In his parting shot at Donald Trump, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s report detailed the testimonies of injured police officers who defended the Capitol building from insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I think I might die today,” one recalled thinking.
Another described being dragged into the mob and tased while someone screamed, “Kill him with his gun!”
A third remembered fearing for journalists and members of Congress while telling themself, “We can take the beating. And I don’t know if these other people can take the beating too.”
There is now palpable dread among current Justice Department staff, retired FBI and extremism researchers that Trump will pardon the “Jan. Sixers.”
“What happens to cooperators? The Senate Judiciary Committee needs to ask the DOJ: What are you doing to protect cooperators?” said a former FBI special agent who expressed concern that released defendants could quickly find their way into far-right militias that will welcome them and champion their cause.
At least 169 of those who participated in the Jan. 6 riot are still behind bars as of this week, with most facing release dates in 2026 and beyond, according to data tracked by the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. At NOTUS’ behest, researchers identified that several defendants have been grouped together at particular federal prisons.
At least 11 were sent to Fort Dix in New Jersey, and two left in October. There are now 10 at Coleman Low in central Florida. In recent months, there were groups of eight serving time at low-security prisons in Elkton in Ohio, Loretto in Pennsylvania and Milan in Michigan.
In the fall, four were placed at FCI Danbury in Connecticut, where Steve Bannon was serving a four-month stint for ignoring a congressional subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. Two inmates serving time for unrelated crimes told NOTUS that Bannon had continued spreading his far-right conspiracies while there.
“Prisons are sort of a hotbed of radicalization,” George Washington University researcher Luke Baumgartner told NOTUS, drawing a comparison to the experience of jihadists in British jails.
“If you have a group of 10 J6ers at a prison, that is a unifying moment for those people. They have something to reflect on, something to look back on with one another, and those sorts of experiences can really bond people,” he said, warning that the expected sweep of pardons “would forge a deeper relationship with these people that can carry on outside these prisons.”
Tom Warrick, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and director of its Future of DHS Project, agreed. “The issue of radicalization in prison is something that has been observed in extremists of all political stripes,” he told NOTUS. “Not everyone in prison becomes radicalized, but it is certainly a problem that transcends ideologies and motivations.”
Warrick said that there’s also a distinction between those who have been convicted of violent and nonviolent crimes. He said that a history of violence is a sign that they might be more willing to reengage in aggressive actions in the future. While those charges represent a minority, the ramifications of pardons for them are substantial.
“Some of the most high-profile cases will send a political message different from what would be sent by pardoning lower-level, nonviolent offenders,” he said. “We need the government to keep the trust of the vast majority of the American people, and how this gets handled could end up increasing the overall level of trust or decreasing it. But if it does the latter, then the consequences for the country will be severe.”
Meanwhile, Trump remains steadfast in saying that the releases are coming. He has heralded those who stormed the Capitol as heroes and political prisoners ever since launching his presidential campaign on March 25, 2023, in Waco, Texas, where loudspeakers blared a rendition of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by prison inmates who were part of the “J6 choir.”
Speaking from his oceanside Florida mansion at Mar-a-Lago on the day after the four-year anniversary of the attack, he claimed, “People that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now.”
“I’ll be making major pardons, yes,” he promised.
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NOTUS wrote letters to dozens of J6 inmates asking about their experience behind bars and any hope that Trump might commute their sentences. Only one responded — Kenneth Joseph Owen Thomas — who sent back a letter in an envelope with three American flag stamps, all placed conspicuously upside down.
According to his sentencing memorandum, Thomas attacked four officers, yanked one’s baton, bodychecked a cop and shoved several others in the chest. He remained unapologetic, becoming what prosecutors called a “one-man misinformation machine.” He was a key figure in establishing the “J6 choir.” Assistant U.S. attorneys described how he’d run a podcast that tried to rewrite history while featuring commentary from Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, the eyepatch-wearing founder of the Oath Keepers, along with several other high-profile Jan. Sixers including the costumed “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley.
In prison at FCI Memphis in Tennessee, Thomas prefers to be known as a Christian “lay pastor.” When he wrote to NOTUS, he signed the letter “hostage #47187-509,” referring to his Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate number. His 14-page response to NOTUS’ inquiries described “black mold in the vents and showers of the housing units,” “roaches and spiders have become mascots here” and that “people get stabbed, raped, set ablaze, and beaten to death for simple commodities like tobacco, onions, stamps, etc.”
“Liberal guards target me for being a J6er,” he claimed.
Thomas also detailed that he celebrated the results of the November election with the three other inmates serving time for Jan. 6.
