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It really was our Beer Hall Putsch.

5 Years After Jan. 6, Lawlessness Has Triumphed

It was a day that should live in infamy. Instead, it was the day President Trump’s second term began to take shape.

Five years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. After the sun set that day, Congress reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The rioters lost, and so did Mr. Trump, who had summoned them to Washington and urged them to march to the Capitol. The Trump era seemed to have ended in one of the most disgracefully anti-American acts in the nation’s history.

That day was indeed a turning point, but not the one it first seemed to be. It was a turning point toward a version of Mr. Trump who is even more lawless than the one who governed the country in his first term. It heralded a culture of political unaccountability, in which people who violently attacked Congress and beat police officers escaped without lasting consequence. The politicians and pundits who had egged on the attack with their lies escaped, as well. The aftermath of Jan. 6 made the Republican Party even more feckless, beholden to one man and willing to pervert reality to serve his interests. Once Mr. Trump won election again in 2024, despite his role in encouraging the riot and his many distortions about it, it emboldened him to govern in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.

Tragically, America is still living in a political era that began on Jan. 6, 2021. Recognizing as much is necessary to bring this era to an end before it has many more anniversaries.

All this would have been hard to conceive for many Americans five years ago. Disgust was bipartisan for a time because so many episodes of that day seemed unforgettable.

As members of Congress were meeting to certify the presidential election result, more than 2,000 protesters forced their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and overturning barricades. They chanted about their desire to hang Vice President Mike Pence and track down Representative Nancy Pelosi. Fearing for their lives, elected officials, their aides and people who happened to be visiting the Capitol scrambled to find safe hiding spaces. The rioters eventually broke into the Senate chamber.

The victims who suffered the worst violence were the police officers protecting the Capitol. Patrick McCaughey, one of the rioters, pinned a Metropolitan Police officer, Daniel Hodges, with a stolen riot shield. Steven Cappuccio, another attacker, used Officer Hodges’ own baton to beat him, leaving him to scream through bloodied teeth. David Dempsey discharged a stream of pepper spray that burned the lungs, throat, eyes and face of Detective Phuson Nguyen. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the face of the Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, who suffered a series of strokes hours later and died.

As the deceased officer’s mother, Gladys Sicknick, later said to the attackers in court, “All of you bear responsibility for the injuries sustained by Brian’s fellow officers — the broken bones, head trauma and the continuing mental anguish they suffer and will endure for the rest of their lives.” Four other officers on duty that day died by suicide in the seven months after the attacks.

Mr. Trump made possible the lawlessness. After he lost the 2020 election, he spent weeks peddling the lie that he had rightfully won. He encouraged state officials to “find” votes for him or simply appoint electors loyal to him. He tried to pressure Mr. Pence not to certify the result. In a final attempt to subvert democracy and overturn the election, Mr. Trump’s supporters went to Washington on Jan. 6.

That morning, he appeared at the Ellipse, a park near the White House, and suggested to his supporters gathered there that he would march with them to the Capitol. He said so even though he knew some of them were armed, according to House Jan. 6 committee witness testimony. “Fight like hell,” he told the mob.

After the protesters marched to Capitol Hill and forced their way into the Capitol, Mr. Trump tweeted criticism of Mr. Pence at almost the same moment that Mr. Pence had to flee to a secure location. As the violence intensified and Mr. Trump’s staff implored him to intervene, he delayed sending security reinforcements to the Capitol. He sent a couple of halfhearted tweets urging his supporters to stay peaceful but did not tell them to leave the building.

Not until almost three hours after the attack began did Mr. Trump release a video telling the rioters to go home. It was clear that restoring peace was far from his priority. In the video, he dwelled on his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, which was the mob’s justification for attacking the certification of votes. His video was, at best, a mixed message, in which he signaled that the cause of the riot was just even as he called for nonviolence long after violence had started.

That video would mark the high point of his chagrin for the Jan. 6 violence. At 6 p.m., less than two hours after releasing the video, he returned to distorting the historical record. “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Over the next several years, Jan. 6 became a “day of love” in Mr. Trump’s telling: The rioters were “patriots,” and those detained were “hostages” whose suffering compared to that of Japanese Americans interned during World War II. He made common cause with the most extreme elements of his coalition to manipulate history. Together, they rallied right-wing media to their cause, silenced all but a few Republican critics and intimidated corporate leaders into complicity.

This behavior, though inexcusable, was not shocking. It fit with Mr. Trump’s character, as both a businessman and a politician who has long pursued his self-interest without legal or ethical restraint.

The shocking part of the story was the response of so many other people in government, media and business.

Initially, many denounced him. As rioters stormed the Capitol, the Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham sent texts to the White House chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, urging him to persuade Mr. Trump to end the attack. Amazon and other companies suspended campaign donations to Republicans who had refused to certify the 2020 election results. Facebook and Twitter banned Mr. Trump from their platforms.

