The Trump administration wields the full strength of its punitive power against immigrants, political opponents, and marginalized groups—and pardons January 6 offenders.
Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who was convicted of for his actions at the January 6 riot, shows off his pardon from President Donald Trump, at a news conference on February 21, 2025, with members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other January 6 offenders who received pardons or commuted sentences.(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
On April 14, 2026, Trump’s Justice Department filed papers asking an appeals court to erase the convictions for “seditious conspiracy” from the criminal records of a dozen rioters who led the planning for the January 6 insurrection. Those convictions resulted from the most serious charges made after January 6, against the masterminds of the operation. All members of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, these insurrectionists had had their sentences commuted, but now, the DOJ is asking that their convictions also be wiped clean from their records. That same day, in a different court, the DOJ also filed paperwork indicating another J6 rioter, David Daniel, plans to plead guilty to sexually abusing two children, one under the age of 12, as well as possession of child pornography.
Daniel had been pardoned by Trump on his first day back in office in January 2025—one of nearly 1,600 insurrectionists convicted or facing pending charges in connection with the Capitol insurrection. Four months before Trump retook office, a magistrate court judge wrote in a court report that evidence in the case against Daniel was “compelling and suggests Defendant engaged in sexual acts with two young girls in his own family,” while also noting that Daniel was alleged to have taken and “kept photos of the genitalia of the victims.” Two months later, in a November 2024 affidavit, investigators confirmed that sexually explicit pictures of both minor girls had been found on Daniel’s electronic devices. Then Trump was inaugurated, and Daniel received what the White House describes as “a full, complete and unconditional pardon.” He remains in jail at the orders of the magistrate, who noted “the mother of one victim (Defendant’s ex-wife) appeared in court to request that Defendant not be released” and that, with two siblings in Mexico, he presents a flight risk.
But Daniel isn’t an outlier. Roughly 40 insurrectionists have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for crimes that have nothing to with their actions on January 6, according to The New York Times. At least 12 of those insurrectionists were arrested after being pardoned by Trump. A December 2025 investigative report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that six insurrectionists have been charged with sex crimes involving children. Five have been charged with drunk driving—two of them having killed other motorists. Five were arrested for illegal weapons possession, including two who had rap sheets with domestic violence charges. And two have been arrested for rape.
Most of the discussion about J6 centers on how destructive Trump and the MAGA movement have been to core American principles and virtues, including democracy, racial justice, and political civility. But there is also a conversation to be had that is less about principles than people—that is, the flesh-and-blood victims and survivors of harms inflicted by so many of those involved in January 6. Some were hurt by future Capitol rioters before January 6, others in the years between the insurrection and Trump’s pardons. Still others were hurt after the president’s blanket clemency. Just days after Trump retook office, NPR reported that pardoned rioters had started “whipping each other up online with increasingly dire threats” against prosecutors, FBI agents, and Capitol law enforcement who were securing convictions for rioters. One official told the outlet that mistrust of Trump’s DOJ meant most of the rioters’ targets were “already not reporting these threats, because we don’t think they’ll care—unless and until one of us gets killed.” A federal prosecutor stated, “Never have I felt less safe than with these defendants.”
Those fears were justified—as were warnings that Trump’s pardons would embolden the already lawless insurrectionists, convincing them they were immune to criminal consequences. Julie Farnam, who on January 6, 2021, was serving as assistant director of Intelligence for the Capitol Police, told HuffPost last month that the pardons removed reasons for bad actors to “play by the book.”
“I think people who have nefarious intentions are kind of thinking the same thing, and a lot of people will feel now they can get away with bad things, especially in the political realm and politically motivated violence,” Farnam told the outlet.
Indeed, insurrectionist Edward Kelley, while free and awaiting trial for crimes committed on January 6, compiled a “kill list” of roughly 40 FBI agents and other people who worked on his case. He “formed a self-styled militia,” according to prosecutors, and “conducted combat drills to realize his plan” of murdering targets in their homes and in public places, such as movie theaters, using car bombs and drones. At trial, Kelley’s lawyers argued that the Trump pardon should also cover his murder plot.
In that case, Trump and his DOJ declined to repardon him for his murderous plot, and in July 2025, Kelley was sentenced to life in prison. But Trump has, in two other cases, pardoned insurrectionists convicted of other crimes, giving victims valid reasons to worry about who might be next. Dan Wilson, who was convicted of a felony before the insurrection, had again been convicted for illegal possession of six guns and roughly 5,000 rounds of ammo that cops found when they searched his house as part of the January 6 investigation. Trump pardoned him for those gun charges; Wilson’s attorney said the pardon “shatters this sham conviction stemming from the January 6 witch hunt.” Susan Ellen Kaye was sentenced to 18 months for a social-media message in which she threatened to shoot FBI agents investigating her attendance at the insurrection. Trump’s DOJ dropped charges against both, offering little reason for confidence in others who were threatened.
