Jan. 6, 2021, was not a day of peaceful protest at the Capitol. It was a riot, in which mobs of hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the seat of our government, smashed windows, and assaulted police with the intention of overturning Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections.
Many rioters came armed, some with guns, others with zip-tie handcuffs, with the intention of harming lawmakers and the vice president of the United States.
It is also true that some Jan. 6 defendants were overcharged and oversentenced. Likewise, Jan. 6 participants received more scrutiny and less mercy than did the looters and rioters during the protests against police in the summer of 2020.
Into this nuanced and politically charged dynamic entered President Donald Trump, who, on his first day back in the White House, pardoned every single Jan. 6 convict except for 14 leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, whose sentences he commuted without providing a full pardon.
Trump’s base applauded the decision as a just response, freeing political prisoners from the “Biden regime.”
The discussion about Jan. 6 has been dominated by extreme views and simplistic characterizations by both Trump’s supporters and his denigrators. A more nuanced picture is needed to judge Trump’s blanket pardon.
A violent riot
At the north door of the Capitol on the morning of Jan. 6, one protester — I don’t know his name — turned to the men around him and began plotting how to breach the line of Capitol Police and gain entrance to the Capitol. “Someone pull down the little guy,” I heard the man say as he pointed at the shortest police officer in the doorway, “then sweep the big guy’s leg, then bam, a wedge right through.”
This plan got scuttled, but nevertheless, the crowd persisted in trying to breach the line of police and storm the Capitol through this door.
Soon, protesters in tactical gear and wielding pepper spray began to push against the line of officers while ringleaders with megaphones yelled, “Push! Push!” encouraging the crowd to join in this effort physically to overwhelm the Capitol Police with violence.
Their aim was to break into the Capitol and disrupt the joint session of Congress convened to ratify Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. Based on conspiracy theories peddled by Trump, these people believed Biden had stolen the election.
At one point, a few of the rioters got tired of pushing and decided to pull — grabbing a U.S. Capitol Police officer and dragging him down the steps from the Senate door. Among the cheering protesters, one wielded a pitchfork.
This was the scene I took in for a couple of hours that afternoon, and this was one of the calmest, safest parts of the Capitol.
Elsewhere on the grounds, the protesters carried guns and smashed windows to break the building. One swiped a police billy club, which he used to beat officers. Others hunted down lawmakers and stole property.
Rioter Peter Stager wielded an American flag as a weapon and used it to beat a police officer who was lying prone on the ground. You don’t have to trust the crooked FBI on this. You can watch the video and witness for yourself Stager swinging the pole up vertically over his head and then whacking down onto the prone officer. Then again. And again.
What was Stager up to? In his own words: “Every single one of those Capitol law enforcement officers, death is the remedy, that is the only remedy they get.” If you take him at his word, Stager was there to kill Capitol Police and Washington officers.
This was also Stager’s prescription for congressmen, senators, and then-Vice President Mike Pence. “Everybody in there is a disgrace,” Stager allegedly said of the building he was trying to storm. “That entire building is filled with treasonous traitors. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building.”
Stager pleaded guilty to various crimes. His sentence was four years. Trump pardoned him, of course.
Mark Mazza traveled from Indianapolis to Washington for the Jan. 6 protest. Mazza brought two guns but lost one of them somewhere at the Capitol.
Here’s what else federal prosecutors say about his protest: “While armed with [a] .40 caliber loaded firearm,” Mazza “engaged in multiple efforts to break through the police line: He repeatedly pushed against officers using the combined physical exertion of the mob; he armed himself with a stolen police baton and assaulted officers with the baton.”
I’m leaving out some of Mazza’s offenses here. He was sentenced to five years in prison. But Trump pardoned him.
I choose these cases not because they are typical, nor because they are the worst cases. The cases of Stager and Mazza are useful because they destroy the MAGA myth that Jan. 6 was in essence a peaceful protest.
If you say, “Police let them in, and they just wandered around,” you are ignoring the J6ers who pushed past police while armed and beat them with clubs in order to breach the security lines.
These two cases are illustrative also because they show that some of the harsh sentences were warranted.