The most important role fell to Congress. It had the power to bar him from holding office again, the appropriate punishment for a political leader who encouraged and praised an attack on Congress. The House impeached him, with 222 Democratic and 10 Republican votes, just seven days after Jan. 6.

Hard as it may be to recall now, the Senate appeared close to convicting him and barring him from office. As The Times reported on Jan. 12, Senator Mitch McConnell, then the Republican leader, “has concluded that President Trump committed impeachable offenses and believes that Democrats’ move to impeach him will make it easier to purge Mr. Trump from the party, according to people familiar with Mr. McConnell’s thinking.”

Within days, though, Mr. McConnell surrendered his influence and his principles. He “never mounted a campaign to persuade other Republicans to join him,” The Times reported. He allowed Mr. Trump’s supporters to dominate the debate. Convicting Mr. Trump would have required 17 Republican votes in the Senate, and seven senators courageously voted for conviction. The most consequential unknown of Jan. 6 is what would have happened if Mr. McConnell had shown similar courage. He might well have found the 10 extra votes needed to change American history. In the end, he did not even vote for conviction himself.

It will be the defining stain on Mr. McConnell’s legacy. He may realize it, too. In the past year, he has turned into a rare Republican senator willing to defy Mr. Trump on some major policies.

After the Senate voted against conviction, there were no similarly clean paths toward accountability. The House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee did admirable work, reconstructing the day and Mr. Trump’s role in it, in 2022. That work appears to have had a political impact. In the midterm elections that year, Mr. Trump’s allies and defenders fared five percentage points worse, on average, than other Republicans. In swing states, prominent 2020 election deniers lost their races. Still, dissatisfaction with the Biden administration handed Republicans control of the House, and they abandoned any Jan. 6 accountability once they were in charge. Instead, they began investigating their colleagues who had attempted to bring justice to Mr. Trump.

The legal system also took some steps to fill the accountability gap. But it moved slowly and ineffectively. Justice Department officials, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, agonized over whether to prosecute a former president from the other party. In the end, they did, but their case produced arguably the worst of all results. It happened too slowly for a trial to take place before Mr. Trump ran for president again in 2024 and thus potentially to influence public perceptions, as the House’s Jan. 6 hearings did two years earlier. Yet the existence of the case allowed Mr. Trump to cast himself as the victim of a politicized prosecution.

The strongest state case, in Georgia, was even more flawed. Prosecutors, led by Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, charged Mr. Trump and 18 others with a racketeering conspiracy for their efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election. Those prosecutors also moved slowly. Worse, Ms. Willis undermined the case by engaging in a secret, deeply irresponsible romantic relationship with a prosecutor who reported to her.

Even without these issues, the criminal justice system would always have been a less effective means than Congress for holding Mr. Trump accountable. Only Congress could have definitively ended his political career. A convicted person can still run for federal office.

With the political and legal systems failing to punish him, much of the rest of the country started to move on. Business leaders made excuses for him. The conservative media establishment promoted him again and cheered on the purge of Republicans who had criticized his role in Jan. 6. Many voters, too, forgave — or at least proved willing to overlook his crimes — and decided that a second Trump presidency was preferable to Mr. Biden’s or Kamala Harris’s leadership. Some 77 million Americans voted for Mr. Trump in 2024.

He learned that he could get away with more than he dared to try in his first term.

Once he was elected, his post-Jan. 6 experience inspired his administration’s goals and methods. He and his aides concluded that intimidation and lawlessness could yield victories even in seemingly unwinnable and sometimes illegal circumstances.

They used Jan. 6 as a litmus test to identify and promote loyalists. They asked prospective national security officials whether the Capitol assault was “an inside job,” The Washington Post reported. The administration gave senior jobs to extremists, opportunists and conspiracy theorists. Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s current F.B.I. director, promoted the theory that the F.B.I. had secretly encouraged Jan. 6 violence. Mr. Patel and other administration officials retaliated against prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who had insisted on enforcing the law impartially. Many noble people have been fired or demoted. Some face unjust federal investigations.

On the first day of his second term, Mr. Trump granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged or convicted in connection with Jan. 6. The group included hundreds of defendants found to have assaulted law enforcement officers. It included Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio, who helped organize the attack. The pardons came eight days after JD Vance, preparing to take office as vice president, said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” The president has also pardoned supporters, like Rudolph Giuliani, who tried to overturn the 2020 election results with fraudulent electors.

The pardons issue a message: If you break the law to protect me, you will be supported, and if you uphold the law to restrain me, you will be persecuted. Today, Ed Martin, who helped raise money for Jan. 6 defendants, holds a top Justice Department job effectively dedicated to hounding Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies. Mr. Martin and his working group are investigating prosecutors, F.B.I. agents and members of Congress whose jobs obligated them to investigate Jan. 6.

The thuggishness extends far beyond the people who were directly involved in Jan. 6 cases. The legacy of that day has taught Mr. Trump how to use power more aggressively to advance his interests. In his second term, he has surrounded himself with officials who accede to his lawless demands. One example: Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has accused outspoken Democratic lawmakers of mortgage fraud and gone after Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor whose views on monetary policy Mr. Trump does not like.

