
The Reinvention of Jan. 6
The Daily- 135 views
- 6 Jan 2025
Since the riot on Capitol Hill four years ago, President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have set out to sanitize the events of that day, changing it from a day of violence into, in Mr. Trump’s words, a day of love.As he prepares to take office for his second term, Mr. Trump said he plans to issue pardons to some of those responsible, throwing hundreds of criminal cases into doubt.Alan Feuer, a reporter covering extremism and political violence for The New York Times, talks to one of those rioters and explains how the pardons could help rewrite the story of what happened on Jan. 6.Guest: Alan Feuer, a reporter covering extremism and political violence for The New York Times.Background reading: How Mr. Trump inverted the violent history of Jan. 6.Hundreds of rioters accused of nonviolent crimes during the attack on the Capitol have wrapped up their cases. Here’s what some of their lives look like now.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
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We have a breach to be capital.
Since the riot on Capitol Hill four years ago.
They were peaceful. They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists.
They were sightseers. President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have set out to sanitize the events of that day.
They're not destroying the capital. They obviously revere the capital.
Changing it from a day of into, in Trump's words.
That was a day of love.
A day of love.
And it was love and peace.
As he prepares to take office for his second term, Trump said he plans to issue pardons to some of those responsible, throwing hundreds of criminal cases into doubt.
As everyone knows, it will be my great honor to pardon the peaceful January sixth protestors, or, as I often call them, the hostage They're hostages. They're hostages.
Today, my colleague, Alan Foyer, talks to one of those rioters and explains how the pardons could help rewrite the story of what happened on January sixth. It's Monday, January sixth. Alan, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Alan, it's been exactly four years since January sixth. You've been our guide for understanding that day and the legal consequences for those involved. Donald Trump's win, of course, throws those consequences into doubt. But before we get to how this landscape might all be about to change, let's start with the basics. As of today, January sixth, 2025, give us a summary of where things stand with the legal cases of the people who participated.
Sure. This has been really my full-time job since January sixth, 2021. Just to take a quick detour here, there's not just the criminal cases that we're talking about. There are other efforts that have taken place to figure out what happened on January sixth. Let's not forget, Donald Trump's second impeachment was all about his role in inciting the riot at the Capitol. There was a very expansive Congressional investigation into this. Then, of course, there's what you're talking about, the Justice Department's criminal cases that have been brought with to January 6. That is the largest single investigation in the history of the Justice Department.
Wow, interesting. Yeah.
This has involved enormous amounts of visual evidence and witness evidence and the cell phone seized and tips from ordinary people around the country. It's really been an unprecedented and a massive undertaking by federal prosecutors. At the moment, we have about About 1,600 people who are facing criminal charges. Of those, most, so a little over a thousand, have either gone to trial or pled guilty. But what's been most remarkable about all of this is that of the more than 200 people who have gone to trial, only two have been acquitted fully. When you look at this overall, the criminal justice system has rendered a pretty clear verdict about what happened on January sixth. It was a day of violence in an attempt to impede a central act of American democracy that resulted in more than 40 police officers being injured and also led to the deaths of four protesters.
And yet despite all of those efforts, despite that very clear verdict to really make a historical record and to to bring to account those who were responsible, here we are, four years later. All of that is in doubt because President-elect Donald Trump has a very different version of what happened on that day. He's promised on day one of his presidency he said that he will pardon January 6 defendants on a case-by-case basis. In fact, he said within the first hour of his presidency, he'd do that. We come to you again today, Alan, to help us understand that and what the consequences would be if it happens.
Yeah, I've been trying to understand that myself. I mean, let's think back here. You might remember that immediately after the attack, Donald Trump called January 6, and I'm quoting, a heinous attack on the United States Capitol. He promised that all the lawbreakers that day would pay. But as I followed this story, I've watched that not only has Trump changed that narrative, changed his position on it, but that he's done so almost in a private dialog with the rioters themselves. Collectively, it's as if they've come up with an alternate reality to explain what happened on January sixth. At least for me, I found that if you want to understand that other reality and all of the really important legal and political implications that emerge from it, you have to get inside the dialog that Trump was having with the January sixth rioters first. Now, look, I found that most people who have been charged in these cases are not willing to do long on the record interviews. But I did meet one guy who was willing to sit down and walk me through his His whole story with the idea of, hey, what's going to happen if and when Trump issues pardons?
