It was an uncharacteristically warm November night in the nation’s capital Wednesday, when a few dozen people gathered on a street corner outside the city’s biggest jail. Some have come to the same spot for the last 800 nights, for a vigil protesting the incarceration of the January 6 rioters.
But this night was different. The mood was buoyant. Champagne was popped.
“Raise a glass to President Trump,” Micki Witthoeft, the group’s leader, told the crowd, offering a toast to the man who had become the president-elect that morning.
Witthoeft is the mother of Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran and fervent Donald Trump supporter who was fatally shot by a police officer inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as she tried to breach an area near the House floor while lawmakers fled.
The people behind the vigil are the tip of the spear of a national movement of activists who have spent years campaigning for the release of January 6 defendants. They’ve pressed forward even though a majority of Americans still see the Capitol rioters as responsible for an attack against democracy, according to the most recent polling.
Now, Witthoeft and others expect Trump to make good on his oft-repeated campaign pledge to pardon the January 6 “political prisoners,” as they are called in MAGA speak.
But the issue poses a dilemma for the president-elect. Many of Trump’s most loyal supporters expect him to grant maximum clemency, even for some of the most violent offenders. But that could upset a majority of voters and even some GOP allies who previously urged Trump not to pardon anyone who assaulted police that day.
During his victory speech early Wednesday, Trump said, “We’re going to keep our promises.” But he hasn’t said anything publicly about the January 6 saga since before the election.
“Unless the president pardons everybody, he is going to get some significant blowback,” said John Pierce, a pro-Trump attorney who has represented dozens of the January 6 defendants. “They are not a shy group of people.”
“He’s got a tough decision to make,” said Jeffrey Crouch, one of the nation’s leading experts on the laws and history of presidential pardons, who teaches at American University. “Does he do nothing, allow the court cases to proceed, and risk angering his base? Or does he abuse the pardon power to grant clemency to insurrectionists?”
This story is based on interviews with a dozen people involved in the January 6 movement, including activists and lawyers on all sides of the debate on what should happen next.
Asked if Trump is seriously considering blanket pardons for all January 6 defendants, Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told CNN in an email, “President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis.”
‘My mom is coming home’
Pardoning the rioters, or commuting their sentences, would drive a dagger through what has been the largest federal criminal investigation in US history, leading to the arrest of more than 1,500 Trump supporters who were involved in storming the Capitol in 2021.
Nearly half of those arrested – 46% – have been convicted of low-level misdemeanors such as trespassing in the Capitol building. Another 33% were convicted of felonies such as assaulting officers or participating in a riot.
The roughly 20% of remaining defendants, or about 315 people, are still awaiting trial. And a trickle of new defendants are still being arrested each week, nearly four years after the insurrection.
Some have offered tearful public apologies and disavowed January 6. Others defiantly still insist the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – and have promoted false claims about the insurrection and the January 6 prosecutions to make their case for clemency.
“Sometimes you have to break the rules to do what’s right. … I want a full pardon,” Zachary Alam, convicted of eight felonies and three misdemeanors, including assaulting police and destroying property, told a judge last week while he was sentenced to eight years in prison. This drew a harsh rebuke from the Trump-appointed judge, who called him “delusional.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump embraced the January 6 movement and said he would “absolutely” consider pardoning every defendant, but he also hedged and said he might not do so because “a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.” He also promised to look “very favorably” and “very strongly” at “full pardons with an apology for many.”
Some defendants are elderly people who got caught up in the frenzy and went in the Capitol but never attacked anyone or broke anything. Others viciously assaulted police with batons, chemical sprays and baseball bats. The harshest sentences were doled out to those convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning to violently subvert the government.
“Not everybody who went to the Capitol was a saint, right? So, you have to draw distinctions between people,” said Joseph McBride, a lawyer for several January 6 defendants. “Even in the situations where people were violent, maybe a pardon is not the best idea, but maybe a commutation is, maybe a lessening of the punishment.”
The movement stayed loyal to Trump, and now “he has to deliver,” McBride added.
Family members of some defendants with convictions for violent or destructive behavior now expect Trump to act.
“The only thing I could think of when I heard that Trump won the election was that my mom is coming home,” said Savannah Huntington, the daughter of Rachel Powell, who was found guilty of multiple felonies and destruction of government property for breaking a window at the Capitol with an ice axe.
Speaking to CNN by phone Friday from a federal prison in West Virginia, Powell said she’s not worried. “I believe that Trump is a man of his word.”
Hopes turn to action
Behind the scenes, defense attorneys representing rioters, along with an array of taxpayer-funded public defenders in DC, are scrambling to seek as much clemency as possible for their clients.
The most pressing concerns are for convicted rioters required to report to prison before Trump’s inauguration in January, and for rioters with sentencing hearings coming up, according to a source familiar with the discussions. Federal judges in DC have already received and rejected some requests to postpone sentencings because of Trump’s pardon pledge.
“They’re thrilled with the election, but there’s a lot of uncertainty from their perspective,” the source told CNN. “We don’t know if he’s going to follow through with his promise.”