Mr. Trump has also learned that congressional Republicans will bow to him even when he treats them with contempt or ignores the Constitution. He has defied the War Powers Act by blowing up boats in international waters, set high tariff rates without consulting Congress and nominated preposterous candidates for the Senate to confirm. He has forced the retirement of legislators who buck him. He has suggested that the House of Representatives has little independent power. “I’m the speaker and the president,” he recently joked. In private, legislators acknowledge that they obey him partly because they fear violence from his supporters.

Mr. Trump likewise plays the courts more successfully than in his first term. The Supreme Court has helped him, first by ruling in 2024 that presidents have almost complete immunity from future prosecution. As a result, he knows that he faces little legal jeopardy for his most outrageous actions. The justices have also proved unwilling to halt some of Mr. Trump’s most dubious second-term policies, such as his tariffs and use of ethnic profiling in immigration raids. The justices have instead allowed most policies to proceed while the cases gradually wind through the courts. Much as he ran out the clock on his post-Jan. 6 prosecutions, he has reshaped U.S. trading relationships, immigration policy and other areas before the legal system has roused itself to intervene.

Again and again, Mr. Trump dares the system to stop him. He does so knowing that the same system that failed to hold him to account for Jan. 6 is unlikely to do so now. The effects might outlast him. He has shown his Republican would-be successors, starting with Mr. Vance, that they can rewrite palpable history, encourage federal crimes for political ends by pardoning guilty people, exact revenge on those who do their duty to uphold the law and manipulate a docile Supreme Court majority willing to hand sweeping, unprecedented powers to a president.

In Mr. Trump’s second term, he has governed as if Jan. 6 never ended. The damage to the nation is severe.

As dark as this story has become, it is not over. Its next chapters will depend on what Americans do now, especially those who share some of Mr. Trump’s policy preferences but remain loyal to American democracy. Many people have already responded heroically to Jan. 6. Police officers risked their lives and suffered beatings to defend the Capitol. Hundreds of F.B.I. agents, prosecutors, congressional aides and others investigated the day’s events and created a historical record that Mr. Trump cannot erase. A small number of elected Republicans — including Liz Cheney, Anthony Gonzalez, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and Mitt Romney — insisted on defending the Constitution, at the cost of their careers.

The past few months offer some new reasons for hope. Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen. His party has lost elections. Lower-court judges, including some appointed by Mr. Trump, have blocked some of his policies and called out his brazen disregard for truth. Even some congressional Republicans have voted against him on a few matters, like the Jeffrey Epstein files and health care subsidies. These developments make it possible to imagine a better future.

The Jan. 6 era turns five years old on Tuesday. The anniversary will always be a mournful one for America. The nation’s challenge now is to ensure that the day is ultimately viewed as it initially was: as an aberration. Americans must summon the collective will to bring this era to an end and make certain that the violence, lawlessness and injustice of Jan. 6 do not endure.

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As bad as that day felt, there was a little relief in the thought of “at least this is all over.”

Turns out it was only the beginning.

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This Jan. 6 plaque was made to honor law enforcement. It’s nowhere to be found at the Capitol

A replica plaque commemorating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot hangs outside the office of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025, at the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers’ lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.

Determined to preserve the nation’s history, some 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have taken it upon themselves to memorialize the moment. For months, they’ve mounted poster board-style replicas of the Jan. 6 plaque outside their office doors, resulting in a Capitol complex awash with makeshift remembrances.

“On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” reads the faux bronze stand-in for the real thing. “Their heroism will never be forgotten.”

Jan. 6 void in the Capitol
In Washington, a capital city lined with monuments to the nation’s history, the plaque was intended to become a simple but permanent marker, situated near the Capitol’s west front, where some of the most violent fighting took place as rioters breached the building.

But in its absence, the missing plaque makes way for something else entirely — a culture of forgetting.

Visitors can pass through the Capitol without any formal reminder of what happened that day, when a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building trying to overturn the Republican’s 2020 reelection defeat to Democrat Joe Biden. With memory left unchecked, it allows new narratives to swirl and revised histories to take hold.

Five years ago, the jarring scene watched the world over was declared an “insurrection” by the then-GOP leader of the Senate, while the House GOP leader at the time called it his “saddest day” in Congress. But those condemnations have faded.

Trump calls it a “day of love.” And Johnson, who was among those lawmakers challenging the 2020 election results, is now the House speaker.

“The question of January 6 remains – democracy was on the guillotine — how important is that event in the overall sweep of 21st century U.S. history,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University and noted scholar.

“Will January 6 be seen as the seminal moment when democracy was in peril?” he asked. Or will it be remembered as “kind of a weird one-off?”

“There’s not as much consensus on that as one would have thought on the fifth anniversary,” he said.

