A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s assassination of right-wing youth leader Charlie Kirk, in the midst of more sober calls for mourning and moderation, many far-right influencers quickly began to call for revenge against the left—whom they blamed for Kirk’s death. They did so even though the shooter still has not been identified, nor their motivations revealed. But it’s not just random individuals circulating such violent fantasies—leaders of prominent extremist groups and pardoned insurrectionists have issued calls to their networks to seek revenge. In an email to Mother Jones, Devin Burghart, executive director of the extremism research group Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, expressed his concern that reactions to Kirk’s death could “energize the far-right to intensify political violence, from street clashes and armed paramilitarism to calls for racist terror.” Consider the message from Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, who was convicted to 18 years in prison for his role in leading the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, before being pardoned by President Donald Trump in January—along with nearly 1,600 others. On Wednesday, he said on Alex Jones’ Infowars podcast that he would be restarting his organization in the wake of Kirk’s killing. “I’m going to be rebuilding Oath Keepers,” Rhodes said, “and we will be doing protection again.” The group never formally disbanded but had receded from the spotlight after their leader’s conviction.  “One thing we will be doing is public protection of patriots again, like we used to—it’s incredibly necessary,” Rhodes added. “I’m sure the Proud Boys will agree—if we have to, we’ll go and ride the train again, just like the Guardian Angels did.” He was referring to the New York City vigilante group Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa started in 1979.  If his security team had been at Kirk’s event, Rhodes said, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Points USA would still be alive. He also urged men to “step up…do your tour of duty” and start their own vigilante groups. “It’s not just the responsibility of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to protect Americans in this environment,” he continued, “it’s the responsibility of all American men.” > “It’s not just the responsibility of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to protect > Americans in this environment, it’s the responsibility of all American men.” He then suggested that they should “start a neighborhood watch,” and should they find “someone who doesn’t belong, let ‘em know you’re watching them.” Threats weren’t even necessary, “but you can let ‘em know you’re watching,” Rhodes said. “Usually, that’s a deterrent.” Several other convicted insurrectionists also said they plan to avenge Kirk’s death, noting that he had strenuously encouraged that they be freed from prison. “Charlie was a HUGE advocate for our unconditional release…He helped restore the lives of 1,600 of us,” wrote Enrique Tarrio, leader of the militia-like group the Proud Boys, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in coordinating the attack on the Capitol. He, too, was pardoned by President Trump. “I think I can speak for ALL J6ers when I say THANK YOU…We carry the torch.” Jake Lang, who was accused of beating officers at the Capitol but avoided going to trial before being pardoned and is currently running for US Senate in Florida, called for “a MILLION MAN MARCH on DC to show solidarity” with both Kirk and Iryna Zarutsk, a Ukrainian refugee who was killed on a train in North Carolina last month. The Trump administration and other Republicans have blamed Zarutsk’s murder on Democrats, alleging that the killing was directly connected to the party for being what they describe as too “soft on crime.” The killer, who had a lengthy criminal history, is facing federal charges. “THE TIME TO RISE IS NOW,” Lang wrote.  Chris Worrell, a member of the Proud Boys, was convicted of assaulting a group of police officers on January 6 and sparked a six-week-long manhunt while he tried to evade authorities. “The POLITICAL ASSASSINATION of [Kirk] MUST see RETRIBUTION!!” he wrote on X. Another convicted insurrectionist and Oath Keeper, Jessica Watkins, said, “Charlie Kirk’s assassination pulled me out of retirement. More work must be done.” Just twelve hours earlier, Watkins had written to fellow Kirk fans who were upset about the shooting, “talks about Civil War are counterproductive. Please Stop. It’s not helping.” The neo-Nazis weighed in with a post on X from Nationalist Network leader Ryan Sanchez: “Charlie Kirk must be avenged. We must destroy the Left once and for all!” In another tweet, he wrote, “WHITE MAN FIGHT BACK!” On his website, Sanchez says he is “fighting for J6 prisoners.” > WHITE MAN FIGHT BACK! pic.twitter.com/V3HQAWHEGg > > — R. Augustine Sánchez (@ryanasanchez) September 11, 2025 As incendiary as these posts may appear, some experts do not believe the former insurrectionists pose as legitimate a threat as they did in 2021. “These people cry civil war when Cracker Barrel changes their logo,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He sees some of the loudest voices calling for retribution, like Rhodes and Tarrio, as mere “grifters,” adding, “I’m not worried about, like, the Oath Keepers bringing 1,000 guys to DC tomorrow.” Lewis pointed to Tarrio’s recent announcement that he would not attend a DC court hearing scheduled for Thursday, where he was supposed to appear in connection with a lawsuit that the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church filed (and won) against the Proud Boys for vandalizing its Washington, DC, church building in 2020.