Hi, Anthony. Hi, Allen. His name is Anthony Vo.
I am currently 32 years old.
It's the young guy. He's from Indiana, and he entered the Capitol on January sixth, didn't hurt anyone, didn't break anything, and he was ultimately convicted at trial of four low-level misdemeanors, including disorderly conduct. In that way, he's That's actually pretty typical of most January sixth defendants, the majority of whom were charged with only relatively minor offenses, except for one thing.
At the moment, I am currently seeking refuge from the current United States government.
He's on the run.
From the law?
Yeah, he's on the land. He was supposed to report to prison after he got sentenced, and he just didn't. He skipped.
Wow. That's That's wild. Alan, do you normally talk to people who are on the run from the law?
That's happened a couple of times.
Okay, so tell me more about Anthony.
Sure.
I am a family of Vietnamese immigrants. They all came over legally from Vietnam as a result of- Anthony His father fought alongside US troops during the war against the Viet Cong.
After the war, his family emigrated to the United States, and Anthony was born here.
We just love this country and the freedom and everything else that symbolized for us coming from Vietnam.
His background might sound surprising, but actually, he's got a pretty typical story for a Trump supporter.
He gave me that persecution complex, which made me start paying attention to him.
He saw Trump as an outsider candidate in 2015.
Fakeyism of being sexist, racist, all these different things.
He doesn't trust the mainstream media.
Hang on, what's going on? Why is the media all Seemingly coordinating in Trump with all these demonstrably false headlines that are all out of context if you just look into it a little bit more.
And flash forwarding to the 2020 election, election night arrives, As we saw with a lot of Trump supporters, Anthony does not believe it's true.
New votes came in or whatever. Oh, man, there's a lot of gaming potential with these mail-on ballots. There's a lot of security gaps. Like Pennsylvania, they illegally changed their voting deadlines. No signature verification was done for these ballots. So many different things made me suspicious.
He's just steeped in this world of election conspiracy theories. Not that he would see it that way.
It made me look for some opportunity to do something about it. And I think in December, they were talking about Stop the Steal rally.
Like, Oh, you can He ultimately finds out that there's going to be a Pro-Trump Stop the Steal Rally in Washington on January sixth. He's like, Yes.
My mom and I, he did the call.
I want to be there His family wants to go with him.
Basically, we were just there to make sure it was legit.
He ends up joining a group of Vietnamese rally goers.
People were giving out Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches to everyone. It was just like an excited fervor, I would say.
Anthony and his mom follow the crowd, and as he gets closer to the capital building itself, he notices people trying to go over the fence. But to him, at that point, it doesn't really seem violent.
You would hear booms, and every so often you might smell some spice in the air. There, but I never saw anything untoured in there.
He ends up just walking with his mom right into the Capitol building.
I remember my mom and I were just sitting on this bench and we're observing this guy in a Colonial Regalia. He was playing the flute, Amazing Grace on the flute. People were just sitting around watching him.
They have never been inside the Capitol before, and it's quite a moving experience for them. When I walked in, it felt like a religious experience.
The Rotunda Dome, I find out later, is inspired by the same dome in St Peter's Basilika. Going in, I was just awash with like, Wow, this is glorious.
Alan, I was actually in the Capitol that day as well. I was covering this event for the times I had walked with the crowd to the Capitol and then inside the Capitol with the rioters. It was an interesting split screen because I saw people walking around just in awe, as you're describing Anthony doing, with selfie sticks, sitting in chairs, laughing, like they were tourists at a tour of Capitol Hill. But then I also saw people breaking windows. Obviously, there was a lot of violence there that day. It just allowed everyone to emerge with their own story of what happened that day. Everyone had their own narrative narrative, which for them was true. It sounds like Anthony had his own narrative.
Yeah, I would agree with you entirely that not one thing happened on January sixth. A lot of different things happened on January sixth. But even the people who saw themselves as peaceful protesters contributed in some part to the larger chaos of what was essentially a riot that culminated in this historic and violent result. But yes, Anthony had his own very particular story and version of events.
I felt like it was a situation where normally you wouldn't be allowed here, but I thought that this was a very special opportunity that we earned to be able to exercise our rights. Like the end of a V for Vendetta, obviously, normally those people wouldn't be allowed to do what they're doing, assemble and whatever in front of their parliament. But by massing together peacefully from my eyes, they were able to make their voices heard.