A replica plaque commemorating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot hangs outside the office of Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025, at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Memories shift, but violent legacy lingers
At least five people died in the riot and its aftermath, including Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by police while trying to climb through a window toward the House chamber. More than 140 law enforcement officers were wounded, some gravely, and several died later, some by suicide.

All told, some 1,500 people were charged in the Capitol attack, among the largest federal prosecutions in the nation’s history. When Trump returned to power in January 2025, he pardoned all of them within hours of taking office.

Unlike the twin light beams that commemorated the Sept. 11, 2001, attack or the stand-alone chairs at the Oklahoma City bombing site memorial, the failure to recognize Jan. 6 has left a gap not only in memory but in helping to stitch the country back together.

“That’s why you put up a plaque,” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa. “You respect the memory and the service of the people involved.”

Police sue over Jan. 6 plaque, DOJ seeks to dismiss
The speaker’s office said in a statement late Monday the statute authorizing the plaque is “not implementable” and proposed alternatives also “do not comply.” Johnson’s spokesman said if Democrats are serious about commemorating the police, they’re free to work with the appropriate committees to develop a framework for proper vetting and consideration.

Lawmakers approved the plaque in March 2022 as part of a broader government funding package. The resolution said the U.S. “owes its deepest gratitude to those officers,” and it set out instructions for an honorific plaque listing the names of officers “who responded to the violence that occurred.” It gave a one-year deadline for installation at the Capitol.

This summer, two officers who fought the mob that day sued over the delay.

“By refusing to follow the law and honor officers as it is required to do, Congress encourages this rewriting of history,” said the claim by officers Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges. “It suggests that the officers are not worthy of being recognized, because Congress refuses to recognize them.”

The Justice Department is seeking to have the case dismissed. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and others argued Congress “already has publicly recognized the service of law enforcement personnel” by approving the plaque and displaying it wouldn’t alleviate the problems they claim to face from their work.

“It is implausible,” the Justice Department attorneys wrote, to suggest installation of the plaque “would stop the alleged death threats they claim to have been receiving.”

The department also said the plaque is required to include the names of “all law enforcement officers” involved in the response that day — some 3,600 people.

A replica plaque commemorating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot stands outside the office of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y, Tuesday, Dec. 30, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Makeshift memorials emerge
Lawmakers who’ve installed replicas of the plaque outside their offices said it’s important for the public to know what happened.

“There are new generations of people who are just growing up now who don’t understand how close we came to losing our democracy on Jan 6, 2021,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the Jan. 6 committee, which was opposed by GOP leadership but nevertheless issued a nearly 1,000-page report investigating the run-up to the attack and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Raskin envisions the Capitol one day holding tours around what happened. “People need to study that as an essential part of American history,” he said.

“Think about the dates in American history that we know only by the dates: There’s the 4th of July. There’s December 7th. There’s 9/11. And there’s January 6th,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-calif., who also served on the committee and has a plaque outside her office.

“They really saved my life, and they saved the democracy and they deserve to be thanked for it,” she said.

But as time passes, there are no longer bipartisan memorial services for Jan. 6. On Tuesday, the Democrats will reconvene members from the Jan. 6 committee for a hearing to “examine ongoing threats to free and fair elections,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York announced. It’s unlikely Republicans will participate.

The Republicans under Johnson have tapped Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia to stand up their own special committee to uncover what the speaker calls the “full truth” of what happened. They’re planning a hearing this month.

“We should stop this silliness of trying to whitewash history -- it’s not going to happen,” said Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., who helped lead the effort to display the replica plaques.

“I was here that day so I’ll never forget,” he said. “I think that Americans will not forget what happened.”

The number of makeshift plaques that fill the halls is a testimony to that remembrance, he said.

Instead of one plaque, he said, they’ve “now got 100.”

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For Many Jan. 6 Rioters, a Pardon From Trump Wasn’t Enough
Some pardoned rioters have been rearrested. Others returned to poverty and mental health challenges. And many became consumed by resentment and demands for payback.

In the first hours of his second administration, President Trump sought to wipe away all trace of the attack on the Capitol by granting amnesty to nearly 1,600 people implicated in the riot stoked by his lies about a stolen election.

They answered with a collective cry of gratitude. And why not?

The pardon proclamation saved them, opening prison doors and ending all of the criminal prosecutions related to the Capitol attack. Even more, it gave a presidential stamp of approval to their inverted vision of Jan. 6, 2021: that those who assaulted the police and vandalized the historic building that day were victims, and those who spent the next four years using the criminal justice system to hold them accountable were villains.

But nearly a year after Mr. Trump’s sweeping proclamation asserted that he had cleared the way for “a process of national reconciliation,” many recipients of his clemency remain consumed by conspiracy theories, angry at the Trump administration for not validating their insistence that the Capitol attack was a deep-state setup and haunted by problems from both before and after the riot.

