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With the stroke of a pen, President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 granted clemency — either a pardon or commuted sentence — to all of the more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. But at an Oval Office signing event and in a Fox News interview, Trump made several misleading or false claims while explaining the reason for his decision.
- Trump referred to those jailed for criminal offenses on Jan. 6 as “hostages,” but the roughly 400 people who were still incarcerated at the time of Trump’s inauguration had either pleaded guilty or were found guilty by a jury or judge of crimes on Jan. 6, many for violent felonies.
- He said there were “very minor incidents” against law enforcement officers on Jan. 6. Whether the attacks on police were “minor” is a matter of opinion, but more than 140 police officers were assaulted, according to the Justice Department. We’ll lay out the facts.
- Trump made the unfounded claim that “outside agitators” were responsible for the violence that day and said “obviously the FBI was involved.” A Department of Justice inspector general report found the FBI had no undercover agents embedded in the protest crowds that day, and while there were some FBI informants there, none of them were “directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts.”
- He also dubiously claimed that in contrast to Jan. 6 rioters, some of whom received long prison sentences, “I see murderers in this country get two years, one year, and maybe no time.” On Fox News, Trump added, “You have murderers in Philadelphia, you have murderers in Los Angeles that don’t even get any time.” Pennsylvania and California have mandatory minimum sentences for first- and second-degree murder that exceed 15 years.
During the campaign and again in the weeks before his inauguration, Trump made clear that he intended to pardon many or even most of those charged in connection with Jan. 6 crimes. But in an interview with Time magazine in December, Trump said he was going to do a case-by-case assessment, and he drew a distinction between those who “were nonviolent” and those “that really were out of control.” That mirrors a comment Trump made during a CNN town hall in May 2023, when he said, “I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.”
In a Fox News interview just a week before the inauguration, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, also drew a line for those who acted violently that day. “If you committed violence on that day,” Vance said, “obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
But in his proclamation, Trump granted clemency to everyone who was accused of committing a crime related to the Capitol riot, including the hundreds who had been convicted of violently assaulting law enforcement officials. He also directed the attorney general to dismiss any pending cases.
Trump’s clemency included a commutation of sentences for 14 people linked to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, extremist groups charged with planning the attack, many of whom had received yearslong prison sentences. While those convictions will remain, the commutation means they were released from prison.
Trump extended a blanket pardon to all of the other people — more than 1,500 in all — who were charged with offenses related to the riots, including for those whose indictments were pending. For any still being held in prison, Trump ordered their immediate release.
‘Hostages’ Were Convicted in Court
As he has on numerous occasions in the past, Trump referred to those incarcerated for their role in the Capitol riots as “hostages.” While the moniker is no doubt intended to suggest unfair treatment of those incarcerated for offenses related to Jan. 6, the fact is that among those who were still in prison, most either pleaded guilty or were convicted by a jury or judge of various crimes related to the riots.
In its latest update, on the four-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots, the Department of Justice reported that approximately 1,583 people had been charged criminally in federal court.
Most of them pleaded guilty to crimes related to Jan. 6., including 327 who pleaded guilty to felonies and 682 who pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, the Justice Department report said. Among those who pleaded guilty to felonies, 172 pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement, 69 pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous or deadly weapon, and four pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy — conspiring to use force against the United States.
Another 221 of the Jan. 6 defendants were found guilty at trial, and 40 more were convicted “following an agreed-upon set of facts presented to and accepted by the Court.”
Of the 1,100 people convicted and sentenced, 667 were sentenced to some period of incarceration and an additional 145 received prison sentences but were permitted to serve their sentence in home detention. According to the Washington Post, about 400 of the Jan. 6 defendants were still incarcerated at the time Trump issued his clemency proclamation.
The Justice Department said that more than 140 police officers were assaulted and about $2.8 million worth of government property at the Capitol was damaged or stolen during the Capitol riots.
On CNN on Jan. 22, retired U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin called Trump’s “hostage” claim “nonsense.”
“These people are not hostages,” Scheindlin said. “They’re not heroes, they’re not political prisoners. They are criminals. They attacked people. They assaulted people. They committed property damage. They committed so many crimes, of course, the seditious conspiracy that you mentioned, and they were convicted and sentenced.”
Trump Dismisses Attacks on Police
In the Jan. 22 Fox News interview, when asked why people who committed violence against police officers got a pardon, Trump said they were in prison for a “long time” already and “some of those people with the police, true, but they were very minor incidents, OK.”
