More than two years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the seditious conspiracy convictions of members of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have raised new possibilities for prosecuting domestic terrorism cases.
Despite video evidence of vicious beatings during the insurrection and witness testimony about pre-rally planning for an assault, the Republican Party’s most powerful figure and front-runner for its 2024 presidential nomination continues to be Donald Trump, whose rhetoric fueled the violence. Both he and leading rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have said they might pardon Jan. 6 defendants if elected.
As a result, extremism analysts said, the prospect of a shared historical reckoning has been thwarted by the same divisive politics that instigated the attack, leaving the ultimate verdict to the judgment of the American people at the ballot box, not the jury box.
“History is written by the victors, and it’s completely unclear who the victors of Jan. 6 are at this point,” said Jacob Ware, a Council on Foreign Relations researcher who studies far-right militant movements. “We only know who lost, and that’s the country and its democracy.”
To date, more than 1,000 people have been arrested for their roles in the Jan. 6 riot, and upward of 650 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted so far. About half face misdemeanor counts such as trespassing in the restricted Capitol, but hundreds others face felony charges such as assaulting law enforcement officers or obstructing Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results.
The 14 members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy — plotting to oppose federal authority or law by force — account for more people convicted of that offense than for any other criminal event since the Civil War, said Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. district attorney for the District of Columbia.
“Today’s sentences reflect the grave threat the actions of these defendants posed to our democratic institutions,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said after Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was sentenced in May to 18 years in prison, the stiffest punishment handed to any Jan. 6 defendant to date. The sentence came after a court found — for the first time in a Jan. 6 case — that Rhodes and co-conspirators’ conduct was tantamount to terrorism, warranting an enhanced sentencing penalty.
Meanwhile, attacking the Justice Department’s prosecutions has become a virtual plank of the Republican platform, with a Washington Post-ABC News survey released last month finding that nearly 80 percent of Republicans said that Trump should not face criminal charges in a federal investigation into his role in the events leading to the storming of the Capitol.
After former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio’s conviction last month, Trump wrote on his social network Truth Social, “The DOJ and FBI are destroying the lives of so many Great American Patriots right before our very eyes.” At his first campaign rally for the 2024 race, Trump traveled to the cradle of the modern far-right militia movement, Waco, Tex., and played a recording of himself singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with jailed Capitol defendants, including a man convicted of assaulting a police officer who died the next day.
House Republicans have also taken up the banner, calling Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners”; touring the D.C. jail, where some remain held pending trial; and giving a platform to FBI agents who claimed they were punished for opposing Jan. 6 investigative practices; the FBI says they were suspended over security concerns. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) shared security footage from inside the Capitol with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who selectively edited the material to argue that the rioters were mere “sightseers.”
Jared Holt, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counterextremism think tank, said Trump has successfully billed his political movement “as an act of collective dissent against an ‘establishment’ government that has declared a kind of war against them.”
But while Trump’s strategy has vaulted him to a double-digit lead over his nearest challenger for next year’s GOP presidential nomination, the Post-ABC News survey found his aggressive election denialism is a vulnerability in the general election. A 56 percent majority of Americans said he should face criminal charges, including a majority of independents.
With many Republican voters ambivalent over Jan. 6, Trump’s explicit attacks have helped armed militia-style groups make gains with mainstream followers, building a sense of team spirit and coziness in fighting a common enemy — Democrats — to get ordinary Americans to lower their guard against violent messaging that could presage future action, Holt said.
A key, dangerous part of the legacy of Jan. 6 is the “normalized political violence we’ve seen grip the country,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads an extremism research lab at American University. She and other extremism researchers said they have observed no letup in the targeting of members of Congress, local officials and marginalized communities.
“We should continue to take them seriously,” she said, “and not assume that this handful of convictions in any way solves the problem.”
A precise measure of political violence is elusive — the metrics and methods vary — but the threat is not receding, according to tallies recorded by academics and think tanks, along with surveys of officials who say they now face threats and intimidation at all levels of public service. Capitol Police reported investigating 7,501 potential threats to lawmakers in 2022, down from 2021 but greater than any year before 2020.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence researcher at the nonprofit Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “In just a few years, violence has become so expected in U.S. politics that many people breathed a sigh of relief after the 2022 midterms.”
“After all,” Kleinfeld continued with a note of sarcasm, “only one state’s election commissioner had to go into hiding with a security detail after credible threats.”