“Being pardoned doesn’t make these families whole,” Cynthia Hughes, a prominent advocate for the Jan. 6 defendants, wrote on social media recently. “Many are barely holding on mentally, emotionally, and financially. To pretend otherwise is a lie.”

In the five years since the Capitol was stormed, no new facts have emerged to undermine the basic findings of congressional and Justice Department investigators that many of the rioters acted in the misguided belief, pushed relentlessly by Mr. Trump, that he had been robbed of victory in 2020 — and that in attacking the Capitol they not only injured about 140 police officers but also struck at a cornerstone of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Even so, Mr. Trump has long maintained that the rioters endured horrible, even illegal, mistreatment during their prosecutions.

And yet if that is true, some pardoned rioters are now asking, then why haven’t their persecutors been thrown in jail? And if the rioters are martyrs to a righteous cause, as the president and his allies have often said, then why haven’t they been made whole through financial reparations?

While this disillusionment is not universal, some so-called J6ers have even begun to ask why, after nearly a year in power, Mr. Trump’s law enforcement agencies have yet to provide any proof of the conspiracy theory they promoted to help him reclaim the presidency: that deep-state agents lured Trump supporters into storming the Capitol to derail the MAGA movement and justify political reprisals.

What J6ers rarely seem to acknowledge is the possibility that Mr. Trump’s government has failed to reveal the hidden truth about Jan. 6 because there is no hidden truth, no deep-state conspiracy, and therefore no legal reason to bring further charges related to the riot.

Still, their questions have nurtured new conspiracy theories from the old, focused not on the Biden administration, but on those in power now, Trump loyalists like the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The theories have intensified as the fifth anniversary of Jan. 6 has arrived — a milestone that many rioters believe marks the final chance to punish the shadowy government agents who supposedly entrapped them in what they have come to call the “fedsurrection.”

“If the true perpetrators of Jan. 6 aren’t held accountable before the statute of limitations expires on Jan. 6, 2026, count me OUT of the midterms,” Shane Jenkins, whose several felony convictions for Jan. 6 included assaulting law enforcement, wrote last month. “I’ll be running AGAINST the GOP.”

By feeding a steady diet of unfounded conspiracy theories not only to the J6ers but also to others in their base, Mr. Trump and his allies have spawned what some experts have likened to a zombie army of followers. And now, by failing to follow these theories to their logical conclusions, they are seeing that army begin to turn on them.

“When you’re told day after day that you’re a victim — when you’re told that for four years straight — it sinks in,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “They’ve become conspiratorial-minded people looking for the next thing to mobilize for.”

“There’s this zombie specter of Jan. 6 defendants who are just looking for that red meat,” Mr. Lewis added.

Another Conspiracy Theory Takes Hold
All of this was on display at the end of the year, when many pardoned rioters reacted in fury as competing solutions were offered to an enduring mystery arising from the Capitol attack: Who planted pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic Party headquarters on the night before Jan. 6?

The first answer was put forward in early November, when Steve Baker, one of the rioters, published an article in the right-wing news outlet The Blaze, saying he had found a “forensic match” between the hooded suspect caught on video prowling Capitol Hill that night and a former Capitol Police officer who had fought the mob on Jan. 6 and then went to work for the C.I.A. Mr. Baker’s report fit neatly into the “fedsurrection” narrative, linking the bombs to a former law enforcement official with ties to the country’s premier intelligence agency.

But The Blaze scoop fell flat. Federal officials, including Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the F.B.I. at the time, dismissed it as untrue, and the former officer’s lawyers said that when the suspect was supposedly setting the bombs, their client was home, playing with her dogs.

A couple of weeks later, Mr. Bongino, Mr. Patel and Ms. Bondi stood side by side at the Justice Department to announce their own break in the case — one that contradicted Mr. Baker’s. Federal agents, they said, had just arrested Brian Cole Jr., a Virginia man who would later tell the F.B.I. he had planted the bombs because he wanted to “speak up” for those who believed the 2020 election had been stolen.

Mr. Bongino, who led the bureau’s investigation, used the news conference to flatter Mr. Trump, saying the arrest would not have happened without the president’s demands “to go get the bad guys.”

But Mr. Bongino left out something important. He never mentioned that before joining the F.B.I., when he was a right-wing podcaster, he had embraced a view of the investigation that echoed the one promoted by Mr. Baker: that the pipe bomb case was an “inside job” that the bureau itself had obscured in a “massive cover-up” intended to stop Republicans from questioning the 2020 election.

Hours later, he minimized that contradiction when pressed on TV by the Fox News host Sean Hannity.

“I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions, that’s clear, and one day I will be back in that space — but that’s not what I’m paid for now,” said Mr. Bongino, who two weeks later announced his resignation from the F.B.I. “I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

But the arrest of Mr. Cole had already planted another conspiracy theory in the collective mind of the Jan. 6 community.

Several rioters quickly described the F.B.I.’s suspect as a patsy whose arrest was meant to distract from the truth that the real culprit, the former officer identified by Mr. Baker, was still at large. Some armchair anatomists argued that Mr. Cole’s legs were too short for him to have been the hooded suspect in the surveillance videos.