Even before Trump returned to office, the GOP’s historically revisionist lionizing of insurrectionists must have been a bitter pill for their victims—of whom, we’re learning, there were many. The pardons only made it worse. This is not an administration invested in abolition, pairing pardons with reparative justice. It’s an otherwise hyperpunitive regime that regularly uses the full weight of its powers against immigrants, political opponents, and marginalized groups. For survivors of crimes committed by insurrectionists, the contrast is probably startling. Former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn spoke to that anger directly in June 2025, amid the administration’s violent, militarized crackdown on Los Angeles protesters—whom the president labeled “bad people” and “insurrectionists.”
“Trump thinks anything done in his name is OK. January 6 was done in his name, so our officers don’t matter,” he told CBS, also noting, “People are still traumatized by January 6. Not just the officers. Everyone who watched it. That hasn’t changed.”
The state has not only absolved insurrectionists of accountability but heaps praise on them as paragons of patriotic virtue—part of a cheap ongoing political stunt that tells victims their pain doesn’t matter.
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Jackson Reffitt, the son of Oath Keeper insurrectionist Guy Reffitt, was so worried about his father’s erratic behavior that he reported it to the FBI before the insurrection, in December 2020, but got no response. After participating in the January 6 riot, Guy returned to the family’s North Texas home and warned Jackson and his sister that if they tipped off authorities to his actions they would be traitors, and “traitors get shot.” Jackson reported his father to the FBI and he was ultimately sentenced to more than seven years in prison. It’s little surprise why, immediately following Guy’s pardon, Jackson told a local NBC affiliate that he had started carrying a gun. In January 2026, he told PBS that things had “been scary.”
“It’s not—I’m not worried that he’s going to break down my door or strangle me through the phone,” Jackson told PBS. “But these people have been endlessly validated with a pardon. And that validation, they never really received before. Like, imagine the kind of action that a lot of these people might feel now that they have been pardoned.”
In this most recent round of pardons, Trump’s DOJ is going even further, calling for the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to whitewash the criminal records of the 12 Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for not just participating in but planning the Capitol attack. That includes Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, who had been sentenced to 18 years. The pardons Trump issued on his first day in office didn’t extend to those rioters, though their sentences were commuted. Incredibly, the garden-variety rioters—including roughly 200 insurrectionists who pleaded guilty to attacking law enforcement, and some 450 whose criminal cases were pending—have had all penalties dropped, but the convictions remain on their records. It’s the people who committed the gravest crimes whose records the DOJ now wants to wipe clean.
Rhodes’s ex-wife, Tasha Adams, has detailed the years of physical, mental, and emotional abuse to which the Oath Keeper leader subjected her, his children, and even their pets. Ahead of the 2024 election, Adams gave a number of interviews about the threat Rhodes posed if released, telling Slate she hoped her words would convince the DOJ to keep him behind bars. She noted that she had testified against Rhodes and provided the FBI with hours of interviews that were then quoted in court during sentencing. Weeks before the election, Adams told USA Today that Rhodes always maintained a “kill list” and that “obviously, now I’m on this list, and so are some of my kids, I’m sure.”
“I have to keep him in jail, and it can’t fail—because I’m in a whole mess of trouble if I fail,” she told the outlet.
But Rhodes was released, and even met with several GOP senators after leaving prison, a celebration of the Oath Keeper that Adams called “disgusting,” noting that “people died because of that day.” She later talked about what it’s like living knowing that Rhodes is now free.
“It’s like living life very carefully,” she told an MS Now panel. “We’re living far away and hopefully it stays that way. But, you know, it was such a such a difficult time period to, see him finally put away and to work toward that and to look for this day of freedom where we felt secure and safe again. And that was very short-lived.”
There are so many more stories like Adams’s. One month before the DOJ asked a court to free Rhodes and other seditious conspirators, insurrectionist Andrew Paul Johnson was sentenced to life in prison for molesting a boy and girl, one age 11. According to The Intercept, Johnson attempted to bribe the children to keep quiet, telling them he was due to receive “$10 million as part of reparations for his January 6 arrest.” It’s an idea he may have gotten from Trump himself, who personally endorsed a “compensation fund” that could dole out money for J6ers’ legal hassles. Likewise, the Trump DOJ filed court papers last year calling for fines and penalties paid by convicted rioters to be reimbursed.
