President Trump issued pardons this weekend to two people convicted of crimes stemming from the events of Jan. 6, 2021, but not directly tied to the attack on the Capitol, expanding the scope of the broad clemency he had already granted to those caught up in the prosecutions related to the riot.
The pardons were announced online on Saturday by Ed Martin, a longtime supporter of the Jan. 6 rioters who is the Justice Department’s pardon attorney. And they were part of Mr. Trump’s continuing efforts to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 and to depict those who took part in the storming of the Capitol not as criminals, but rather as victims of a weaponized justice system — much like he sees himself.
Mr. Trump issued the first of the two pardons on Friday night to Daniel Edwin Wilson, a militiaman based in Kentucky who, like all of the nearly 1,600 other rioters who took part in the Capitol attack, had been issued a presidential reprieve for the crimes he committed on Jan. 6.
But Mr. Wilson was also facing separate gun charges after federal agents discovered a cache of illegal weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his home as he was being investigated in connection with the storming of the Capitol.
His lawyers argued that the initial pardon covered those crimes, claiming that he never would have been prosecuted but for the Jan. 6-related inquiry. A federal judge in Washington disagreed. In a ruling in March, the judge, Dabney L. Friedrich, said that Mr. Trump’s first round of pardons covered only offenses that were directly related to the Capitol attack and ordered Mr. Wilson to serve a portion of the five-year sentence he had received for both the gun offenses and the Jan. 6-related charges.
As he sat in jail, Mr. Wilson, who had pleaded guilty to joining a conspiracy to impede or injure officers at the Capitol, became a cause célèbre among the small group of activists and lawyers that advocates on behalf of Jan. 6 rioters, many of whom have close ties to Mr. Martin.
Other pardoned rioters have also been charged with crimes — like the possession of child pornography — that stemmed from the investigation of their roles in the Capitol attack. But Mr. Trump has not yet issued separate pardons to any of them.
In a social media post on Saturday, Mr. Martin thanked Mr. Trump for issuing the pardon to Mr. Wilson, asserting that he was “now a free man.” Mr. Martin also claimed that he himself had “advocated for this clemency.”
In a separate post, Mr. Martin also announced the pardon of Suzanne Kaye, a Florida woman who had been sentenced two years ago to 18 months in prison for threatening to shoot F.B.I. agents who had sought to question her about her involvement in the Capitol attack.
The agents reached out to Ms. Kaye by phone three weeks after Jan. 6, court papers say. Even though she denied that she had been at the Capitol that day, she agreed to speak with them at her home in Boca Raton.
But before the meeting took place, the papers say, Ms. Kaye posted a series of videos online threatening the agents. One of the videos, the documents say, showed her taking a drink from a nearly empty whiskey bottle and declaring that if the agents showed up at her home, she would exercise her “Second Amendment right” to shoot them.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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