“They want me to travel to totally unsafe DC in a time where conservative voices are under threat,” Tarrio posted.  John Rennie Short, professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Insurrection: What the January 6 Assault on the Capitol Reveals About America and Democracy, sees the insurrectionists’ calls for retribution as an effort to “raise that anger level again” after losing their relevance with Trump’s return to office. “It’s a great business model for them,” he added. What these experts are concerned about, though, is how these messages from influencers with such a wide online reach could inspire lone actors to inflict violence. “They’re now being told that the same people who tried to steal this country away from you just killed Charlie Kirk,” Lewis said, “and someone has to do something about that.”  > “They’re now being told that the same people who tried to steal this country > away from you just killed Charlie Kirk, and someone has to do something about > that.”  There’s also concern that the Trump administration may use the insurrectionists’ sense of grievance to, as Burghart put it, “further [their] authoritarian plans.” After all, Attorney General Pam Bondi already fired multiple prosecutors who pursued cases against the insurrectionists, and both FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have promoted conspiracy theories about the attack. In an address to the nation Wednesday night, President Trump explicitly blamed his political opponents for Kirk’s death: “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” > "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like > Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murders and criminals. This kind > of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our > country and it must stop right now." pic.twitter.com/q25tSplWQW > > — CSPAN (@cspan) September 11, 2025 Rennie Short sees Trump’s baseless politicization of the tragedy as serving to distract from some of his own troubling political failures. “It takes attention away from the Epstein files,” he said, “from Israel bombing allies, or Putin continuing to savagely attack Ukraine.” Nonetheless, this messaging from the insurrectionists and echoed by the highest officials in government could still have serious consequences. “Especially for people who already assaulted law enforcement on January 6 and were pardoned,” Lewis said, “there is certainly going to be an expectation that, if they answer the call again, they could have the same outcome.”

Ed Martin, the far-right-activist-turned-acting US attorney for DC, apologized this week for praising an alleged Nazi sympathizer at an event last year. But Martin’s ties to Timothy Hale-Cusanelli—who is known for wearing a Hitler-style mustache, and who allegedly once told a coworker that the Nazis “should have finished the job”—are far more extensive than just that one meeting. Martin told the Forward this week that he was “sorry” for bestowing an award on Hale-Cusanelli during an August 2024 event at Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin said. “At the time, I didn’t know it.” Martin was not specific in the portions of interview quoted by the Forward, but he seemed to suggest he had previously known only of a photo in which Hale-Cusanelli wore the Hitler-syle mustache, not “the full scope of his repulsive behavior.” Martin reportedly said that he now understands Hale-Cusanelli’s behavior was “clearly far more serious than a singular act that, by itself, might look like a mistake.” Martin’s office did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Martin’s tenure as acting US attorney is set to expire May 20. His apology appears aimed at softening opposition from lawmakers in both parties as he seeks Senate confirmation to hold the post permanently. It is a notable exception to his general refusal to respond to the overwhelmingly negative press generated by his efforts to help President Trump use the Justice Department as a partisan weapon. It appears that Martin believes his past praise for an alleged antisemite could be particularly damaging to his nomination. But Martin’s suggestion that he was not familiar with the broader scope of Hale-Cusanelli’s alleged bigotry when he gave him an award is implausible. The prior month—in July 2024—Martin asked Hale-Cusanelli about his alleged extremism during an interview on a podcast hosted by Martin. Martin asserted on the program that the allegations, which emerged in court filings