There was even talk of a government cover-up. A new cover-up, not the old one promoted by Mr. Bongino.

Pardoned rioters seized on the fact that the prosecutor managing the pipe bomb case, Jocelyn Ballantine, had also overseen another high-profile Jan. 6 case: that of Enrique Tarrio and other leaders of the far-right Proud Boys, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, only to be granted clemency and freed by Mr. Trump.

This new conspiracy theory went viral enough to be featured days later at a media event with Mr. Trump at the White House. The president was asked about Ms. Ballantine by one of the White House press corps’ newest members, a correspondent for LindellTV, a company created by Mike Lindell, the election denier and founder of MyPillow.

There was no reason to believe Mr. Trump had ever heard of Ms. Ballantine, whose experience handling many complex Jan. 6 prosecutions made her a natural fit to oversee the pipe bomb case. But that did not stop him from casting suspicion on her.

“Jocelyn is being looked at — they all have to be looked at,” Mr. Trump said. “What they’re doing is so bad. This was a whole Democrat hoax.”

Though his answer promised nothing, it still gave oxygen to the question’s conspiratorial premise. It also gave pardoned rioters another reason to turn against the Trump officials they once believed would reveal the truth about the case.

In an interview shortly after Mr. Trump was asked about Ms. Ballantine, Mr. Tarrio said he was pleased that the issue was on the president’s “radar,” but expressed skepticism that anything would come of it.

“We might see some results from it,” he said. “But I don’t trust the D.O.J. whatsoever to do the right thing here. I mean they’ve fumbled everything.”

Restitution for the Riot
For many Jan. 6 defendants, clemency was not enough. From the moment Mr. Trump issued his proclamation, there came demands for more: deep-state actors held accountable, hidden truths revealed and reparations — some form of monetary apology — paid.

Nearly two months after Mr. Trump’s decree, lawyers representing Jan. 6 offenders were making plans to sue the Justice Department. They intended to argue that the cases stemming from the Capitol attack amounted to malicious prosecution and that many rioters had been grievously harmed by their own government.

Two lawyers were behind the effort: Mark McCloskey, known for brandishing a semiautomatic rifle in 2020 as Black Lives Matter protesters paraded past his home in St. Louis, and Peter Ticktin, a friend of Mr. Trump since their teenage years at the New York Military Academy.

The men had reason for hope. Asked in the spring about possible compensation for the rioters in an interview on the right-wing news channel Newsmax, Mr. Trump gave a typically opaque answer.

“A lot of people that are in government now talk about it because a lot of the people in government really like that group of people,” he said.

But there is a yawning chasm between talk and action — especially in Washington. And recognizing the hurdles to winning lawsuits against the government, Mr. McCloskey began pitching top Justice Department officials on a more audacious plan, establishing a panel to award damages to the rioters, similar to the special master who distributed money to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

One of Mr. McCloskey’s top interlocutors was Ed Martin, who has a history of espousing conspiracy theories and raising money for the Jan. 6 offenders. Mr. Martin, who ran the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington until May, now leads the Justice Department’s weaponization working group, whose stated mission is to review the actions of law enforcement officials who investigated Mr. Trump.

But as the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term drew to a close, Mr. McCloskey’s proposal was in limbo. It was not lost on many pardoned rioters that Mr. Trump himself had demanded that the Justice Department pay him up to $230 million in similar claims for the criminal inquiries it conducted into him.

Last month, in a tacit admission that his negotiations had stalled, Mr. McCloskey posted a photo of himself on social media wheeling a cartload of boxes to Justice Department headquarters. The post said the boxes contained hundreds of government forms filled out by would-be litigants in advance of filing claims.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. McCloskey said that while he and Mr. Martin had held a number of “positive meetings,” Mr. Trump and his administration appeared to have “no appetite” at the moment for financially compensating the rioters.

His photo, he said, was meant to warn that lawsuits could be coming.

“I don’t think any word has come down from on top about how to handle these things,” Mr. McCloskey said. “But we want to give them a wake-up call, saying, ‘This is a problem you should probably stop ignoring.’”

A Milestone on Several Fronts
Five years later, the Capitol attack continues to define many of its participants. Whether in triumphant or sorrowful commemoration, some are planning to return to Washington for the fifth anniversary to rewalk the path that changed their lives.

“January 6 didn’t end when the sun went down,” Tommy Tatum, whose civil disorder charges were dismissed by Mr. Trump’s clemency proclamation, wrote in a post last month titled “I’m Still Going to Washington.”

“For many of us, it never ended at all,” Mr. Tatum said. “It followed us home. It sat with us in courtrooms, hospitals, quiet rooms, and sleepless nights.”

But the anniversary also marks the day the five-year statute of limitations will expire for crimes arising from Jan. 6 — chief among them the supposed offenses that the conspiracy-minded believe were committed by the government that day.