“Last week was the first time all four of us met together. We enjoyed a 15-minute dinner meal expressing our mutual joy for Trump’s victory and shared jokes,” he wrote.
“Kinship, I feel, is not the correct term,” Thomas wrote. “We have a shared experience and naturally I sometimes use the collective ‘we’ in some conversations, but I did not know or meet any of them before entering the unforgiving walls of this prison. I guess I could refer to a line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to explain how I felt the first time I came across one of those suffering under the same injustices as I.”
Thomas quoted the Soviet dissident who survived the Russian political repression and its notorious jail system: “Now for the first time you were about to see others who were alive, who were traveling your road, and whom you could join to yourself with the joyous word ‘we.’”
When asked about the potential for pardons, Thomas said he wrote two letters sent to Mar-a-Lago without a response.
“I will be incarcerated until God opens the gate. God may use Trump’s pen to do it, but I do not expect any form of dependency,” Thomas wrote. “If he does pardon, great — thanks, But I did not go to the Capitol for him, specifically. I went to honor my oath to the Constitution, for all Americans.”
Thomas’ experience behind bars — and insistence that he did nothing wrong — is a preview of what’s to come if Trump fulfills his promise to wipe the slate clean for some, or even all, of those involved in the 1,576 cases so far.
Baumgartner, the extremism researcher, noted that those serving time for Jan. 6 overwhelmingly fit a profile: 87% of them are white men in their 30s and 40s. Baumgartner said the sentencing memos also overwhelmingly contain accounts of men dealing with rage, substance abuse and traumatic childhoods.
“If you take Jan. 6 out of the equation and just look at the individuals … there’s not an insignificant number of people who have criminal histories,” he said.
“If these individuals are pardoned or some action is taken to lessen their sentence — let’s say it’s commuted or some other legal mechanism is taken — that’s basically a tacit endorsement of their behavior. And it’s signaling to them that violence is OK to settle our political differences and to act on your beliefs in a conspiracy theory,” Baumgartner said. “It’s an endorsement of their violence. It’s excusing it. It’s saying it’s OK.”
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Many Republicans in Congress are encouraging Trump to pardon those convicted for the Jan. 6 riot. They, like Trump, have minimized the severity of the event, called some participants who breached the Capitol innocent and created distinctions for some in the mob. The 1,105 cases that have already been adjudicated include everything from “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building” to the far more serious charges of “seditious conspiracy” that took down members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Rep. Thomas Massie, an outspoken advocate for pardoning Jan. 6 participants, told NOTUS that a distinguishing factor of the pardons should be if their convictions involved violence.
“There may be a few in there that don’t deserve a pardon,” he said. “But for the most part, they’ve been over-sentenced. And it can be commuted, too; they don’t have to be pardoned.”
Republicans would like to see Trump act on those types of convictions early.
“My advice was that the people who were nonviolent, go ahead and get those out of the way immediately,” Rep. Byron Donalds told NOTUS. “The other ones, you’ve probably got to look at them, probably on a case-by-case basis.”
Rep. Darrell Issa drew a similar distinction between those he claims were “completely innocent and just wandered in with the crowd” and those who “committed a serious crime knowingly and willfully.”
“That’s very different than the many who simply followed through, in some cases, escorted by plainclothes police or walking past plain clothes,” he said. “I think the facts are important, that there will be two categories, and I would hope that it is looked at that way.”
An open question: If Trump were to issue these pardons, would he rely on the court filings of the very Justice Department he’s denounced as politically motivated or the attestations of his most loyal followers behind bars?
There are Jan. 6 defendants who insist that they partook in no violence at all, despite the video evidence and law enforcement statements to the contrary. Their cases will be difficult for Republicans in Congress to square. Trump continues to deny the extent of the violence and danger, notably referring to it as a “day of love” during a Univision town hall in October.
Republicans invoke a common refrain that some of those currently jailed were simply “walking around past Capitol police officers,” as Rep. Ronny Jackson told NOTUS.
“People were punished for political reasons,” he said. “People who just went to the Capitol and didn’t damage anything, you know?”
“It was unfair what happened to some people. Some wrongs need to be righted,” he added.
However, some Republican voices in the Capitol take serious issue with this characterization.
On Wednesday, Sen. Thom Tillis used attorney general nominee Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee as an opportunity to place a stake in the ground and make any such consideration unthinkable.
“I was the last member out of the Senate on Jan. 6,” he said. “I walked past a lot of law enforcement officers … who were injured. I find it hard to believe that the president of the United States or you would look at facts that were used to convict the violent people on January the 6th and say it was just an intemperate moment. I don’t even expect you to respond to that.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS. John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.