Trump said: “You know, they get built up by that a couple of fake guys that are on CNN all the time. … They were very minor incidents. And it was time.”
What constitutes “minor” is a matter of opinion. We’ll lay out of the facts, and readers can judge for themselves.
As we said, the Justice Department reported this month that 172 people pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement on Jan. 6, and 69 pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous or deadly weapon. Those figures don’t include those who were convicted but hadn’t pleaded guilty. “During the siege of the Capitol that day, over 140 police officers were assaulted—including over 80 from the U.S. Capitol Police and over 60 from the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department,” the DOJ said.
Injuries to the officers included cuts, bruises and sprains; concussions; rib fractures; irritated lungs; and a mild heart attack, according to statements by the police departments to media at the time. Several officers were hospitalized. “One officer lost the tip of his right index finger. Others were smashed in the head with baseball bats, flag poles and pipes. Another lost consciousness after rioters used a metal barrier to push her into stairs as they tried to reach the Capitol steps during the assault on Jan. 6,” the New York Times wrote in a Feb. 11, 2021, story based on court documents, video footage and accounts from law enforcement officials.
“If you’re a cop and get into a fight, it may last five minutes, but these guys were in battle for four to five hours,” Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, told the Times. “You would be hard-pressed to find another day in history like this,” he said, “when the police encountered this level of violence in one event.”
In a Jan. 21 story, NPR detailed some of the convictions for assault on law enforcement and other charges, linking to the court documents. One man, sentenced to 20 years in prison, had assaulted police officers for more than an hour, federal prosecutors said, “fighting with his hands, feet, flag poles, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, and anything else he could get his hands on, as weapons against the police.” Another, sentenced to 12 years, was convicted of “viciously assaulting police officers for hours” and “chok[ing] one officer to the ground,” prosecutors said.
Another man sentenced to 12 years in prison pleaded guilty and “admitted to assaulting MPD Officer Michael Fanone with a taser,” according to a press release from the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. Fanone testified to Congress that he thought he was going to be killed. “Because I was among a vastly outnumbered group of law enforcement officers protecting the Capitol and the people in it, I was grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country. I was at risk of being stripped of, and killed with, my own firearm as I heard chants of, ‘Kill him with his own gun!'” Fanone said in July 2021 testimony.
In another well-known incident, Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges was crushed in a doorway in the Capitol by a man using a police shield to do so.
The DOJ said that among the weapons used or carried on the grounds of the Capitol, as proved in court cases, were: “firearms; OC spray; tasers; edged weapons, including a sword, axes, hatchets, and knives; and makeshift weapons, such as destroyed office furniture, fencing, bike racks, stolen riot shields, baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles, PVC piping, and reinforced knuckle gloves.”
As we’ve written, no police officers died at the scene on Jan. 6. However, USCP Officer Brian Sicknick suffered two strokes nearly eight hours after being sprayed with a chemical irritant during the riot. The Washington, D.C., medical examiner told the Washington Post that Sicknick died of natural causes, but “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”
Four other police officers committed suicide in the days and months after the riot. One of them, D.C. Police Officer Jeffrey Smith, was injured in the riot, and “wasn’t the same” in the days after, according to his wife. Smith shot himself on the way to work eight days after Jan. 6. His suicide was declared a “line-of-duty death” by the D.C. Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board.
In a Jan. 21 statement, the DC Police Union said it “wishes to express its dismay over the recent pardons granted to individuals convicted of assaulting police officers during the January 6, 2021, riots at the US Capitol Building. As an organization that represents the interests of the 3,000 brave men and women who put their lives on the line every day to protect our communities, our stance is clear — anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, without exception.”
No Evidence of ‘Outside Agitators’
At the signing ceremony, Trump suggested “outside agitators” were responsible for instigating some of the “aggressive behavior,” though there’s no evidence of that. And he distorted the facts in claiming that the “FBI was involved.”
“These people have been destroyed,” Trump said of those charged with offenses related to Jan. 6. “What they’ve done to these people is outrageous. There’s rarely been anything like it in history, in the history of our country. And even people that were aggressive, and in many cases, I believe they happen to be outside agitators. What do I know? But I think they were, I think there were outside agitators. There were outside agitators. And obviously the FBI was involved, because [FBI Director Christopher] Wray admitted the FBI was. Didn’t he say 23 people, indirectly or directly were involved? And it was then 26? That’s a lot of people.”