“President Trump campaigned on there being feds in the crowd that stirred up trouble, but we haven’t seen any action against them yet,” said Will Pope, one of the rioters. “The bottom line is we’d like to see some action.”

Demands for vengeance from rioters like Mr. Pope, while neither sudden nor surprising, have long been fanned by Mr. Trump and some of his top aides.

But the insistence by many J6ers that time was running out to seek charges against federal instigators, prosecutors who worked on their cases and even members of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack created such a drumbeat that top Justice Department officials felt compelled to address it.

On the Sunday after Christmas, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division, attacked the “influencers” who were raising questions about the statute of limitations, effectively telling them not to worry. The “Trump/Bondi DOJ,” she vowed, “is working to bring to justice those who weaponized January 6th, 2021.”

One way such justice might be meted out is through a report that Mr. Martin has been preparing on the government’s response to Jan. 6. The effort is being coordinated in part by someone who joined in the Capitol attack: Jared L. Wise, a former F.B.I. agent who was charged with encouraging the mob to kill the police that day and then, after receiving clemency, was hired by Mr. Martin as a Justice Department adviser.

While it remains unclear what the report might say, Mr. Wise has met about it with officials in the White House and the deputy attorney general’s office, according to internal Justice Department records. Some rioters have shared their own perspectives with his team, Reuters recently reported, and have even suggested how to shape indictments against the very officials who sought to hold them accountable.

Treniss Evans, who was sentenced to 20 days in prison after pleading guilty to entering the Capitol, sent a statement to the Justice Department last year that outlined how, in his opinion, charges could be filed against some of the agents, prosecutors and even judges who handled Jan. 6-related cases for what he described as having concealed exculpatory evidence and suborned perjury from witnesses. He volunteered to take the witness stand if new charges were filed.

It is impossible to know whether Mr. Trump’s Justice Department would, or even could, follow through on such charges. While Mr. Martin is said to have the president’s ear, several of his more aggressive plans have been shelved by his Justice Department superiors, including the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche.

Many police officers injured protecting the Capitol on Jan. 6 still bear scars from that day. And many agents and prosecutors who worked on riot cases — some of whom were fired for it — seem outraged that the defendants have come after them but unsurprised that they have failed so far to get the charges they have asked for.

“It almost reminds me of a cult leader not delivering to his followers,” said Mike Romano, a former prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases. “Maybe the leader never intended to or never had the power to deliver.”

Still, the calls for revenge among the pardoned rioters and their supporters remain loud and impatient. Some have expressed resentment that other news has sucked right-wing attention away from their cause, including, most recently, the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“America is obsessing over Epstein while the January 6 victims — REAL victims — are being erased,” Ms. Hughes, the ardent supporter of the rioters, wrote in one recent post. “These are Americans who were thrown into solitary confinement for YEARS, denied Due Process, raided, bankrupted, and separated from their children. Families destroyed. Lives shattered. And now? Silence.”

Ms. Hughes is hardly alone in her frustration. The repeated intimations by Mr. Martin and others that the perpetrators of the “fedsurrection” will be brought to justice — without, as yet, any conclusive action — have fueled suspicion about who is in cahoots with whom.

In other words, an even grander conspiracy.

Geri Perna, whose nephew died by suicide while awaiting sentencing in a riot case, posted an image on social media shortly before Christmas that seemed to capture the fierce desire and waning hope for retribution. It depicted Santa Claus shouldering a bag of gifts, each wrapped in a red bow and labeled with a single word: ARRESTS.

“Dear Santa,” her caption read. “We’ve been waiting patiently all year.”

  • Popular Post

Biden was a pretty shit president on everything but the economy, but his biggest fumble was not making a better example of these people and the cretin who lead them to potential slaughter.

  • Popular Post

Ashley Babbitt still dead right???

4 minutes ago, speed817 said:

Ashley Babbitt still dead right???

Yes, and congrats to her for her 5th year of sobriety!

Edited by The Ace of Aces

1 hour ago, bolverk said:

“Being pardoned doesn’t make these families whole,” Cynthia Hughes, a prominent advocate for the Jan. 6 defendants, wrote on social media recently. “Many are barely holding on mentally, emotionally, and financially. To pretend otherwise is a lie.”

Thats Good Donald Glover GIF

4 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

i hate these people so much

I said it in the Trump thread, but I think we've passed "Orwellian" language here.

44 minutes ago, Red Five said:

That is.... there's not a word strong enough for this disgrace of a lie. And of course, to accuse the left of "gaslighting" over the events is just the cherry on the shit sundae. Can't believe we have to live under this regime. No end in sight.

The stab in the back!

Vice President Mike Pence, who had the opportunity to return disputed electoral slates to state legislatures for review and decertification under the United States Constitution, chooses not to exercise that power in an act of cowardice and sabotage. Instead, Pence presides over the certification of contested electors, undermining President Trump's efforts to address documented fraud and ending any chance to correct the election steal.

