The Daily - The Reinvention of Jan. 6

Episode Date: January 6, 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.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. 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 Capitol. They obviously revere the Capitol.

Changing it from a day of violence 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 6 protesters

or, as I often call them, the hostages. They're hostages. Today, my colleague Alan Feuer talks to one of those rioters and explains how the pardons could help rewrite the story of what happened on January 6th. It's Monday, January 6th. Alan, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. So Alan, it's been exactly four years since January 6th.

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. So as of today, January 6th, 2025, give us a summary of where things stand with the legal cases of the people who participated. Sure. So this has been really my full-time job since January 6th, 2021.

And 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 kind of figure out what happened on January 6th. 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. And then of course, there's what you're talking about, the Justice Department's criminal cases that have been brought with regard to January 6th. And that is the largest single investigation in the history of the Justice Department. Wow, interesting. Yeah, and this has involved enormous amounts

of visual evidence and witness evidence and this cell phone seized and tips from ordinary people around the country. It's really been an unprecedented and a massive undertaking by federal prosecutors. So at the moment we have about 1,600 people who are facing criminal charges. And of those, most, so a little over 1,000 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 to have been acquitted fully. So when you look at this overall, the criminal justice system has rendered a pretty clear verdict about what happened on January 6th. It was a day of violence and an attempt to impede a central act of American democracy that resulted in more than 140 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 bring to account those who were responsible, here we are, right? Four years later. And all of that is in doubt because President-elect Donald Trump has a very different version of what happened on that day. And he's promised on day one of his presidency, he said that he will pardon January 6th defendants on a case-by-case basis. In fact, he said within the first hour of his presidency, he'd do that. So 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 6th, and I'm quoting, a heinous attack on the United States Capitol. And 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 kind of private dialogue with the rioters themselves. Collectively, it's as if they've come up with an alternate reality to explain what happened on January 6. And at least for me, I've 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 kind of have to get inside the dialogue that Trump was having with the January 6 rioters first.

Now, look, I mean, 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 kind of sit down and walk me through his whole story with the idea of, hey, what's going to happen if and when Trump issues pardons hi Anthony hi Alan his name is Anthony Vaux I am currently 32 years old it's kind of a young guys from Indiana and he entered the Capitol on January 6th didn't hurt anyone didn't break anything and he was ultimately convicted at trial of four low-level misdemeanors, including disorderly

conduct. So in that way, he's actually pretty typical of most January 6th 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. Like from the law? Yeah, like he's on the lam. He was supposed to report to prison after he got sentenced and he just didn't. He skipped. Wow, 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. Danielle Pletka Okay.

So tell me more about Anthony. Alan L. Johnson, Ph.D. Sure. Alan L. Johnson, Ph.D. I am a family of Vietnamese immigrants. They all came over legally from Vietnam. Alan L. Johnson, Ph.D. So Anthony's father fought alongside U.S. troops during the war against the Viet Cong.

And after the war, his family emigrated to the United States and Anthony was born here. Alan L. Johnson, Ph.D. And after the war, his family emigrated to the United States and Anthony was born here. He's never like partisan or anything like that. We just love this country and, you know, the freedom and everything else that it symbolized for us coming from Vietnam. His background might sound kind of 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.

Fake heism of being like, sexist, racist, all these different things. He doesn't trust the mainstream media. Like, hang on, what's going on? Why is the media like all seemingly coordinating against Trump with all these like demonstrably false headlines that are all out of context if you just like look into it a little bit more. And flash forwarding to the 2020 election, election night arrives and as we saw with

a lot of Trump supporters, Anthony does not believe it's true. Oh, new votes came in or whatever. Oh, man, there's like a lot of gaming potential with these mail-in ballots. There's a lot of like security gaps. Like Pennsylvania, they illegally changed the voting deadlines. No signature verification was done for these ballots. So many different things like made me suspicious. He's just steeped in this world of election conspiracy theories.

Not that he would see it that way. It kind of like made me look for some sort of opportunity to do something about it. And I think in like December they were talking about the Stop the Steal rally. And he ultimately finds out that there's going to be a pro-Trump stop the steal rally in Washington on January 6th. And he's like, yes, my mom and I heeded the call. I want to be there. His family wants to go with him.