following Hale-Cusanelli’s indictment for entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were “leaked” by federal prosecutors in an effort to push the narrative that “MAGA people are antisemitic.” “I’ve gotten to know him really well,” Martin said of Hale-Cusanelli during the show. “I’d say we’re friends.” The two men know each other because Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” activist and lawyer for January 6 defendants, served until January 2025 on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit that was launched in 2021 by Cynthia Hughes, a New Jersey activist who refers to herself as Hale-Cusanelli’s “adoptive aunt.” Martin reported on a Senate financial disclosure form that he was paid $30,000 last year to serve on the board. Hughes, who did not respond to a request for comment, has previously said she launched the group as a result of Hale-Cusanelli’s arrest and “incredibly unfair” treatment. That treatment included court filings in which Justice Department prosecutors called Hale-Cusanelli an “avowed white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer” and cited a litany of antisemitic and racist statements his former colleagues said they had heard him make. In a sentencing memo filed in September 2022, prosecutors also quoted a conversation secretly recorded by an unidentified person, in which Hale-Cusanelli said, “I really fucking wish there’d be a civil war.” In the same conversation, according to prosecutors, Hale-Cusanelli stated that he would like to give Jews and Democrats “24 hours to leave the country” and to have many of them arrested. Prosecutors also noted a picture of Hale-Cusanelli sporting a Hitler-like mustache and hair style, an image that drew substantial media coverage. > Cusanelli was convicted on all counts at a jury trial this year. The judge — a > Trump appointee, who has been skeptical of some J6 cases — panned Cusanelli's > testimony on the witness stand, where he claimed he didn't know Congress met > at the Capitol. /4 https://t.co/S4nkmnyBoA > > — Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) September 3, 2022 Hale-Cusanelli—who has said he has Jewish and Puerto Rican ancestry—testified during his trial that he is not antisemitic or racist. He said the statements prosecutors cited were meant to be “ironic” and “self-deprecating humor” intended to gain attention. Hale-Cusanelli did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. While imposing a 48-month prison sentence, Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, said Hale-Cusanelli’s “statements and actions” make Jews “less safe and less confident they can participate as equal members of our society.” Martin sounded conversant on the details of the government’s accusations during a more-than-hour-long interview on July 2, 2024, on Martin’s podcast, video of which remains available on Rumble. “They used your phone and…leaked the photo to say, ‘Look, these people, these MAGA people are antisemitic,'” Martin said. “And the photo was of you…you had like a mustache shaped in such a way that you looked vaguely like Hitler.” Throughout the conversation, Martin indicated familiarity with the accusations about Hale-Cusanelli that emerged in his court case. Their discussion also referenced the same secretly recorded conversation in which Hale-Cusanelli and a confidential informant talked about Jews and civil war. Hale-Cusanelli told Martin he was drunk when he made the statements later cited by prosecutors. Martin repeatedly defended Hale-Cusanelli, arguing prosecutors had improperly “leaked” the photo and other material from Hale-Cusanelli’s phone. (Hale-Cusanelli acknowledged that material in fact appeared in publicly filed court documents related to his detention.) “I really think that your story is now sort of the quintessential example,” Martin said later. That interview came amid multiple appearances that Hale-Cusanelli made at events with Martin last year. Those include a June 2024 event at Bedminster and the August 14 event at the club where Martin gave Hale-Cusanelli an award for promoting “God, family and country.” Hale-Cusanelli’s presence at the Bedminster events gained attention when NPR reported on them in September. And Martin’s role attracted notice after he began serving as US attorney in January. Martin’s ties to an alleged Nazi sympathizer were noted in a February bar complaint against him and in a March speech by Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering Martin’s nomination. Still, weeks later, Martin appeared alongside Hale-Cusanelli—this time at a March 24, 2025, fundraiser in Naples, Florida, for an organization that Martin previously ran. As I reported with Amanda Moore, Martin was the keynote speaker at the March 24 event. The event was also attended various January 6 defendants, including two who were convicted of seditious conspiracy and whose appeals Martin’s office is still opposing—an apparent conflict of interest. (Moore reports additional details on Martin’s ties to Hale-Cusanelli here.) Martin did not address this event in his comments printed by the Forward. But at that fundraiser, there was no evidence of distance between Martin and Hale-Cusanelli. In a speech at the event, Hale-Cusanelli called January 6 “a psy-op led by three-letter agencies.” And he said he had an ally in Martin, who has fired, demoted, and investigated former January 6 prosecutors, even as he has promoted, while US attorney, a conspiracy theory that the FBI had a hand in January 6. “Led by the current US attorney,” Hale-Cusanelli said in Naples, “we’re starting to see a vast restoration of the truth, which is that January 6 defendants were not criminals, they were in fact the victims…And we will expose these nefarious actors who set us up in the first place.” In his own remarks, Martin did not denounce those claims.