Among liberals, criticism abounds that prosecutors didn’t go far enough in underscoring Trump’s role in instigating the violence on Jan. 6 and that sentences were too short for participating in what the FBI regards as an act of domestic terrorism. The average felony sentence handed down in Jan. 6 cases has been slightly more than three years.
House and Justice Department investigators have not produced direct evidence of a wider plot tying violent actors at the scene to Trump or his White House, though special counsel Jack Smith continues to investigate whether Trump or his advisers’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results violated federal law.
Still, the sprawling riot prosecutions have created a deep historical record of how Jan. 6 unfolded, with participants motivated by Trump’s lies about election results.
Amy Cooter, a researcher at the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, praised the Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy convictions, calling the cases “a clearer match to the spirit” of the law barring plots to overthrow the government. Cooter contrasted them with the Justice Department’s failed 2012 prosecution of members of the Hutaree militia group, who were accused of an unrealized plan to lead a violent revolt by killing police officers.
The convictions also showed how prosecutors can make use of the “extremely limited” tools they have for domestic extremism cases in comparison to those available for investigating international militants, said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism official during the Trump administration.
“There has been a sense among those with anti-government sentiment that … they could get away with nefarious activities, which if conducted by individuals affiliated with or supportive of a foreign terrorist organization would easily be prosecuted and convicted,” said Neumann, now chief strategy officer at Moonshot, a company that combats online extremism.
Extremism trackers say that formalized groups — only a fraction of the Capitol rioters — suffered the biggest blows from the Justice Department’s actions. Their national leadership structures, already shaky, were decimated. And courtroom revelations about the large role of informants have put a damper on overt recruiting and driven activities underground.
“It doesn’t mean they’ll be less organized. It just means they may not be so public about it,” said Gina Ligon, who leads a Homeland Security-affiliated violent extremism research center in Nebraska.
The Oath Keepers, which researchers say was fashioned largely as a cult of personality and moneymaker for Rhodes, all but collapsed under prosecution, though its anti-government ideology and belief in a constitutional right to armed revolt lives on in an array of spinoff militia-style groups.
The Proud Boys also have struggled to regroup at the national level; one recent thread in a forum for supporters tried to clarify the few places where recognized chapters still remain. Researchers say Proud Boys have been trying to stay relevant by glomming on to the latest right-wing outrages, showing up to local anti-LGBTQ+ rallies, harassing patrons at drag performances and pushing the false “groomer” narrative that imagines leftists as condoning pedophilia.
Miller-Idriss, of American University, said the Jan. 6 prosecutions have helped clarify for the public the threat posed by movements that built paramilitary wings and pushed hateful ideologies for years before they were taken seriously by authorities.
“It feels like some small measure of justice to see the both the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convictions come down like this and confirm what people in the field have been saying for years, which is that this is not just some street-fighting boys’ club,” she said. “They’re violent. They’re dangerous. And now they’ve been found guilty.”
However, analysts emphasized, organized groups aren’t the primary far-right threat, according to attack data that shows individuals, typically radicalized in online networks, as the biggest risk for violence. Most of the Capitol rioters weren’t affiliated with organized movements, according to researchers, but were nevertheless whipped into a violent mob that served as a de facto militia for Trump.
With even some of the most radicalized or violent defendants receiving sentences shorter than four years, it’s “entirely possible that we’ll see individuals seek out similar opportunities,” said Ware, the Council on Foreign Relations researcher. He pointed to the case of Jacob Chansley, the notorious “QAnon shaman” whose outfit of horns and fur made him one of the most recognizable rioters.
Chansley had publicly disavowed his QAnon beliefs by the time he was sentenced to 41 months in prison. And yet within hours of his release to a halfway house last month, “he was once again spouting wild conspiracies in a video he posted to Twitter, in which he promised to fight ‘global corruption,’” Vice News reported.
“Jan. 6 defendants have been painted by the far right as martyrs, as political prisoners; they’re seen as heroes. They’re ‘victims’ of the same government overreach that we saw at Waco and Ruby Ridge,” Ware said. “We’re not going to have seen a significant deterrent effect for those individuals who are still mired in that space, still enthralled by those conspiracy theories.”
On a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, Trump embraced a convicted rioter, Micki Larson-Olson, who was found guilty on a misdemeanor charge of resisting police efforts to clear the Capitol during the mob attack.
“Listen, you just hang in there,” Trump told Larson-Olson, who was wearing a bedazzled hat over a red, white and blue wig. “You guys are gonna be okay.”