In his mind, what he was doing was this expression of democracy. He was out there petitioning the government. He wanted redress for his grievances. That's how he saw it. I will never forget having read the FBI interview of one rioter who actually was quite violent. But at the key moment, at the height of this interview, the guy breaks down crying and tells these federal agents, I thought I was the good guy that day. Anthony and his mom stay for 20, 30 minutes. Basically, they're kicked out by a capital police officer. The guy's like, Got to go. They do. They leave the building and they eventually make their way to the DC Metro.
I see the first bits of news coming through my phone, all the initial headlines, like, Writers stormed the capital. Writers blocked the vote or whatever. All these things, they caught me by surprise.
He's getting the news in real-time from his phone about busted windows and beat-up cops and the real bad stuff, terrible stuff that happened that day. Frankly, he says that he's shocked about all that because it didn't match his personal window on January sixth.
When I was reacting to it with friends on social media, DMs and such, I was basically mocking media about like, Oh, yeah, we stormed the Capitol. It was like, We walk right in. I thought it was just like, over the top embellishment. So I was just having fun with it.
As you learn more about the day, did your feeling towards the day change in any measurable or important way?
I did think that people were starting to say, this is a big setup or whatever. It did seem to be that way.
What starts to happen is that not only does he cling to the idea that January 6 was not a violent event, but in fact, he begins to develop this idea that all the violence that took place that day was the fault of others not the rioters. It was police brutality, or maybe this was all a setup to begin with. Was the federal government itself not setting security per in the right way? Where's the National Guard? These questions began to make him doubt the culpability. Who's responsible for the violence?
Despite the footage of the violence around the Capitol that day, Anthony is sorting through it all and landing on a pretty different version of events, namely that the whole thing had been set up.
Yes, and that's a quite common belief among January sixth defendants. You know what In the year after the attack, it really took hold in the broader right-wing media.
Okay, so we know that's not the end of Anthony's story because he does eventually get arrested. When does that actually happen?
It's about six months months later, and he is picked up by a local FBI field office in Indiana.
I think the first thing I said to the officer was like, You got me. I remember thinking out loud to the two interviewing agents as I was going through the paperwork and such. I was like, How can I beat this?
And so he ultimately goes to trial. He chooses to put the government to his test.
I was staring in the miles of a kangoo court, but I just felt like I had to go with that anyway.
During the trial, prosecutors end up cite text messages that Anthony sent after the sixth, saying things like, Oh, the cops had it easy that day, and it would be easy to go back to the Capitol, armed. He also makes a decision to attend a vigil that has been going on at the local Washington Jail for years now. That's where many of the most violent January 6 defendants are being held on pretrial detention. It's called the Freedom Corner.
I just wanted to go there and support the people that were stuck behind bars, awaiting their trial that they haven't received yet, suffering through God knows what conditions.
You have people who are flying flags and eating snacks, and they often call into the jail to talk to the inmates, and they livestream broadcast with these inmates. But...
Like, Sluce or whatever on the live stream, started reporting me.
Anthony is not supposed to associate himself with any other January 6 defendants or people in that community. That decision on his part really irks Judge Tanya Chutkin, who is probably best known for having been the judge who was assigned to Trump's own January sixth case. She really ways into Anthony about this particular issue. When it comes to the moment of, okay, he's been found guilty, and now, what's your sentence? She ends up sentencing him to nine months in prison, which is, as far as these misdemeanor cases go, it's on the high end.
But of course, we know that he doesn't ultimately report for his sentence.
That's right. He decides it doesn't matter what the judge has said or what the law says. He's not turning himself in for what is supposed to be his date in June to start serving his prison term.
A couple of my heroes were Edward Snowet and Julian Assange, all these people that had to flee to find safety or whatever.
And yet there's one more thing that's informing Anthony's decision.
O say, can you speak Trump has started campaigning explicitly on a promise to pardon the January sixth rioters.
Yeah, I remember him starting out campaign, rally, speeches, whatever, with the January sixth Prisoners Choir, reciting the National Anthem.
In fact, at the very first official rally that Trump holds for his re-election campaign, he takes the stage to a recording of the National Anthem being performed by a choir of January sixth inmates. These are people who are in prison in Washington, DC for crimes they committed on January sixth. Well, thank you very much. You see the spirit from the hostages, and that's what they are, is hostages.