When Elon Musk ordered a government-wide email blast directing federal employees to list their recent accomplishments, most senior officials paused to consider their options. In the Justice Department, US attorneys around the country discussed the matter over an email list they share, with many deciding to seek more guidance before instructing career prosecutors on how to respond. One questioned whether the email was even real. But Ed Martin, an acolyte of President Donald Trump named interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, charged ahead. “It’s legit and we’ve already replied,” he told his fellow US attorneys. “Great leadership.” Just 33 minutes after the Office of Personnel Management directive hit inboxes, Martin urged lawyers under him to comply, though he suggested they respond carefully. “DOGE and Elon are doing great work!” Martin wrote in one of his frequent communiques to hundreds of assistant US attorneys and support staff. “We are happy to be participate.” > “We are happy to be participate.” For Martin—a right-wing activist and serial political candidate who has enthusiastically defended January 6 rioters—this was just one more typographically challenged missive in a campaign to turn a powerful legal office into a partisan weapon. Since taking on the gig in January, he’s compensated for his lack of prosecutorial experience by loudly proclaiming his desire to help Trump and Musk use the DOJ to punish their foes. Trump quickly returned the favor, nominating him to hold the post indefinitely. Martin, who did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, has announced investigations into his own staff for their role in January 6 cases and has volunteered to support Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Orwellian “Weaponization Working Group,” which purports to take aim at abuses of the justice system during the Biden administration. Martin has threatened former special counsel Jack Smith and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and has used X to indicate plans to investigate administration critics. He has even tried to leverage a dubious criminal probe to seize climate grant money awarded by the Biden administration. > The US Attorney in DC is investigating Georgetown Law School, demanding that > "if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in anyway [sic]," the law school > should "move swiftly to remove it" > > Federal prosecutors don't control classrooms. pic.twitter.com/UCJhSe4uMp > > — Adam Steinbaugh (@adamsteinbaugh) March 6, 2025 As he posts his way to prominence, Martin has bombarded his staff with chatty emails recounting his daily activities, then repeatedly berated them after those emails leaked. In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it. EAGLE ED Martin, whom associates call outwardly affable, presents as a guy pleased and a bit surprised by his elevation. “He has a little bit of buffoonery and a ‘Mr. Smith comes to Washington’ vibe,” said one person who has worked in the DC US attorney’s office. His emails and other communications tend to read like daily journal entries. “Life is very different for me and my family these days,” Martin wrote in a February 4 Substack post. “I am up earlier and into the office in downtown DC. Home late. Pretty tired by then.”  “There is so much to tell you,” he added. “One aspect: my new office is large.” If Martin is pinching himself at his new position, he has reason. While US attorneys are often experienced prosecutors or rising political prospects, Martin, 54, is more of a journeyman. He spent much of the past two decades as a conservative activist in Missouri, running a series of political organizations—a sort of far-right change agent who sometimes leaves behind litigation and enemies. As chief of staff for Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt in 2007, Martin fired a state attorney, Scott Eckersley, who had warned against deleting emails that state law required be retained. In a lawsuit, Eckersley alleged that Martin and other officials had falsely accused him of “accessing group sex websites on his state computer” and had defamed him to the media. The state attorney general’s office ultimately agreed to pay Eckersley a $500,000 settlement in the matter.  