Basically we're just there to like, make sure it was legit. And he ends up joining a group of Vietnamese rallygoers. People are giving out like Vietnamese bungee sandwiches to everyone. So it was just like a excited fervor I would say. And so Anthony and his mom follow the crowd and as he gets closer to the Capitol 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, but like, I never saw anything untoward in there. And 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 named Colonial Regalia. He

was playing the flute, amazing grace on the flute. People were just like sitting around watching him. And 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, like the Rotunda Dome, I find out later, is like inspired by the same dome in St. Peter's Basilica. And going, you know, I was just like awash with like, wow, this is glorious. So, 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. And, you know, it was an interesting split screen because I saw people walking around kind of just like in awe as you're describing Anthony doing, you know, with selfie sticks, sitting in chairs, laughing, kind of 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. And, you know, it just allowed everyone to emerge with their own story of what happened that day. Like, everyone had their own narrative, which for them was true.

And it sounds like Anthony had his own narrative. Yeah, yeah. I would agree with you entirely that not one thing happened on January 6. A lot of different things happened on January 6. A lot of different things happened on January 6. 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 V for Vendetta, like, obviously, normally, like, those people wouldn't be allowed to, like, do what they're doing, like, assemble and whatever in front of their parliament. But by massing together peacefully from my eyes, they're able to make their voices heard. In his mind, what he was doing was this kind of expression of democracy. He was out there petitioning the government, right?

He wanted redress for his grievances. That's how he saw it. And 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 kind of breaks down crying and tells these federal agents, I thought I was the good guy that day. So Anthony and his mom stay for like 20, 30 minutes. And so basically they're kicked out by a Capitol police officer.

A guy's like, gotta go. And they do. They leave the building and they eventually make their way to the DC Metro. I see like the first like bits of news coming through my phone, like all the initial headlines, like rioters storm the Capitol, rioters like block the vote or whatever. And all these things like they kind of caught me by surprise. So like, and he's getting the news in real time from his phone about busted windows and beat up

cops and you know, like the real bad stuff, terrible stuff that happened that day. And frankly, he says that he's shocked about all that because it didn't match his sort of personal window right on January 6. So like when I was like reacting to it with friends on like social media, DMs and such, I was basically mocking the media about like, oh yeah, we stormed the Capitol. It was like, we walk right in.

Like, you know, I thought I was like, just like over the top embellishment. So I was just like having fun with it. As you learn more about the day, did your feeling towards the day change in any measurable or important way? Um, I did think that uh, people were starting to say like, this is like a big setup or whatever, and you know, it did seem to like be that way. And 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? Hmm fault of others, not the rioters. It was police brutality or maybe this was all kind of a setup to begin with, right? Was the federal government itself not setting security perimeters in the right way? Do you know, like, where's the National Guard? And these questions began to make him And these questions began to make him doubt the culpability, like who's responsible for the violence. So despite the footage of the violence around the Capitol that day, Anthony is kind of 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 6 defendants. And, you know, 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 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, ah, 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 sort of put the government to his test. I was like staring into the mouths of a kangaroo court, but I just felt like I had to go with that anyway. And during the trial, prosecutors end up citing text messages that Anthony sent after the six saying things like, oh, the cops had it easy that day and it would be easy to go back to the capital armed. He also makes a decision to attend a vigil that has been going on at the local Washington jail for years now. And that's where many of the most violent January 6 defendants are being held on pretrial detention. It's called the Freedom Corner. So 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 like God knows what conditions. And you have people who are flying flags and eating snacks and they often call into the jail to talk to the inmates and they live stream broadcast with these inmates. But like sleuths or whatever like on the live streams like started reporting me and then I think by Anthony is not supposed to associate himself with any other January 6th defendants or, you know, people in that community. And so 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 6th case. And she really kind of lays into Anthony about this particular issue. So 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, you know, 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 like, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, like all these people that had to you know flee to like find safety or whatever.

And yet there's one more thing that's informing Anthony's decision. Trump has started campaigning explicitly on a promise to pardon the January 6 rioters. Yeah, I remember of him starting out campaign, rally, speeches, whatever, with the January 6 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 6 inmates. These are people who are in prison in Washington DC for crimes they committed on January 6. Well, thank you very much. And you see the spirit from the hostages and that's what they are. Yeah, I remember hearing like, you know, we're like, 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 It would promise to like pardon the political prisoners the first day we get Into office. We're gonna save our country, and we're going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots, and they were unbelievable patriots and are. And 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. And he thinks to himself, why should I report to prison? I think I can get a pardon. ["The Last Post"] Of course, what happens next is that Trump wins the election. ["The Last Post"] To me, it was like, I guess, light at the end of the tunnel. I was crying happy tears the night, like the next few days afterwards. And 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 pop champagne bottles on election night. And you just saw this whole community being absolutely certain that Donald Trump was gonna ride to their rescue and save them. When I first got arrested, I kind of knew that this is a thing that's gonna be a process.