Overprosecution
Here’s where the MAGA lament is true: Taken as a whole, the Jan. 6 offenders were prosecuted much more harshly because of the political valence of the protest.
If you were a rioter in Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020, you almost certainly were treated more leniently than a Jan. 6 rioter.
While the FBI went to extreme lengths to hunt down every masked trespasser in the Capitol, officers and prosecutors gave up pretty quickly when George Floyd-inspired arsonists hid behind masks and the dark of night.
Also, as someone who was there that day, I can correct a common media representation: It’s not true that all or even most of the folks at the Capitol that day were rioters or “insurrectionists.”
While the Capitol lawn was off-limits to the public, it was easy to wander onto the property without knowing you were on “restricted grounds.” When I arrived at 2 p.m., I walked onto the lawn without hopping a fence or seeing a “no trespassing” sign.
Most of the people on the Capitol grounds that day were not trying to breach the Capitol — many were drinking Yuenglings in lawn chairs they had carried from Trump’s speech on the Ellipse.
And if you entered the Capitol through certain doors at certain times, you may not have known that you were trespassing because the police may already have retreated from the door you used. In some cases, police stood back and allowed the protesters to walk the halls of the building — a scene captured in many security videos.
These protesters may have been foolish. They were breaking the law and probably should have known it. But jail time for nonviolent trespassers who left when told reeks of politicized prosecution.
Double standard
The comparison to the post-Floyd riots and protests is also worth considering.
A common MAGA misperception is that no left-wing protesters were prosecuted or jailed for their arson, looting, destruction of property, or assaults on police in the summer of 2020. The lenience by prosecutors was real but exaggerated. What might stick most in the craw of Trump supporters was not so much the prosecutorial treatment of Floyd protesters, but the media and political treatment of them as heroes.
Famously, media outlets minimized the arson, the killing, the assault, and the looting, emphasizing only that the protests were “mostly peaceful.” Even at the protests right outside the White House, where I reported for a few nights that summer, rioters burned a church, torched local businesses, threw hard projectiles at police, and threatened the press (me) with violence for the offense of filming their actions.
In other cities, arson and looting were more rampant. Nevertheless, Kamala Harris, who would soon be tapped as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, raised funds for the legal defense of these rioters.
One media hero that summer was Philadelphia high school teacher and social justice activist Anthony Smith. Smith was already famous for vandalizing and tearing down a statue of former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo. After Floyd’s death, Smith joined the riots, flipped over a police car, and joined other rioters in torching it.
After his arrest, media and Democratic activists praised Smith, one calling him an “outspoken community activist and a leader in the movement for black lives in Philadelphia.”
“Free Ant” became a cause, and the prosecution was blasted in the media as political persecution.
One of the men arrested with “Ant” for flipping and torching the police car was Carlos Matchett, who had traveled from Atlantic City, where he had called for riots and launched looting mobs.
Matchett was held up by liberal nonprofit groups as a victim of overprosecution.
In the end, Smith got a one-year sentence, and Matchett got four years.
Compare Matchett to Stager. Both rioted. One physically beat an officer and called for mass murder of police while taking part in a mob. The other led looting gangs, called for riots, and destroyed a police car. Both got four years. That seems equal and fitting.
More than 16,000 arrests were made in major U.S. cities related to those protests, with nearly 3,000 of those arrests for felonies. In some cities, prosecutors refused to prosecute all but the worst offenses (in Philadelphia, it was left to the U.S. government to prosecute Smith and Matchett).
The news media, meanwhile, minimized the damage. It was even considered racist to point out the property damage done by rioters. Most of the 1,100 Jan. 6 arrestees who have been sentenced were not charged with violence against people or property, according to a database maintained by the group Look Ahead, which defends the protesters and rioters as “political prisoners.”
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Certainly, some of these pardons are deserved. Likely, most rioters who served four years deserve some clemency. But to call all 1,500 arrestees “political prisoners” is false, just as it is false to claim nobody was prosecuted for torching cities or beating officers in George Floyd’s name.
America’s judicial system is inherently arbitrary, and so politics necessarily creeps in. There’s no preventing that. But improving that system will require honest examination rather than blanket generalization.