Pardons Didn’t End Jan. 6 Saga, Advocates Say

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The pile of white t-shirts on display seemed to tell the whole story.

“Full pardon,” they declared in bold letters. Just underneath was a depiction of President Donald Trump, his arms raised victoriously.

But for those staffing the booth for the January 6th Legal Fund this past weekend at CPAC 2025, the battle is only beginning.

“For most people what they think about Jan. 6 comes from what they’ve learned through television and radio,” said Tricia LaCount, a volunteer at the booth and nominal spokesperson for the three other women seated behind the display table.

“What the public doesn’t see are the challenges faced by individuals pardoned from the J6 incident,” she said.

“These guys have to rebuild their lives, and many of them are starting over from scratch,” she said. “A lot of them have lost their homes; they’ve lost their wives, they’ve lost their dogs … I mean, some of them are seriously destitute and living in homeless shelters.

“The reality is there are a lot of people out there who don’t want to hire J6ers,” LaCount said.

She went on to explain the legal fund is raising money through donations with the intent of suing the federal government, including figures like then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the Capitol Police over “their treatment [of the pardonees] during the events.”

Trump issued pardons for nearly 1,500 defendants who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege on the Capitol within hours of his inauguration last month, fulfilling a campaign promise to offer executive clemency to individuals he often referred to as “patriots,” and sometimes, as “hostages.”

The executive order, signed the evening of Jan. 20, granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” 

The order also commuted the sentences of 14 people, paving the way for the release of individuals convicted of more complicated crimes stemming from the riot, including seditious conspiracy.

While a pardon forgives a conviction, erasing it from the individual’s record and restoring their rights — like the right to vote under federal law — a commutation merely reduces one sentence.

Individuals falling under both categories were in attendance at CPAC this year, including Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group.

Trump’s order also directed the Justice Department to dismiss all pending cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol, cases that had been a priority under former Attorney General Merrick Garland all the way through his final days in office.

The Capitol Police Officers’ Union later blasted Trump’s decision to give clemency to Jan. 6 rioters as sending “the wrong message that the lives of law enforcement officers are not valued.” 

“Our political leaders need to be sending the message that … those who kill and injure police officers will be held fully accountable,” the union said. 

A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that more than 80% of Americans oppose pardons for those convicted of violent crimes, and a little over half disagree with pardons for nonviolent offenders.

The siege on the Capitol resulted in seven deaths that day or in its immediate aftermath, and left 140 police officers injured.

Federal prosecutors and the FBI spent untold hours pouring over photographs, video and cell phone location data to piece together the day’s events and identify potential suspects.

The assault on the Capitol also led to a lengthy, but ultimately failed investigation, of Trump himself, for allegedly conspiring to hold on to power and effectively ignore the votes of millions of Americans who cast a ballot in 2020,

Special counsel Jack Smith secured a four-count felony indictment of Trump, but ultimately was forced to abandon the case after the 2024 election, based on a longstanding DOJ view that a sitting president cannot be charged or face trial.

All of this remains a sore point for the cross-section of CPAC attendees who are also hardcore MAGA loyalists.

Though a number of J6ers said they were initially barred from attending the conference, by Thursday morning, at least a dozen of them were wandering the halls with official accreditation, and posing for selfies as newly minted celebrities.

CPAC itself later issued a statement in which it said it was “untrue that we are not allowing people to come to CPAC because of their involvement with J6.” 

“In fact, CPAC has been a constant supporter of this persecuted community and we support wholeheartedly President Trump’s pardons of the J6 victims,” the statement said.

Among the group’s most vocal supporters at the event was Steve Bannon, who spoke shortly after Elon Musk addressed a packed session at the conference.

Though he didn’t quite hold the Musk crowd — about a quarter of them heading to the exits after the DOGE chief’s departure — Bannon, Trump’s one-time chief strategist, remains an influential figure for many on the right, thanks largely to his “War Room” podcast.

On Thursday evening, following a day of speakers celebrating Trump’s present, Bannon focused primarily on old grievances, including the outcome of the 2020 election, which he continued to insist was “stolen” from his former boss, and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, which he characterized as a set-up.

“The J6ers are in the house,” he said early on in his remarks.

At one point he quipped that the J6 Prison Choir, a group of about 20 men imprisoned for their involvement in the Capitol attack, would be performing at the Kennedy Center, a reference to the president’s decision to sack the board of the arts institution and take over as its chairman.

Later, Bannon encouraged the crowd of 1,500 or so to continue to “fight, fight, fight,” repeating the phrase Trump used immediately after surviving an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last summer.

Unfortunately for Bannon, he then inadvertently stepped on his own lede, as they used to say in the news business, extending his right arm toward the audience, his palm facing down, in a gesture to the audience.

Many attendees said in the hallway later that they thought he had done something like a Nazi salute, others said it wasn’t a Nazi gesture at all, but was likely intended to be close enough to trigger the media and progressives.

For his part, Bannon said his hand and arm motion was merely a wave, adding later that he always waved to his listeners in precisely the same way.

“I do it at the end of all of my speeches to thank the crowd,” he said.

In the relative calm of the exhibition hall, LaCount recalled her own arrest on Jan. 6, 2021.

“It was a beautiful day until the Capitol Police attacked us as we were standing there on the west lawn peacefully,” she said.

“And it was beautiful inside the Capitol, until we were attacked again,” she said.

After her arrest, LaCount said she had to wait roughly 24 hours before she went before a magistrate judge to get released on her own personal recognizance.

“But those 24 hours were hell,” she said. “I can’t imagine what these guys, who have been behind bars for two, three and in some cases, as long as four years, have been through. I can’t imagine it, but I don’t think I would have survived.”

The January 6th Legal Fund was established by Edward Lang, of Narrowsburg, New York, himself one of the recipients of the pardon from Trump.

On the organization’s donation page, Lang says 100% of the donated money will go “directly to the Jan. 6 defendants and families legal related costs.”

So far the effort has raised $585,624, according to its GiveSendGo account page.

LaCount said her and other J6ers’ post-arrest experiences are now helping to fuel the Legal Fund’s additional push for sweeping prison reform.

“I would love nothing more than to see the federal Bureau of Prisons shut down,” she said. “It needs to be completely dismantled. 

“You need to start over from scratch because our legal system is just a nightmare,” LaCount said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and on X @DanMcCue