groups of seditious conspiracy against the United States. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence. Stewart Rhodes, who led the Oath Keepers, is serving 18 years in prison.
“I think that groups like The Proud Boys, who have many members who've been in prison for all kinds of things, will feel that violence is just fine, that it's being sanctioned from the highest office,” said Beirich. “And we might see them back out on the streets and much more aggressive and targeting people who they view as their opponents, whether those are folks on the left, people of color and others.”
Thomas Joscelyn, who served as a senior staff member with the Jan. 6 Select Committee in Congress, said that he’s concerned Trump’s reelection will allow him to effectively rewrite the history of the attack in the public consciousness — turning it from a violent attack on democratic institutions into what he’s called a “day of love.”
“I'm very worried that all the lies that he's told about our elections, all of the, basically, incitement he did, everything he did through the course of his first term will now be sanitized by virtue of the fact that he won a second term,” said Joscelyn.
NPR's Graham Smith and Barbara Van Woerkom contributed to this story.
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