Like, it's gonna take a lot of time, a lot of things to happen for the tide to turn. take a lot of time, a lot of things to happen for the tide to turn. And it 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. So 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.

So let's talk about the logistics and the implications of this. First the logistics. How exactly would this happen? Like, is it just a stroke of the pen? I mean, basically it is. The presidential pardon power is enormous. You know, Trump would just sort of write up an executive order or sign a document and poof, it's done.

Like magic. Yeah. And so the debate now is really about the scope of the pardons that Trump is going to do. You know, is he going to issue a total blanket amnesty or is it gonna be sort of more targeted to people like Anthony who are sort of nonviolent, low level misdemeanor defendants. And they're gonna involve not just a sort of question

of logistics, but 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, you know, 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. And 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 6th defendants. But there's

this debate that has been sort of raging both on the outside, right? There's advocates for the family members. And then that is sort of seeped into Trump's inner circle. And I wouldn't want to call it either way at this point. Right. And 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. And you know, of course, that's important in its own right, but it does really set up the potential for a broader meaning here. Like, for example, what does it do to public trust in the legal system?

Oh, 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. And so to sort of, depending on the scope of these pardons, to sort of 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.

You know, choose your metaphor. And I think it could have a quite corrosive effect on trust in the system. Right. And of course, there's another piece here, which we've kind of touched on, but I want to bring back in front of people, which is the story of what happened that day, right? So to what extent do these pardons actually help the people who participated and help the president rewrite the story of what happened on January 6th? Well, see, that's the remarkable thing. So from Trump's point of view

and from the defendant's point of view, these pardons will not be a sort of 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. And so if Trump does pardon these defendants, it will be his opportunity to

kind of rewrite the entire story of what the Justice Department has been doing over the past four years. And he will be able to sort of 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. And so, 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 gonna to allow him to sort of

legally wash away the sins of many of the people who are involved in them. But the crazy thing is we have this whole record. I mean, beyond the prosecutions, we have all of these videos, we have this body cam stuff. You know, in the modern internet age, there's a record. So can the narrative just be flipped like that? No. So you're absolutely right. In this internet age, there's tens of thousands of hours of January 6th video out there. And 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 kind of stood up in public in written and oral rulings against the idea that January 6th 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, quote, an orderly fashion, unquote, like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as political prisoners, or even incredibly hostages. That is all preposterous. Hmm. But at the same time, yes, we live in a siloed information world where people

sort of see what they want to see. And so there will now be a bubble that exists that, you know, sort of has the stamp of approval from the president on it that nothing bad happened on January 6. 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. You know, Stalin is seen by many in Russia as the leader who made Russia great.

And 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. So 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 kind of Soviet aspect to sort of erasing all of this, right? That is not how the January 6th defendants obviously see it. They see this as the lifting almost of Soviet oppression on them.

And so 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 sort of emerge as victorious? I don't know that that's above my pay grade. But these tensions about the meaning of January 6 have been there. And there are practical ramifications to all of this. I think a lot of what the erasure or revision of the January 6 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 kind of 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 6. And that's already starting to happen, right? accountable for January 6. And 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 6 committee, recommended that Trump be charged with crimes in connection with January 6 should herself face an FBI

investigation. And 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. Mm-hmm. If you rewrite the history of what happened on January 6th, 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 kind of just biding his time, waiting around until Trump comes back into office. And he really does seem to believe not only that the winners write history, but that he and the other January 6th 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 6th.

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. And I think that's how history will remember January 6. Do you, and you believe that? I do. And you believe that history will believe that? Yeah. I do. And you believe that history will believe that?

Yeah. Alan, thank you. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. 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 our human rights. As Senator, she helped— — And George Soros, the activist liberal billionaire

who Trump and his allies have mocked for years. — Born into a Jewish family in Hungary, George Soros escaped Nazi occupation to build a life of freedom for himself and countless others around the world. 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 gotta keep the faith. God bless you all and may God protect our church. Please enjoy this. Today's episode was produced by Asda Chaturvedi and Muj Zaydi with help from Nina Feldman, Eric Krupke, and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Michael Benoit. Research assistance by Susan Lee contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano,

and Sophia Landman, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley, with help from Carol Sabereau. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow. you