I remember hearing, we're We're political hostages.
He's calling them hostages. He's calling them political prisoners.
We're being very unfairly treated by the weaponized justice system, as he has been as well, who would promise to Part in the political prisoners.
The first day we get into office, we're going to save our country and we're going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots, and they were unbelievable and are.
Anthony is hearing that message and thinking it's meant for him, like Trump is speaking to him.
Yeah, the Republican candidate for President is essentially validating Anthony's version of events. He thinks to himself, Why should I report to prison? I think I can get a pardon. Of course, what happens next is that Trump wins the election.
To me, it was, I guess, late at the end of the tunnel. I was crying happy tears the night, the next few days afterwards.
There's this tidal wave of optimism among the January 6 defendants and their families. At the Freedom Corner, that vigil outside the jail that Anthony attended, they popped champagne bottles on election night. You just saw this whole community being absolutely certain that Donald Trump was going to ride to their rescue and save When I first got arrested, I knew that this is a thing that's going to be a process.
It's going to take a lot of time, a lot of things to happen for the tide to turn. I was just going to take a lot of patience and a lot of work to be able to overcome it, but I think we're all stronger for it now.
We'll be right back.
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Anthony and other participants are expecting pardons, and we have reason to believe that Trump will issue them. That's what he says he's going to do. Let's talk about the logistics and the implications of this. First, the logistics. How exactly would this happen? Is it just a stroke of the pen?
Basically, it is. The presidential pardon power is enormous. Trump would just write up an executive order or sign a document, and pouf, it's done.
Like magic.
Yeah. The debate now is really about the scope of the pardons that Trump is going to do. Is he going to issue a total blanket amnesty, or is it going to be more targeted to people like Anthony who are non-violent, low-level misdemeanor defendants? They're going to involve not just the question of logistics, but a It's really a political question, and that's how much of a hit does he want to really take if he's going to issue pardons to people who say, hit a cop on the head with a two by four, or maybe even more so, issue pardons to members of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were found guilty of seditious conspiracy.
Do we have any indication of which way Trump is going to go?
That's the problem with Trump. No, of course not. There's recent polling that suggests that a majority of this country is not interested in pardoning January sixth defendants. But there's this debate that has been raging both on the outside. There's advocates for the family members, and then that is seeped into Trump's inner circle, and I wouldn't want to call it either way at this point.
Right. As you're saying, it could all happen with a stroke of a pen.
Absolutely.
Alan, it's pretty remarkable that with all of this prosecutorial work that's gone into this, to hold hundreds of people to account, all of this would be thrown out. Of course, that's important in its own right, but it does really set up the potential for a broader meaning here. For example, what does it do to public trust in the legal system?
I think it would be quite destructive to the notion of the rule of law. Like I said, this is the largest investigation that the federal prosecutors have undertaken since the department was created in 1870.
Amazing.
To, depending on the scope of these pardons to undo all that work in an eye blink, it'll be somewhere between a gut punch and the rug being pulled out from under you. Choose your metaphor. I think it could have a quite corrosive effect on trust in the system.
Right. Of course, there's another piece here which we've touched on, but I want to bring back in front of people, which is the story of what happened that day. To what extent do these pardons actually help the people who participated and helped the president rewrite the story of what happened on January sixth?
Well, see, that's the remarkable thing. From Trump's point of view and from the defendants' point of view, these pardons will not be a attack on the rule of law. They will be an upholding of the rule of law because these prosecutions, from their point of view, have been deemed unjust from the outset. If Trump does part in these defendants, it will be his opportunity to rewrite the entire story of what the Justice Department has been doing over the past four years. And he will be able to revise the story of the Justice Department seeking accountability for an attack on American democracy into positioning the Justice Department as the villains who are out to destroy democracy, in essence. It's going to allow Trump to both have the imprimatur of the presidency to declare that, Hey, no crimes were committed at all that day, or at least it's going to allow him to legally wash away the sins of many of the people who are involved in them.
But the The crazy thing is we have this whole record. I mean, beyond the prosecutions, we have all of these videos, we have this bodycan stuff. In the modern internet age, there's a record. Can the narrative just be flipped like that?