The roughly 315 defendants awaiting trial will also seek delays. For convicted rioters already serving prison sentences, there’s even less hope to get them out based on Trump’s campaign rhetoric, the source said. They’ll need to wait for it to become real.
Defense lawyers are preparing petitions for the Office of the Pardon Attorney, within the Justice Department, to officially seek clemency for their clients. But they’re also mulling “other ways to get it on the president’s desk,” remembering how Trump eschewed the formal process in his first term and was drawn to specific cases by allies and friends.
Even for the rioters who already served their time, a pardon could help them get jobs in the future or claw back military benefits they lost, the source added. At least 100 defendants have military ties, according to CNN reporting.
A flourishing movement
Like the 2020 election denialism and anti-vaccine movements, the campaign to release January 6 prisoners is another form of MAGA mobilization and community organizing that has taken on a life of its own, with multiple support groups popping up since 2021.
American Patriot Relief runs an “Adopt a J6er” program that allows patrons to select an inmate to “adopt,” and to make a monthly contribution to their commissary, which the inmate can use to buy items like coffee and snacks. The organization raised about $100,000 in the first half of 2024, according to financial records posted on its website.
Another group sells “The American Gulag Chronicles,” a series of books with letters from January 6 inmates. The book costs $45, and proceeds go to inmates’ families.
Suzzanne Monk founded the J6 Pardon Project, and wrote a 130-page book with a “comprehensive strategy” for maximum clemency for “the entirety” of January 6 defendants. Outside the DC jail Wednesday night, Monk urged the crowd to keep fighting.
“This pressure can help make sure that the president fulfills his job,” Monk told them.
She later told CNN that her strategy guide has already been sent to Trump and the Republican National Committee.
“We are in a bit of a battle,” Monk said of the divisions among pro-Trump factions on who should be pardoned. “If the line is drawn hard at anyone who has received an assault charge, the movement will be upset,” she added.
Others, such as Trump ally Charlie Kirk, founder of the Turning Point USA group, recently revived calls to pardon the nonviolent rioters, as he did Friday on “The Glenn Beck Program.” But Kirk notably didn’t say anything in the interview about the violent rioters.
It’s all in Trump’s hands
It’s wholly up to Trump to decide what to do, and his decision can’t be contested. The only constraints are political considerations, like upsetting his base or the broader public.
“There are no legal obstacles preventing Trump from pardoning as many January 6 defendants as he would like,” said Crouch, the pardon expert from American University.
The US Constitution gives the president a lot of flexibility, Crouch said. Trump could grant individual pardons for specific rioters by name. Or he could issue broad clemency proclamations for subsets of January 6 defendants, or all of them in one fell swoop.
President Jimmy Carter issued a proclamation in 1977 pardoning everyone who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. President Joe Biden granted a blanket pardon in 2022 for people convicted of some federal marijuana offenses. If Trump takes this route, it would be up to each January 6 defendant to ask a judge to implement the pardon in their case.
“The traditional rationales for clemency are to show mercy to someone who has been unfairly treated by the criminal justice system, or to put down a rebellion,” Crouch said, adding that pardoning the rioters could be seen as serving Trump’s “personal interests,” as happened with some controversial pardons in the Clinton and both Bush administrations.
There are also questions about whether Trump will direct the Justice Department to shut down the investigation and dismiss all pending charges. The January 6 probe has mostly fallen out of the daily headlines, but about 315 defendants are awaiting trial and the FBI is still seeking information on more than 500 unidentified Capitol rioters.
‘A slap in the face’
For many Americans, clemency for the January 6 rioters would be yet another betrayal of democracy by Trump, who incited the riot and tried to overturn his defeat in 2020.
There are people all along the political spectrum who oppose blanket amnesty.
Democrats, police officers who protected the Capitol, and anti-Trump Republicans have led the charge against the whitewashing of January 6. But some Trump allies say mass pardons are a bridge too far. GOP Sens. Tom Cotton and Markwayne Mullin have already drawn a red line and said Trump shouldn’t pardon anyone who attacked police.
“This is the crowning achievement of the effort to rewrite the history of January 6,” Marcus Childress, investigative counsel for the House committee that investigated the attack, told CNN. “The pardons don’t sit right with me. Now you have a presumption of unequal application of the law. What is the rule of law if it’s not being applied equally?”
The most recent CNN poll on this topic, from January, found that 69% of Americans opposed Trump pardoning “most people convicted of crimes” related to January 6. About 71% of independents and 77% of moderates opposed it. But Republicans were more split, with 55% supporting these pardons and 45% opposing them, the poll found.
Former US Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell told CNN last week that he believes “attacks against our democracy should never be pardoned or forgiven under any circumstance.” He was part of a small cadre of January 6 survivors who campaigned for Biden before he dropped out, and later, for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“It’s insulting. It’s kind of a slap in the face,” said former US Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, who helped quell the insurrection and is now a Trump critic. “It’s a slap in the face not just to me but to every law enforcement officer who had to endure that day.”
This story has been updated with a response from the Trump transition team.
CNN’s Sean R. Clark and Emily R. Condon contributed to this report.
