Looming Danger

The Looming Danger of Trump’s January 6 Pardons

His efforts to “erase” the insurrection could inspire violent extremists and do other harm, national security and law enforcement sources warn.

Mark Follman

Four years ago, after thousands of people were incited by losing presidential candidate Donald Trump to storm the US Capitol and try to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, the FBI began one of its largest criminal investigations ever. Those efforts remain ongoing but may soon largely be undone by Trump, using the clemency powers of the presidency. National security and law enforcement sources say that could have dangerous consequences.

Based on prolific video footage, digital communications, and other evidence from January 6, 2021, almost 1,600 people have been charged with federal crimes. More than 1,250 have either pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial, roughly a third of whom were prosecuted for violence or rioting. According to the Department of Justice, nearly 600 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, which continues to result in convictions and guilty pleas. The DOJ successfully prosecuted 14 people for seditious conspiracy from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, pro-Trump extremist groups whose members planned extensively for violence on January 6. Oath Keepers from multiple states brought an arsenal of guns and ammunition.

Trump asserted throughout his 2024 campaign that he would issue sweeping pardons for Jan. 6 convicts. Despite multiple deaths and the widespread injury and property damage at the Capitol, Trump has brazenly tried to rewrite history ever since, declaring that January 6 was an unarmed “love fest” and depicting the perpetrators as “patriots” and “hostages” who have been persecuted.

On NBC’s Meet the Press in early December, Trump confirmed that he will “most likely” carry out the pardons when he retakes office. He mentioned possibly making exceptions for “people from antifa”—referring to the antifascist ideology that the FBI determined played no role in the attack—and talked up other debunked conspiracy theories. In an interview with Time published on Dec. 12, he appeared to narrow the scope to “nonviolent” convicts—yet he maintained that violent offenders could also be cleared on a “case by case” basis and reiterated that a “vast majority” of Jan. 6 convicts should be pardoned, a process he vowed to begin in his first hour as president.

Legal absolution for Trump’s criminal supporters who tried to subvert the electoral system could have grim consequences, according to national security and law enforcement sources I spoke with.

Violent far-right groups who backed Trump will be emboldened, says Juliette Kayyem, a former senior DHS official in the Obama administration who directs the Homeland Security Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “They will have a narrative of martyrdom, and that’s a really good way to rebuild right-wing terrorist organizations,” she says. “They’ll see it as a win and it will help them recruit people and raise money.” (Notably, as Trump and his allies campaigned nonstop through the fall on phony claims of imminent election fraud, members of the Proud Boys were again preparing for potential violence in support of Trump, the Wall Street Journal reported.)

The looming Jan. 6 pardons are part of a broader picture that includes loyalty tests for Trump’s incoming administration and talk of retribution against his political “enemies,” as he seeks to install highly provocative loyalists atop the FBI and Justice Department. These and other moves build on Trump’s perpetual denial that he lost the 2020 election and serve to distract from the large body of evidence that led DOJ special counsel Jack Smith to charge Trump himself with serious crimes relating to the 2020 election and US national security.

“He wants to erase his election loss and what really happened on January 6,” Kayyem says, warning that Trump may also be setting the stage for white supremacist violence to grow, as it did during his first term in office. “What I worry about isn’t just the nurturing from the Trump White House that says, ‘Yes, this kind of behavior is OK,’ but also the lack of prosecutions of these kinds of behaviors going forward.”

The politics of grievance and a heightened threat environment could also have a cost for federal law enforcement and those they protect on Capitol Hill. US Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger told a Senate committee in mid December that members of Congress continue to face record levels of threats. “We are on pace again this year to receive approximately 8,000 to 9,000 threat assessment cases,” Manger testified, detailing a “crushing” amount of work for the agents involved: “They carry an average annual caseload of nearly 500 cases.”

According to a source familiar with Capitol Police operations, an era of politicizing security “on both sides of the aisle” has been demoralizing among the ranks—but foremost in how Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill have helped him make truth a casualty of January 6. “You’ve got some members you’re protecting who are minimizing or outright lying about the event itself,” the source told me, a posture that is all the more galling with resources stretched thin: “Then some of those same folks will be outraged if they don’t get the security they want.”

Even if American politics is moving on after Trump’s 2024 victory, law enforcement officers who lived through January 6 are still coping with the psychological and physical wounds, the source added. That includes debilitating cases of PTSD, permanent disfigurement from chemical sprays wielded by rioters, and other lasting trauma. At least four officers who responded to the Jan. 6 attack subsequently took their own lives.

Photos of more than 90 suspected rioters wanted by the FBI remain posted on the bureau’s Capitol Violence page. And dozens of Jan. 6 criminal investigations remain open, including for violence against police, confirmed a senior US law enforcement official who is familiar with the cases.

That law enforcement official, long based in Washington, told me that several Republican lawmakers have made comments privately in recent months rejecting Trump’s false narrative of January 6—but won’t do so publicly. One lawmaker, the law enforcement official told me, admitted that this was for fear of political retribution as well as for the safety of his family. Critics of Trump in his own party often have been targeted by Trump and face violent threats as a result.

It is unclear to what degree the ongoing Jan. 6 investigations will be diminished or shut down when Trump takes control of the Justice Department and appoints a new FBI director to replace Christopher Wray, who announced this month that he will step down when Biden’s term ends. Trump has seethed at Wray ever since the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022 to retrieve highly classified documents that the former president refused to return to the federal government. Smith went on to indict Trump for multiple crimes, including obstruction and violation of the Espionage Act.

Trump’s response has always been to declare that the leadership of the FBI and DOJ are corrupt and out to get him—baseless claims he is now using to demolish a 10-year term for FBI directors put in place by Congress after Watergate to safeguard against partisan abuse of vast law enforcement powers. Trump’s replacement pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, has made clear that such partisan abuse would be core to his mission.

Trump has also been shoring up his false narrative about the 2020 election and its aftermath by continuing to threaten members of the bipartisan House select committee that investigated January 6. He reiterated on Meet the Press that Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming should be prosecuted. “For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump inveighed. (On Tuesday, House Republicans published an investigative report clearly aimed at supporting Trump’s narrative; thin on evidence and heavy with insinuations, the report targets Cheney and Thompson, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a key witness for the Jan. 6 select committee, Cassidy Hutchinson.)

Democratic committee member Zoe Lofgren of California responded that Trump’s attack on the bipartisan committee’s work is “unconstitutional, dangerous, and should be laughed at by any legitimate lawyer.” She said in her statement that the committee “followed the facts and provided the American people with the truth—and while that may be an inconvenient truth for Donald Trump, it is an honest depiction of what happened. He is lying when he says otherwise.” 

Lofgren further noted that the American public can view the committee’s full report and investigative evidence as well as the Justice Department’s case files on the multitude of crimes committed by Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6. 

With Trump’s return to power, though, many of those offenders are likely to be absolved, and the public’s memory of how Trump motivated them to do what they did could begin to fade away.