1 hour ago, Hammerin Hank said:

Biden was a pretty shit president on everything but the economy, but his biggest fumble was not making a better example of these people and the cretin who lead them to potential slaughter.


Biden will be viewed by historians as one of our better presidents.

6 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:


Biden will be viewed by historians as one of our better presidents.

I voted for the dude, but this is Heisenberg purity copium.

  • Author

I didn't realize the regime had deleted its database of January 6 cases after pardoning the traitors. This, along with refusing to post a plaque in the Capitol, is an attempt to memoryhole the whole fucking thing.

Fortunately, NPR, with the assistance of other media, created an archive to preserve evidence for the historical record.

https://apps.npr.org/jan-6-archive/

https://apps.npr.org/jan-6-archive/database.html

Screenshot of what it looks like, highlighting certain Texas traitors.

image.png

im trying to fathom how to be as big a pussy as the democrats or as much of a coward as the republicans.

its amazing the country is still standing honestly.

GRaLANUWQAAZcS0.jpg

One of bolverk's links is to the Texas Board of Realtors.

it's really deeply upsetting to look back at the threads and see posts calling this out exactly as it fucking happened. History was our guide, and we are well past the point of no return.

I recommended it back in 2021, but Robert Evans' Behind the Insurrections is a wonderful and maddening series of past fascist takeovers and how they happened. It's the same thing over and over and over.

hopefully all the jan 6 traitors die horrible deaths, asap

41 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:

This link has enraged me to the point I may need to turn off the internet for a while and walk around for a bit.

i didn't get past the 2nd paragraph.

1 hour ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:


Biden will be viewed by historians as one of our better presidents.

Whatever else he may have done, he fucked it up by attempting to run for re-election. That one decision makes his whole Presidency a failure.

10 minutes ago, Valmy77 said:

Whatever else he may have done, he fucked it up by attempting to run for re-election. That one decision makes his whole Presidency a failure.

He should have never run in 2020.

1 hour ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:


Biden will be viewed by historians as one of our better presidents.

Agreed, mainly because he'll be viewed next to Dotard.

TMZ
No image preview

Fight Breaks Out Jan. 6 Memorial March For Ashli Babbitt...

It's January 6, so of course, there is chaos in Washington, D.C. ... and this time tensions are flaring at a march memorializing the Capitol Riot ... a fight broke out, and it's all on video.
2 hours ago, Valmy77 said:

Whatever else he may have done, he fucked it up by attempting to run for re-election. That one decision makes his whole Presidency a failure.

I disagree. It’s not his fault Americans are the dumbest people on earth. But that’s for another thread.

Fuck these traitors. This should be a national day of remembrance. Remembering the Capitol Police who died and also what we SHOULD have done to the perpetrators, both at the Capitol and the republicans who helped plan and encourage it.

2 minutes ago, Red Five said:

It's disgusting that we haven't seen mass resignations yet. People like Rubio fucking know better.

People like Rubio are positioning themselves for the fall and hoping they will be able to stand on the ashes.

This more than any other single thing disqualifies that rotten, indecent piece of shit from a leadership position in our country.

And that's even before you get to all the post-hoc lying and re-writing of history.

40 minutes ago, Red Five said:

It's disgusting that we haven't seen mass resignations yet. People like Rubio fucking know better.

I can’t take credit for this, someone else posted it recently, but Marco…

IMG_5874.webp

8 hours ago, Chuckie Finster said:

This link has enraged me to the point I may need to turn off the internet for a while and walk around for a bit.

I didn't click it because I knew I would be infuriated.

14 hours ago, The Ace of Aces said:

Yes, and congrats to her for her 5th year of sobriety!

I admire her resolve and commitment to her ongoing hunger strike, too.

Either Erickson has been completely hollowed out inside by apologizing for Trump while his wife slowly dies of cancer, or he’s setting up a heel turn, and this is bleak wit on par with Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker.

Edited by Bozo_Casanova

15 hours ago, David Dennison said:

He should have never run in 2020.

15 hours ago, ChiTownDoc said:

Agreed, mainly because he'll be viewed next to Dotard.

He'll be most remembered for ushering Trump right back into office

1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Either Erickson has been completely hollowed out inside by apologizing for Trump while his wife slowly dies of cancer, or he’s setting up a heel turn, and this is bleak wit on par with Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker.

That statement is completely absurd. First off, just because a mass shooting isn’t in the news after 48 hours doesn’t mean we all just move on. A lot of us have that in the back of our minds every day whether it be worrying about our own kids, our neices and nephews, our friends kids, etc. Secondly, how is it hand wringing to remember the attack on our capitol? Is it hand wringing when we remember 9/11, or D Day, or Pearl Harbor?

2 minutes ago, Hammerin Hank said:

That statement is completely absurd. First off, just because a mass shooting isn’t in the news after 48 hours doesn’t mean we all just move on.

He’s working through a collapse of faith, probably in multiple forms.

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