No. You're absolutely right. In this Internet age, there's tens of thousands of hours of January sixth video out there. In fact, there are people who have been intimately involved in scouring and cataloging that video who are right now making sure that it doesn't disappear, that that record, that bulwark of reality exists. We've also seen in recent weeks, some of the federal judges in Washington who have heard these cases and know them better than anyone, have stood up in public in written and oral rulings against the idea that January 6 was a nothing event. They have defended the seriousness of that day in quite remarkable public utterances. Interesting. Actually, let me read one right here. It's from a sentencing memo by a judge named Royce Lamberth, who was actually a conservative Republican appointed by Ronald Reagan. It says, I have been dismayed to see distortions and outright falsehoods seep into the public consciousness. I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history claiming rioters behaved in an orderly fashion, like ordinary tourists or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as political prisoners or even incredibly hostages. That is all preposterous. But at the same time, yes, we live in a siloed information world where people see what they want to see.
And so there There will now be a bubble that exists that has the stamp of approval from the President on it that nothing bad happened on January sixth.
Alan, it's really incredible to be watching this happen in the United States. I know comparisons are tricky, but I spent a lot of my early career in Russia, and that's a place that's really quite expert at whitewashing and just having an alternative reality version of history. Stalin is seen by many in Russia as the leader who made Russia great. The fact that millions of people died of starvation and in mass executions, that's just not the dominant story or really part of the story at all at this point, in part because people don't want to see it that way. This all feels very familiar to me in quite an eerie way.
I mean, look, we don't know what's going to be the final verdict about all of this, but there is a Soviet aspect to erasing all of this. That is not how the January sixth defendants obviously see it. They see this as the lifting, almost, of Soviet oppression on them. That's why there has been this tug of war all along. Now, who's going to win that war and which version will eventually emerge as victorious? I don't know. That's above my pay grade. But these tensions about the meaning of January sixth, have been there. There are practical ramifications to all of this. I think a lot of what the erasure or revision of the January sixth story could do for Trump is that it's not only going to diminish the culpability of his supporters who are involved in the attack, or, of course, diminish his own culpability, but it could do something else. It could provide him with the ideological ground to move forward into fulfilling his own promises to seek revenge on those of his enemies who took part in the attempts to hold him accountable for January sixth.
That's already starting to happen, right?
It's absolutely already starting to happen. Just recently, Trump's Congressional allies released a report recommending that Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming Congresswoman who was the vice chair of the January sixth Committee, that recommended that Trump be charged with crimes in connection with January sixth, should herself face an FBI investigation. You know, Trump is also seeking to install loyalists in the FBI and the Justice Department who may indeed carry that out in the end. I mean, I think these things are not unrelated. When you position yourself as the victim, you then have the moral standing to seek retribution against your enemies. If you rewrite the history of what happened on January sixth, it allows you to change the heroes to villains, the villains to heroes. I mean, Anthony is certainly well aware of this. After our interview, he told me he's now in Canada. He's formally asked for asylum there, but he's also just biding his time, waiting around until Trump comes back into office. He really does seem to believe believe, not only that the winners write history, but that he and the other January 6 defendants are themselves poised to be the winners. That they are now in a position to write what could be the final chapter on January 6.
There's a meme that's been circulating around for probably at least a few months, years now, saying, January 6 will go down in history as a day the government staged a riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election. I think that's how history will remember January sixth.
And you believe that?
I do.
And you believe that history will believe that?
Yeah.
Allen, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today.
Distinguished guests, the President of the United States and Dr Biden.
Over the weekend, for his final time in office, Joe Biden bestowed the presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In doing so, he singled out several public foes of his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Trump's Democratic opponent in 2016. As a lawyer, she defended the rights of children.
As first lady, she fought for universal health care and declared women's rights are human rights.
As Senator, she helped- And George Soros, the activist liberal billionaire, who Trump and his allies have mocked for years.
Born into to a Jewish family in Hungary, George Soros escaped Nazi occupation to build a life of freedom for himself and countless others around the world.
Educated and equal- For Biden, the ceremony was an unmistakable message of support for a political and financial establishment that Trump is eager to replace in the coming months.
Congratulations, but let's remember, our sacred effort continues. We have to keep going. As my mother would say, we got to keep the faith. God bless you all and may God protect our church. Please enjoy.
Today's episode was produced by Asta Chattravedi and Mujdzeidi. With help from Nina Feltman, Eric Krupke and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Michael Benoît. Research Assistance by Susan Lee contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Sophia Landman, and was engineered by Moxley, with help from Carole Sabaro. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of Wunderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.