This story was originally published by ProPublica.
The day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a surprise visitor joined the crowd outside the D.C. Jail, drawing double takes as people recognized his signature eyepatch: Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers movement.
By the cold math of the justice system, Rhodes was not supposed to be there. He’d gone to sleep the night before in a Maryland prison cell, where he was serving 18 years as a convicted ringleader of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Yale-educated firebrand who once boasted a nationwide paramilitary network had seen his organization collapse under prosecution.
For the Justice Department, Rhodes’ seditious conspiracy conviction was bigger than crushing the Oath Keepers — it was a hard-won victory in the government’s efforts to reorient a creaky bureaucracy toward a rapidly evolving homegrown threat. On his first day in office, Trump erased that work by granting clemency to more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, declaring an end to “a grave national injustice.”
“It’s surreal,” Rhodes said, absorbing the scene.
Rhodes, sporting a Trump 2020 cap, was back in Washington with fellow “J6ers” within hours of his release in the early hours of Jan. 21, 2025 . In the frigid air outside “the gulag,” as the D.C. Jail is known in this crowd, he was swarmed by TV cameras and supporters offering congratulations. Nearby, far-right Proud Boys members puffed cigars. A speaker blared Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”
The shock of the moment has continued to reverberate far beyond the jailhouse parking lot.
Trump’s pardons immediately upended the biggest single prosecution in U.S. history and signaled a broader reversal that threatens to create a more permissive climate in which extremists could regroup, weaken the FBI’s independence and revive old debates about who counts as a terrorist, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials and national security experts.
In the whirlwind of the last three weeks, the Trump administration has purged federal law enforcement agencies of prosecutors and investigators who’d been pursuing homegrown far-right groups that the FBI lists as among the most dangerous threats to national security. The Biden administration’s 2021 domestic terrorism strategy — the nation’s first — was removed from the White House website. And some government-funded extremism-prevention programs were ordered to stop work.
“There’s no indication that he engaged in any kind of assessment or has even stopped to think, ‘What did I just unleash on America?’” Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw domestic terrorism cases as a senior Justice Department official, said of Trump’s actions.
Colin Clarke, an analyst at the nonpartisan security-focused Soufan Center, said “far right” and “domestic terrorism” are now “kind of dirty words with the current administration.”
Far-right movements that openly promote violence have suddenly been invigorated, he said. “Does this become a four-year period where these groups can really use the time to strengthen their organization, their command and control, stockpile weapons?” he said.
A Sudden Departure
The changes are a departure even from the first Trump White House, which ramped up attention on domestic terrorism in 2019 after attacks including the deadly white supremacist rampage that August targeting Latino shoppers in El Paso, Texas.
The next month, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report that described domestic terrorism as a “growing threat,” that had “too frequently struck our houses of worship, our schools, our workplaces, our festivals, and our shopping spaces.”
Joe Biden made violent extremism a central theme of his 2020 presidential campaign, saying that he’d been inspired to run for office by a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent, leaving one person dead. His administration’s steps borrowed from previous campaigns to combat AIDS and framed radicalization as a public health priority. Biden also made efforts to address extremism in the ranks of the military and Department of Homeland Security.
Experts described the effort as modest, but the moves were welcomed among counterterrorism specialists as an overdue corrective to a disproportionate focus on Islamist militant groups whose threat to the United States has receded in the decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaida.
A failure of authorities to pivot to the homegrown threat was cited in the findings of a Senate panel that examined intelligence missteps ahead of the Capitol attack. The report called for a reevaluation of the government’s analysis of domestic threats, finding that, “Neither the FBI nor DHS deemed online posts calling for violence at the Capitol as credible.”
This Trump administration has shown no appetite for such measures. Instead, the White House pardons are nudging fringe movements deeper into the mainstream and closer to power, said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads an extremism research lab at American University and has testified before Congress about the threat.
“It creates immediate national security risks from people who are pledging revenge and retribution and who have now been valorized,” Miller-Idriss said.
Within 24 hours of his release, Rhodes had embarked on a comeback blitz. He visited the Capitol and stopped by a Dunkin’ Donuts in the House office building. Three days later, he was in a crowd standing behind Trump at a rally in Las Vegas.
Rhodes was among 14 defendants whose charges were commuted rather than being pardoned. Though he didn’t enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was convicted of orchestrating the Oath Keepers’ violent actions that day. At trial, prosecutors played a recording of him saying, “My only regret is they should have brought rifles.”
At the Capitol after his release, he told reporters he plans to seek a full pardon.
Extremists Reconnect, Rejoice on X
Emboldened by the pardons and Trump’s laser focus on mass deportations, which is redirecting authorities’ attention, far-right extremists rejoiced at the idea of having more space to organize.
Chat forums filled with would-be MAGA vigilantes who fantasize about rounding up Democratic politicians or acting as bounty hunters to corral undocumented migrants. Researchers noted one Proud Boys chat group where users had posted the LinkedIn pages of corrections officers who purportedly oversaw January 6 detainees.
