Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, his administration has enthusiastically — and steadily — embraced his campaign to try to rewrite the story of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump immediately granted a blanket pardon to nearly everyone charged or convicted in connection with the attack, calling them “patriots.” Earlier this year, his White House posted a falsehood-strewn retelling of that day.
Then, this week, his administration moved to vacate some of the last remaining and most serious criminal convictions stemming from the riot.
This last cluster of convictions was handed down to 12 members of the right-wing Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. The Justice Department said undoing their convictions was in the “interests of justice,” but did not specify why.
The Capitol riot followed a rally where Trump repeated his false claims that he defeated Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. A mob stormed and breached the Capitol, forcing lawmakers to evacuate and delaying the certification of Biden’s election for hours. More than 140 police officers were injured, and the Justice Department has said the attack cost millions of dollars in damage.
In the aftermath, the Justice Department launched the largest investigation in its history. More than 1,500 people were charged in connection with the attack. A House committee launched its own probe.
For Trump and his supporters, the Jan. 6 criminal cases became symbols of what they called Justice Department overreach under Biden. They have assailed the conditions in which people were jailed, said defendants were excessively charged and called in some cases for “retribution” for the prosecutions.
Since Trump’s second term began, his administration has turned some of these complaints into action.
A Justice Department task force has been examining so-called weaponization in the response to Jan. 6, including probing the work of investigators. The agency has also continued looking backward in other prominent ways, such as again scrutinizing the 2020 election, even though courts and independent reviews have found no evidence of significant fraud.
Trump’s effort to reframe what happened on Jan. 6 appears, in many ways, to be an attempt to shape public perceptions. The details of what happened that day remain accessible and documented in an expansive universe of videos, accounts and court filings.
The day he was inaugurated last year, Trump pardoned most Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom are now seeking elected office. The president also commuted the sentences for more than a dozen others. Pardons lift certain restrictions, including on gun ownership. Commuting sentences, meanwhile, cuts short punishments.
The members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers whose convictions were still intact had been found guilty of counts that included seditious conspiracy and were appealing. If the appeals proceeded, the Justice Department would have had to defend their cases.
With a deadline looming for briefs, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in D.C., wrote in court filings this week that she was asking an appeals court to vacate the convictions and send the cases back to a lower court.
At that point, Pirro said, the Justice Department would seek to dismiss the indictments with prejudice, meaning prosecutors could not re-file the cases.
In court papers, Pirro pointed to Trump’s commutations and wrote that it was “not in the interests of justice to continue to prosecute this case or the cases of other, similarly situated defendants.” She did not elaborate on her decision. Her request is likely to be granted, because prosecutors have wide latitude to decide what charges to pursue or abandon.
Attorneys for defendants praised Pirro’s decision. Jonathan Crisp, a defense attorney for Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keepers leader, said they were “grateful that this is happening.” Norm Pattis, an attorney for Joseph Biggs, one of the Proud Boys, called the move “long overdue.”
Pirro’s request drew sharp condemnation from others. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, called it “an appalling and dangerous turn of events.”
“This is an insult to the jurors who heard the evidence and did their civic duty, to the judges who presided over these cases and sentenced these criminals, and above all to the heroic officers who were wounded, bloodied, and broken defending our democracy on that terrible day,” Raskin said in a statement.
Seeking to wipe out these cases because the top of the administration no longer believes in them is “a tremendous blow to the rule of law,” said a former prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases.
“When a jury renders a verdict … it is a strong signal that not only did we get the law right, and the facts right, but we actually convinced 12 members,” said the ex-prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“How many times can you sit down and talk about anything and get 12 people to agree with you,” including on something like sedition, the prosecutor said. “It’s a powerful message that the jury recognized the gravity of the offenses and the proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Ahead of Trump’s pardons, some federal judges handling Jan. 6 cases had pointedly stressed the importance of the court process in documenting what happened that day.
“It needs to be crystal clear, it’s not patriotism, it’s not standing up for America, it’s not free speech to descend violently on the Capitol at the urging of a disappointed candidate,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said while sentencing a Proud Boys member in December 2024.
Since being pardoned by Trump, some Jan. 6 defendants have been seeking their own government jobs. In Oregon, a man pardoned on charges of obstructing an official proceeding is running for governor. A man pardoned after pleading guilty to assaulting law enforcement is running for a House seat in South Carolina.
And in Florida, a man photographed hauling Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern through the Capitol on Jan. 6 is running for a seat on Manatee County’s board of commissioners. He is using a silhouette of him carrying Pelosi’s lectern as his campaign logo and has referred to Jan. 6 as Patriots Day.
Beyond granting clemency, Trump and his administration have taken aim at the federal government’s approach to Jan. 6 in other significant ways.
Attorneys who worked on Jan. 6 prosecutions were fired. Last fall, two federal prosecutors in D.C. were placed on leave after writing in court papers that the Capitol attack was a “riot” carried out by a “mob.”
The administration agreed last year to pay nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot and killed by police during the Capitol riot, who has become a martyr among some of his base. Trump also floated support for the idea of financially compensating Jan. 6 defendants.
Earlier this year, on the fifth anniversary of the riot, the White House unveiled a website that recast Jan. 6 as a moment when Trump’s supporters were “unfairly targeted, overcharged, and used as political examples.” The site also decried what it called “a fraud-ridden election.”
Trump himself had also been indicted and charged with conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election results, though the case was dropped after he won the 2024 presidential election.
There are also other lingering court cases tied in some fashion to Jan. 6. The Trump administration has sought to ditch some of those, too.
The Justice Department is backing efforts by Stephen K. Bannon, a right-wing podcaster and ex-Trump strategist, to dismiss his conviction for defying a congressional subpoena related to Jan. 6.
In a filing in his case earlier this year, Pirro asked a judge to dismiss Bannon’s indictment “in the interests of justice.” The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month sided with Bannon, sending his case back to an appeals court for reconsideration.
Last fall, the Justice Department said it no longer supported the conviction of Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, who had served a four-month sentence for defying a Jan. 6-related congressional subpoena.
Trump and his administration have also repeatedly set their sights on the issue inexorably tied to Jan. 6: his false claims that he really won the 2020 election.
Since returning to office, Trump and his aides stocked the upper levels of Justice Department and other agencies with attorneys and activists who questioned or have sought to overturn election results, such as Kurt Olsen, who spoke with Trump multiple times on Jan. 6, 2021, and is now advising the White House on election issues.
Last year, the office of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard took the unusual step of examining voting machines used in Puerto Rico. The administration and Trump allies unsuccessfully sought to take possession of voting machines from Colorado and Missouri. And in recent months, the Justice Department seized 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, and a trove of 2020 election data from Maricopa County, Arizona.
Trump last year also sought to rewrite election rules with an executive order that courts quickly blocked. He renewed his effort last month with a new executive order that purports to restrict mail ballots. States, voting rights groups and the Democratic National Committee have separately sued, arguing the president doesn’t have the power to do that.
Simultaneously, the Justice Department demanded states provide it with copies of their voter rolls that include sensitive information and sued 30 of them for not providing them. The Justice Department has lost four cases and reached a settlement with one state. The other cases are pending.
Patrick Marley and Perry Stein contributed to this report.
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