Inside The Frenzy Among Jan. 6 Plotters To Snag A Trump Pardon

The far-right extremists who planned the attack on Congress on January 6 and who were hit with the longest prison sentences for their actions that day are now pushing for pardons from Donald Trump as he prepares to take office for a second time.

A feeding frenzy has broken out among Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and their lawyers over how to secure the long-promised clemency. Even though Trump doesn’t take office for another two months, they’re scrambling to flatter him, strategize over whom to contact, and generally push their way to the front of the line — even though there may not formally be one — to ensure that they receive pardons, and receive them as quickly as possible.

What’s clear is that none of this is taking place within the bounds of anything approaching the normal process for securing presidential pardons. Instead, alleged seditionists are in some cases conducting direct, personal outreach to President-elect Trump and those who hold sway in his inner circle. In at least one case, the lobbying appeals to Trump’s vanity, his rage at the DOJ for attempting to hold him accountable for January 6, and his support for the January 6 defendants themselves. All the while, advocates for clemency remind Trump of one thing: his repeated promise to release the insurrectionists that he’s called “political prisoners.”

It’s a lobbying blitz as unprecedented as it is bizarre: Now elected, Trump is being asked to pardon people that he encouraged to commit crimes in furtherance of him staying in power the last time. And, it’s proceeding in typically chaotic fashion. The normal considerations for clemency — remorse, debt to society, nature of offense, and passage of time — are being ignored in favor of personalistic appeals to the country’s incoming leader.

That personal process replaces the normal process, by which applications are reviewed through the DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. The work of determining whether an applicant has expressed remorse, committed to change, investigating the nature of their offense, and recommending a decision to the President has resided in some form with the attorney general since the Lincoln Administration.

But the Trump Jan. 6 pardon frenzy has abandoned that approach in favor of personal appeals to the man himself. Much of it is riven with confusion, as lawyers trade rumors over the who, what, when, and where of how the incoming Trump administration is thinking about fulfilling his campaign-trail promise. Few of the seditious conspiracy offenders have expressed any form of sustained or credible remorse — long used as a basic criteria for determining whether someone is worthy of clemency. They almost all remain in prison.

Opportunity knocks

Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader who prosecutors described as having organized “terrorism” to “oppose by force the authority of the government of the United States,” is among those planning to obtain a pardon.

James Lee Bright, an attorney for Rhodes, said that he and his partner would be “chomping at the bit to fly up to D.C. to present our case for Stewart.”

“You don’t really many times in your career get too many chances to ask for a presidential pardon,” he added.

It’s virtually unprecedented for a defendant to have a presidential candidate campaign in part on issuing pardons to, perhaps, your client. Why not seize the opportunity?

Take Rhodes’ case: he was sentenced to 18 years in prison last year. He hasn’t met the criteria that other presidents have used for decades to issues clemency: Rhodes remains in prison, and has not expressed remorse; at sentencing, he told a judge that he was a “political prisoner.”

Trump’s approach here flips how Presidents have long considered pardons, in part out of their own instinct for political self-preservation. Should a pardon recipient go on to commit a headline-grabbing crime, it might, in earlier political eras, be a political death sentence for the pardoner.

But for Trump, the direct appeals are part of a difference with roots in his first term. Then, the Washington Post reported, well-connected offenders were able to receive pardons by bypassing normal DOJ processes. Now, it’s about loyalty: Trump is reviewing pardons for people convicted of committing crimes that could have directly benefitted him, and who have already demonstrated their capacity to do violence on his behalf.

At least one lawyer tied to the seditious conspiracy cases remains close to the incoming administration. Stan Woodward, an attorney who represented an Oath Keeper couple convicted of seditious conspiracy, is, according to the Washington Post, vetting Trump appointees.

Trump promised in various forms throughout the campaign to issue a pardon to the Jan. 6 rioters. In July, he said that he “absolutely” would pardon rioters that attacked police officers. In September, he said he would “rapidly review” Jan. 6 cases for pardons on “day one.”

Out of all the crimes alleged on Jan. 6, seditious conspiracy is arguably the most serious, and is the charge that speaks to the core of what took place. The charge involves a concerted effort to attack the U.S. government. On Jan. 6, that manifested in a violent attempt to block the peaceful transfer of power to the Biden administration, the only time in U.S. history that it has been interrupted.

Some attorneys for seditious conspiracy defendants target that view in their appeals to Trump, calling it overblown or naive.

‘Few greater “asses” in American public life’

One attorney trying to take the opportunity is Norm Pattis, who represents three Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy: Zachary Rehl, Joseph Randall Biggs, and Dominic Pezzola. Rehl and Biggs were convicted of seditious conspiracy in 2023; Pezzola was acquitted of that charge but convicted of other, less serious charges.

Pattis provided TPM with a letter to Trump that he drafted for Biggs, a Proud Boys organizer and former Army sergeant who, prosecutors said, was among the first to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6. Pattis said that he sent the message to Trump last week. The letter was first reported by the New York Times.

“We want to get in the door because my sense is the administration will have a lot going on and it’s better to get in the door early than to try to bang a door down,” Pattis told TPM.

Biggs briefly expressed some remorse at sentencing, saying that he knew he “messed up that day.” He was sentenced to 17 years behind bars. Rehl was sentenced to 15 years in prison; Pezzola to 10.

The letter plays the hits of Trumpian complaint. “There have been few greater ‘asses’ in American public life in recent years than Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has directed a bitter and vindictive prosecution of well nearly 1300 protestors at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” the letter reads, before assailing the “entrenched bureaucracy” at the DOJ.

“Mr. President, you are no stranger to prosecutions warped by partisan vendetta,” Pattis wrote.

Oath Keeper Thomas Edward Caldwell was acquitted on seditious conspiracy and is fighting a conviction on a tampering charge as he awaits sentencing next month.

“I think that Mr. Caldwell would be first among equals as far as those deserving pardon,” Fischer said, adding that he would pursue a pardon if his motion to reconsider the tampering charges loses.

Bright, Rhodes’ attorney, said that he saw the pardon as an opportunity to free his client, but also to go further in working to reshape public understanding of Jan. 6 in a way that benefits the Oath Keeper leader.

“For so many humans, three days after a news event happens, it’s embedded in their brain that whatever they read was the truth,” Bright said. “And then they move on and they hold that truth dear to themselves. And that’s not a rational way to view an event in its entirety when new information comes out. The American public deserves — right, left and center — they deserve to have all of it once and for all.”

It’s not clear what eventual form pardons will take. Some attorneys expect Trump to issue pardons on a case-by-case basis; others suggested that he would issue a pardon to non-violent offenders. Others believed that he would go all the way, and issue a blanket pardon to all offenders that day.

Brandon Sample, a Vermont attorney who worked on securing pardons during Trump’s first term and anticipates doing the same in a second, told TPM that he expects any clemency around Jan. 6 to come categorically.

“If he’s going to do it, it’s going to be in a blanket form,” Sample said. “He said he was going to do it. I don’t see why it wouldn’t.”

For Trump, there’s no legal violation in any of this. The pardon power, Sample told TPM, is “king-like,” though in practice it’s long been wielded with built-in checks and balances.

The prospect of a blanket pardon has already begun to rile judges in D.C., who have now spent three years dealing with hundreds of cases from the event.

“Blanket pardons for all Jan. 6 defendants would be beyond frustrating and disappointing,” Judge Carl Nichols, a U.S. District Judge in D.C., reportedly said on Tuesday, while postponing a Jan. 6 trial.