Trump is referring to an investigation report released in December by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office that found there were 26 “confidential human sources” used by the FBI who were in Washington, D.C., in connection with the events of Jan. 6. Those are people who provide the FBI with “information and insights about the inner workings of criminal, terrorist, and espionage
networks that otherwise would be unavailable.” They are not FBI employees.
Furthermore, the report said, “Our review found that no FBI CHS [confidential human source] was authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.”
Of the 26 FBI informants who were there that day, the investigation found four entered the Capitol and 13 entered the restricted area outside the Capitol but did not go inside the building. None of them were prosecuted. According to a footnote in the report, the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office said it “generally has not charged those individuals whose only crime on January 6, 2021 was to enter the restricted grounds surrounding the Capitol, which has resulted in the Office declining to charge hundreds of individuals; and we have treated the CHSs consistent with this approach.”
Only three of the FBI informants were actually tasked by the FBI to be in Washington, D.C., that day, and the rest were there “on their own initiative,” the report said. Ten of them had not even let their FBI contacts know they would be there that day.
Also, contrary to Trump’s claim that “the FBI was involved” — either directly or indirectly — with the events of Jan. 6, the report stated, “We found no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6.”
Steven D’Antuono, then FBI Washington field office head, told the inspector general’s office that FBI policy does not allow undercover FBI employees at “First Amendment-protected events absent some investigative authority,” and the assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office’s counterterrorism division told investigators that he “denied a request from an FBI office to have an undercover employee engage in investigative activity on January 6.”
In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on July 12, 2023, Wray, then the FBI director, forcefully denied the FBI had played any role in instigating protesters that day.
“I will say this notion that somehow the violence at the Capitol on January 6th was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and agents is ludicrous and is a disservice to our brave, hard working, dedicated men and women,” Wray said.
Trump has not provided any evidence to contradict that, and his comments echo unfounded claims pushed by other conservatives.
False Comparison with Murder Charges
At the signing ceremony, Trump made the dubious claim that while many Jan. 6 defendants have “been in jail for a long time already … I see murderers in this country get two years, one year, and maybe no time.” In his Fox News interview, Trump added, “You have murderers in Philadelphia. You have murderers in Los Angeles that don’t even get any time. They don’t even collect them and they know they’re there to be collected.”
According to the Justice Department, people convicted of murder in 2018 were sentenced to an average of about 50 years in state prisons.
In terms of time served, on average, people convicted of murder had spent about 18 years in prison before they were released in 2018, also according to Department of Justice data. That year, a little less than 6% of people convicted of murder served two or fewer years in prison before they were released (less than 2% served less than six months in prison). But those statistics come with some caveats.
The figures include inmates who died in prison. Specifically, 9% of those who served less than a year had died in prison. Moreover, while the statistics include prison time served, they do not include the time spent in jail awaiting trial.
“My guess is most of those who serve very short sentences in prison had already served a large amount of time in jail prior to their conviction and got credit for that,” John Pfaff, a professor at Fordam Law School and an expert in sentencing law, told us via email. In other words, he said, “if the trial takes 8 years, and the person gets 10, they may be released after two years in prison, on the grounds that they served the first 8 during their pre-trial lockup in jail.”
Trump’s claim is also dubious given that most states have mandatory minimum sentences for murder that far exceed two years in prison. Consider Pennsylvania and California, since Trump claimed that in Philadelphia and Los Angeles “you have murderers … that don’t even get any time.”
According to state law in California, first-degree murder carries a minimum sentence of 25 years in prison. For second-degree murder, the minimum prison sentence is 15 years.
In Pennsylvania, the minimum sentence for first- and second-degree murder is life in prison. State law sets no statutory minimum prison sentence for third-degree murder, saying only that it cannot be more than 40 years. Third-degree murder is defined as: “All other kinds of murder” that aren’t first or second degree and amounts to “a killing committed with malice aforethought but without the specific intent to kill,” according to the Pennsylvania law firm Latoison Law.
“So Trump’s claim of no-time is conceptually true [in cases of third degree murder in Pennsylvania], but the guideline minimum is 6 years, which means no parole until that 6-yr mark is hit (and no guarantee at that),” Pfaff said.
A searchable online tool provided by the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing suggests that just two people convicted of third-degree murder between 2015 and 2018 received a sentence of probation, less than 1% of the cases.
In other words, Pfaff said, it is “vanishingly rare.”
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