Trump’s January 6 Pardons Unleash Legal Chaos

When FBI agents investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol searched the Florida property of Jeremy Brown, they found a small arsenal. An AR-15-style rifle and a sawed-off shotgun, both unregistered, and two fragmentation grenades turned up in the search, prosecutors said. The Justice Department later alleged that Brown—an Army special forces veteran and member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia—had driven to Washington with those grenades and other weapons as part of the Oath Keepers’ preparations for violence aimed at helping Donald Trump retain power.

In 2023, a federal judge in Florida sentenced Brown to more than seven years in prison on weapons charges. He also faced charges in Washington, DC, for disorderly conduct and entering a restricted building.

Trump’s grant of clemency Monday to every single person “convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” wiped away Brown’s DC charges, along with those of about 1,600 other people allegedly involved in the January 6 attack.

But Trump’s broadly worded pardon might also affect the sentences of Brown and other alleged extremists facing separate charges that arose in part from the investigations into their January 6 conduct.

Carolyn Stewart, an attorney who represents Brown, said in an interview Tuesday that she is preparing to argue that Brown’s Florida conviction is covered by Trump’s pardon because the search that turned up Brown’s weapons resulted from the January 6 probe. That is, Stewart contends that his conviction was, in the words of Trump’s pardon declaration, “related” to the events of January 6.

“It should relate,” Stewart said, “because everything was the fruit of the poisonous tree.” Stewart said she is unsure how that argument will fare in court, and she noted that she is also hoping Trump will issue an additional pardon specifically clearing Brown, who remains imprisoned, in the Florida matter.

A spokesperson for US Attorney’s office in Tampa, which prosecuted Brown, declined to comment on whether the office believes Trump’s pardon applies to Brown’s Florida case, and the Justice Department in Washington, DC, did not answer questions about the case.

Trump’s sweeping and almost entirely indiscriminate clemency announcement freed hundreds of people convicted of using or plotting violence in an effort to help Trump seize the power that voters had denied him in 2020. Trump, whose November 2024 election victory helped him avoid his own trial on January 6-related charges, pardoned people who used bear spray, metal barricades, flag poles, an American flag, police shields, tasers, fists, and other weapons to attack police officers defending the Capitol. Trump freed Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, along with other members of their groups who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a crime that entails conspiring to overthrow the US government.

Rhodes promptly showed up Tuesday outside a DC jail where many January 6 defendants have been held. On Wednesday, he appeared on Capitol Hill, where he said he was lobbying lawmakers for Brown to “be given a pardon also.”

The blanket clemency has the potential to complicate the cases of an indeterminate number of defendants like Brown, who have been charged or convicted on separate, but arguably related, crimes that go beyond the specific events of January 6.

It is not clear if that was Trump’s intent. Trump and his advisers, who reportedly did not attempt to review specific January 6 cases individually, appear to have given little thought to the complications of determining which convictions are “related to” January 6. That task now falls to defense attorneys, DOJ lawyers, and judges.

Axios reported Wednesday that Trump decided shortly before his inauguration to skip a case-by-case review and instead quickly pardon as many January 6 defendants as he could. “Trump just said: ‘Fuck it: Release ’em all,’” a Trump adviser told the outlet.

The White House and the Justice Department press office did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about the pardons.

The breadth of the pardons could even affect cases like that of Edward Kelley, a Tennessee man convicted in November of plotting to murder FBI agents and other federal employees who investigated him over his involvement in the January 6 attack. Trump’s pardon means Kelley escaped punishment for a separate conviction for assaulting law enforcement officers—including throwing a Capitol Police officer to the ground—while storming the Capitol on January 6.

But could Kelley now argue that his Tennessee conviction is sufficiently “related” the attack on the Capitol and seek release? A former Justice Department attorney critical of Trump’s pardons, who asked not to be named, said the vague wording makes such arguments at least plausible, regardless of whether they ultimately succeed.

An attorney for Kelley did not respond to inquiries. A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Tennessee, which prosecuted Kelley, referred questions to the US Attorney’s office in Washington, which ran the massive January 6 investigation that Trump shut down upon taking office. A spokesperson for that office said questions should go to local US attorneys’ offices.

One DOJ official, however, speaking on the condition of anonymity, pointed to the arrest Wednesday of Daniel Ball, which came just one day after Trump’s pardon freed Ball. Ball had been charged with throwing an “explosive device” at police in a crowded tunnel on January 6, and he had been held under a pretrial detention order in Washington until Trump freed him.

Ball was then rearrested Wednesday on charges stemming from the May 2023 search of his home in Florida, during which FBI agents said they found a loaded rifle, ammunition, and “multiple commercially produced explosive devices” that appeared to be the same style of device Ball allegedly threw at officers on January 6. Ball was charged with illegally possessing a firearm due to past felony convictions which include a domestic violence charge for “battery by strangulation.”

The DOJ official agued that Ball’s arrest indicates that federal prosecutors are indeed willing to proceed with separate, though arguably related, cases against violent January 6 offenders pardoned by Trump.

Also on Thursday, Ed Martin, the interim US Attorney in DC, said in a filing that the office is not dropping charges against a brother and sister, Joseph Hutchinson and Olivia Pollock, over their alleged failure to appear to face January 6 charges, even as Martin moved to dismiss their charges for assaulting officers and other crimes on January 6.

Another January 6 criminal who Trump pardoned on Monday was Guy Reffitt, a member of the far-right Three Percenters militia, who, according to prosecutors, intimidated and impeded officers outside the Capitol while wearing body armor and armed with a loaded revolver. Prosecutors said Reffitt played “central role in leading” the attack. “We’re all going to drag them motherfuckers out kicking and screaming,” he told others in the crowd that day. “I just want to see Pelosi’s head hit every fucking stair on the way out.”

Reffitt was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges that included obstruction of justice for threatening to shoot his son and daughter if they reported his January 6 actions to law enforcement. “If you turn me in you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot,” Reffitt told his children, according to his son Jackson Reffitt, who testified during his father’s 2022 trial. Reffitt is also charged in Texas with possession of an unregistered silencer that FBI agents found when they arrested him in 2021.

It is not clear if Trump’s pardon applies to Reffitt’s obstruction charge. Federal prosecutors on Thursday had not dismissed Reffitt’s case, as they have for those of other January 6 defendants. But in a motion filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, Reffitt’s attorney indicated the charge had been erased. “Reffitt no longer is serving a prison sentence and is ordered released by Executive order for his case in the District of Columbia,” the filing says. The motion also asked the presiding judge in Texas to drop a standing detention order in a step that could free Reffitt. The judge scheduled a January 30 hearing on that request.

Jackson Reffitt has said the prospect of his father’s release has left him fearing for his life. “I’m terrified,” he told CNN Monday. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

This post was originally published on here