In some cases, victims of insurrectionists have been vocal about their pain. Federal prosecutors, in making their sentencing recommendations before a court in insurrectionist Peter Schwartz’s January 6 case, cited a “jaw-dropping criminal history of 38 prior convictions going back to 1991.” In addition to attacking police at the Capitol in DC, according to NPR, Schwartz’s crimes included a 2020 arrest in Ohio for punching and biting his wife; a 2019 arrest in Kentucky for threatening to kill his then-girlfriend, a woman named Shantelle Holeton, and then making “terroristic threats” against arresting officers; another 2015 arrest in Kentucky for possessing an illegal gun and “threatening to kill another individual”; and a 2004 arrest in North Carolina for “assault with a deadly weapon.” Schwartz “cannot be deterred from violent conduct,” federal lawyers wrote in a brief that suggested community safety demanded Schwarz be given a “very lengthy sentence.” The judge agreed, handing down one of the longest prison terms for an insurrectionist, 14 years. Trump’s pardon sprung him from prison.
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“I’m just afraid that I’m going to come home from work one night and he’s going to be right there,” Holeton told CBS News about Schwartz, on the heels of Trump’s pardon. “He’s going to be right there sitting on my porch.”
John Emanuel Banuelow, captured on video January 6 firing his illegal weapon into the air twice, was identified and reported to the FBI by online sleuths as early as February 2021, but not arrested. Six months after the insurrection, he fatally stabbed 19-year-old Christopher Thomas Senn in a Salt Lake City park. Utah police officers reported that Banuelos boasted that he “was in the D.C. riots,” identifying himself as “the one in the video with the gun.” He claimed self-defense; the district attorney declined to pursue charges, and Banuelos was released. By early 2022, when Banuelos was named in the media but still free, Senn’s foster mother, Victoria Thomas, told NBC that she was “heartbroken.”
“We’re disappointed in the justice system,” Thomas, a retired school principal, told the outlet. “He should have been arrested.… He’s going to do this to somebody else.”
In fact, he already had. In October 2025, Banuelo was arrested and charged with aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault; court documents alleged that he “lured the victim to his home, drugged her, and then sexually assaulted her for over 12 hours.” A DNA match connected him with the 2018 assault. The FBI had finally arrested Banuelos for January 6 crimes in March 2024, but during a hearing, he correctly predicted that he wouldn’t be in custody long. “President Trump’s going to be in office six months from now,” he told the court, “so I’m not worried about it.” He was, of course, pardoned under Trump’s order.
“I was just devastated,” Thomas said of finding out, after her foster son’s killing, that Banuelos was at January 6, but hadn’t been brought in by federal agents sooner. “I was like, ‘How can somebody that’s wanted by the FBI get away with murdering somebody?’”
There are others. Less than two weeks after being pardoned by Trump, insurrectionist Emily Hernandez was sentenced to 10 years for drunkenly driving the wrong way on a freeway and killing a 32-year-old mother of two teens, Victoria Wilson. The accident had occurred in 2022, while Hernandez was out on bond for her crimes committed at the insurrection. The victim’s mother, Tonie Donaldson, told the St. Louis Dispatch that her daughter “had a heart of gold,” and worked as a home health aide, adding, “Not everyone can work with mentally challenged children, and she’s done it since she was 13.” She expressed anger that Hernandez wasn’t already jailed for participating in J6.
“Why is she still out?” Tonie Donaldson asked the outlet. “With what she did to the government, why is she still walking the street? To me, she’s a piece of shit.”
One of the most affecting things I read in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 win was by an anonymous survivor of sexual assault who wrote that “each vote for Trump was a vote for my rapist.” It was a metaphor, however devastating, about how it feels to watch the country elevate a man credibly accused of sexual assault by—even back then—at least 24 women. The indifference shown to people hurt by the insurrectionists—and I could not include all their stories here, given column space and word count—feels like something even beyond a metaphor. This administration proves its willingness to hurt Americans, and its disregard for their pain, every day. This is only one of the more palpable examples of that disregard. And as the crimes and victims continue to accrue, the message intensifies that what happens to you does not matter.
“Start sending these criminals to prison. Hold them accountable,” Angela Ortiz, sister of Victoria Wilson, told a local St. Louis outlet, given Hernandez’s role at the Capitol. “Maybe if she knew she was going to get in real trouble, she wouldn’t have put the keys in the ignition and drove.”
Kali HollowayKali Holloway is a columnist for The Nation and the former director of the Make It Right Project, a national campaign to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Time, AlterNet, Truthdig, The Huffington Post, The National Memo, Jezebel, Raw Story, and numerous other outlets.