Newly freed prisoners, no longer subject to orders to stay away from extremists and co-defendants, gathered for a virtual reunion, hosted on Elon Musk’s X platform the weekend after their release. For hours, they talked about what led them to the Capitol, how they were taken into custody and the harsh jail conditions they faced — a vivid, albeit one-sided, oral history of life at the center of what the Justice Department had hailed as a landmark domestic terrorism investigation.
The reunion on X offered a glimpse of men juggling the thrill of their vindication with the mundane logistics of reintegrating to society. One former defendant called in from a Florida shopping mall where he was buying sneakers with his mom. A Montana man who embraces the QAnon conspiracy theory said he was experiencing the most exciting time of his life.
Some were too flustered to articulate their thoughts beyond a deep gratitude for God and Trump. Others sounded fired up, ready to run for office, join a class-action lawsuit over their prosecution or find others ways to, as one pardoned rioter put it, “fight the hell out of this thing.”
Outside the D.C. Jail, pardoned defendants described the whiplash of their sudden status change from alleged and convicted criminals to freed patriots.
William Sarsfield III, a tall, gray-bearded man in a camouflage cap printed with “Biden Sucks,” sipped coffee outside the jail. Before dawn that morning, he’d been released from a Philadelphia detention center where he was awaiting sentencing on felony and misdemeanor convictions.
Court papers, backed by video evidence, describe Sarsfield as joining other Capitol rioters in trying to push through a police line with such force that “one officer could be heard screaming in agonizing pain as he was smashed between a shield and a metal door frame.” Sarsfield insists the charges were inflated, noting that he also helped officers escape the mob that day.
In the runup to Trump’s inauguration, rumors had swirled about an imminent pardon, though details were fuzzy. Sarsfield said his girlfriend was so certain Trump would deliver that she hopped in a truck and raced from Gun Barrel City, an hour southeast of Dallas, to the jail in Philadelphia, a 22-hour drive.
“She drove all the way from Texas on faith,” he said. “Because we both knew it was going to be right. A man’s word is what his word is.”
After his release, Sarsfield said, he headed straight to the D.C. “gulag” to make sure others were getting out, too. He still wore his jail uniform of sweats and orange slippers. The miracle of his freedom was just beginning to sink in.
“I got pardoned by a felon,” Sarsfield said with an incredulous chuckle, referring to Trump’s distinction as the only U.S. president to serve after a felony conviction.
Sarsfield said he planned to show his appreciation by helping Trump “clean up in local communities,” which he said meant working at the grassroots level to expose prosecutors and politicians he believes have corrupted the justice system.
“When people decide not to use the rule of law, that becomes tyrannical,” Sarsfield said. “And in our Constitution I’m pretty sure it says when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”
An “Inflection Point” for Political Violence
The uncertainty of what comes next is nerve-wracking for longtime monitors of violent extremists. Even in their worst-case scenarios, they said, few foresaw the Trump administration sending hundreds of diehard election deniers back into their communities as aggrieved heroes.
“A lot of these people will have martyrdom or legendary status among extremist circles, and that is a very powerful recruiting tool,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group.
ACLED research shows extremist activity such as demonstrations and acts of political violence has declined since 2023, which saw a 35 percent reduction in mobilization compared to the previous year. Doyle and other monitors credit the drop in part to the chilling effect of the Justice Department’s post-January 6 crackdown on anti-government and white supremacist movements.
Doyle cautioned that it’s too early to assess the ripple effect of Trump’s clemency on extremist activity. Their ability to regroup depends on several factors, including fear of FBI infiltration, which could subside now that hard-right Trump loyalists are overseeing the Justice Department.
“We’re at an inflection point,” Doyle said.
At the FBI, the Trump administration’s post-clemency vows of payback have sidelined a cohort of senior officials who oversaw the January 6 portfolio of cases, resulting in the loss of some of the bureau’s most seasoned counterterrorism professionals.
Without that expertise, investigators run the risk of violating a suspect’s civil rights or, conversely, overlooking threats because they are assumed to be constitutionally protected, said a veteran FBI analyst who has worked on January 6 cases.
“It has the potential to cut both ways,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Many longtime monitors of extremist movements have themselves become targets of threats and violence from January 6 defendants and their supporters, raising anxiety about their release from prison.
Megan Squire, a computer scientist who in 2017 was among the first academic researchers documenting the Proud Boys’ increasingly organized violence, said members are already “saber-rattling and reconstituting dead chapters.”
The group’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, released from prison in Louisiana, told the far-right Infowars podcast: “Success is going to be retribution.”
All five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol attack were in Squire’s original dataset. Another member who was a January 6 defendant had previously blasted Squire on social media and posted her private information on Telegram.
Squire, who has since joined the civil rights-focused Southern Poverty Law Center, said she finds herself wondering, “Are they going to come after me now?”
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