Martin ran for Congress in 2010; he started and ended Senate and House campaigns in 2012, before committing to the state attorney general race that year. None of his campaigns were successful. After a stint running Missouri’s GOP and heading several conservative nonprofits, Martin landed in 2015 as president of the Eagle Forum, an organization founded by conservative hero Phyllis Schlafly, then 90 years old. Within a year, Martin had been fired by the group’s board and accused by Schlafly’s daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, of manipulating the aging icon to commandeer her organizations and legacy. In 2016, Cori and other group members sued Martin for alleged acts that included impersonating Schlafly in Facebook posts and other correspondence. “During Martin’s brief tenure, the Eagle Forum…has experienced unprecedented chaos,” the plaintiffs asserted in their complaint. Martin denied those claims. In March 2016, with Martin at her side, Schlafly endorsed Trump. She died September 5, 2016. Her name appeared posthumously alongside Martin’s as an author of the book The Conservative Case for Trump, published the next day. A year later, Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice then running for Senate, claimed Schlafly among his endorsers. Moore’s webpage, Roll Call reported, said: “Phyllis Schlafly, Late President, Eagle Forum; inference of Ed Martin.” Martin by then had launched a new group, Phyllis Schlafly’s American Eagles. And he retained control of another Schlafly-founded nonprofit, the Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund. Tax filings by the latter group show Martin’s salary as president, which fluctuated, peaked at just over $204,000 in 2020. He’d received more than $1.4 million in total from the group as of 2023. He still uses the X handle @EagleEdMartin. Martin netted more than $322,000 from yet another former Schlafly nonprofit, America’s Future, while serving as its president beginning in 2016. In 2021, Martin’s final year leading that group, he received more than $83,000 for the job, which, according to tax filings, took him eight hours per week. That year, the group appointed Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and a prominent far-right conspiracy theorist, as its board chair. America’s Future also hired Flynn’s brother Joe and sister Mary to top jobs. Within a few years of Martin’s departure, America’s Future was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to members of the Flynn family. Asked about this, Joe Flynn, a sometime-spokesperson for the family, texted: “Fuck off quote me.” STOP THE STEAL Martin moved to Virginia in 2017 and spent much of the first Trump administration as a far-right pundit. He lost a gig as a CNN contributor after complaining about appearing on the network alongside “Black racists.” He ran a feeble 2019 campaign for the Board of Supervisors in Fairfax County, Virginia. He also designed a coloring book based on Trump’s 2017 “covfefe” typo tweet. In it, aspiring artists can color in outlined images of Kanye West and Candace Owens under a West tweet boasting that he had a signed MAGA hat, or they can complete a connect-the-dots puzzle of a MAGA hat on a page advertising a free downloadable song sharing a “#CovfefeIsLove” message. > Wondering what that page is on #TheMovement? It's a page from Can't Trump This > Covfefe: Top Trump Tweets – The MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL Coloring and Activity > Book for All Ages (but especially adults)! https://t.co/3hoC7nzEsL > pic.twitter.com/4aB5J1WzSc > > — Ed Martin (@EagleEdMartin) June 5, 2018 Martin gained focus following the 2020 election, organizing pro-Trump protests alongside Ali Alexander, the “Stop the Steal” activist who claimed he “came up with the idea” to pressure Congress on January 6 to not certify Biden’s victory.  Martin “was kind of like a mentor,” Alexander said in a December 2021 deposition conducted by the House January 6 committee. According to Alexander, the two men “prayed together every morning.” In depositions, other January 6 rally organizers expressed various concerns about Alexander, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars without setting up a nonprofit group or accounting for the funds. But Martin offered his own nonprofit as a place for Alexander to park cash, Alexander told the committee. Martin’s group acted “as a sponsor for collecting Stop the Steal funds” for the rally, Alexander testified. Alexander did not respond to inquiries from Mother Jones. In late 2020, Martin was in regular contact with Vincent Haley, a White House aide, according to previously unreported text messages released by the January 6 committee. Shortly after the election, Martin urged Haley to “push” a pardon for Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI but was never imprisoned. The Trump DOJ already had dropped the case against Flynn, but Martin suggested that the former general would be more willing to join Stop the Steal rallies once pardoned. “He’d come to dc for the rally/March,” Martin texted Haley on November 10. “We need that guy loosed.” “I have recommended it,” Haley responded. It is not clear whether Martin’s pressure had any impact, and Haley didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ questions. But Trump pardoned Flynn on November 26, 2020. Flynn then spoke at DC rallies on December 12 and January 5. > “They know they’re going to jail.” Martin also spoke at those rallies. And he was outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as rioters attacked police. But Martin, who was not charged with a crime, saw no evil. “Rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand,” Martin tweeted at 2:53 p.m. that day. “Ignore the #FakeNews.” In a video he posted the next day, Martin repeated false claims that the attack had been orchestrated by left-wing infiltrators. “Now we know that it was antifa,” he said. “It was plants.” Martin’s efforts drew a subpoena from the January 6 committee. He ignored it, failing to appear for a scheduled deposition. He went on to become a vocal advocate for attackers facing legal charges and represented several people charged with taking part in the riot. Martin was no ordinary defense attorney. He suggested that the defendants should receive “reparations” and pushed a bizarre and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that “January 6 was staged by Mr. Coffee,” a supposedly unidentified man seen drinking coffee near the gallows display constructed outside the Capitol that day. Martin pursued this theory vigorously, posting “missing person” flyers featuring grainy images of the man around Washington. On the right-wing podcast circuit, he called for “accountability” for those who had investigated January 6. “One of the reasons I think that we should fear for this election,” he said last summer, “is because there’s hundreds of Democrats and some Republicans—Liz Cheney—that they know they’re going to jail.” “A GREAT FAILURE OF OUR OFFICE” Martin began working as US attorney on Inauguration Day, the day Trump granted clemency to 1,600 January 6 defendants. The president’s vaguely worded declaration largely left implementation to the DOJ. Martin took on that task with alacrity. When a judge barred Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whose 18-year sentence Trump had commuted, from entering DC, Martin intervened, successfully arguing that the order was improper. Rhodes—who has since shown up on Capitol Hill—later told reporters that the judge “got slapped down by Ed Martin.” As an interim US attorney, Martin can serve a maximum of 120 days, unless the Senate confirms him to fill the job permanently. He wasted no time in reshaping the office in his image, demoting key attorneys who’d worked on January 6 cases and initiating an internal investigation of prosecutors who charged defendants with violating a particularly harsh obstruction statute—18 USC 1512—that the Supreme Court later ruled did not apply to most of the rioters.  For Martin, the DOJ’s use of the that provision had long been an obsession. “Who ordered the 1512?” he asked on Charlie Kirk’s podcast in 2023. “If it was [Merrick] Garland, or [former Deputy Attorney General] Lisa Monaco, or Joe Biden, or Hunter…that guy or gal needs to end up in jail.” In a January 27, 2025, email that began by lamenting the Washington Commanders’ playoff loss the day before, Martin asked DC prosecutors to hand over material relevant to his probe into this matter, which he dubbed the “1512 Project.” “Obviously, the use [of the statute] was a great failure of our office,” he wrote to his staff, “and we need to get to the bottom of it.” The next day, he reminded employees to cough up information about their own activities. “Please be proactive – if you have nothing, tell the co-chairs,” he wrote. “Failure to do so strikes me as insubordinate.”  News of this investigation was quickly reported. “Wow, what a disappointment to have my email yesterday to you all was leaked almost immediately,” Martin wrote in another email. “Again, personally insulting and professionally unacceptable. I guess I have learned my lesson.” Maybe not. A few days later, Martin was again chastising his staff after Reuters reported that he had put his name on a January 21 DOJ filing requesting that a judge dismiss charges against one of Martin’s personal January 6 clients, whom Trump had just pardoned. Martin, it emerged, had not withdrawn as the man’s attorney, putting him on both sides of the case, an ethical breach that drew a bar complaint. (In a February 5 filing, he told the judge that he had not actually represented that defendant since 2023 and asked to withdraw from the case.) “I have said repeatedly over the past few days that we must protect our lawyers, staff, and all on our team from doxing, from attacks and from any threats,” he wrote in a February 5 email to his staff complaining about that “leak.” He urged them to join a training “to protect ourselves from unethical behavior.” This admonishment came a few paragraphs after Martin’s description of his visit to Frederick Douglass’ house in DC—“It’s a fascinating site and I encourage you to visit”—and a meeting with DC District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg and other judges: “It was an off the record conversation, but I can say it was an extraordinary one.” “NOONE IS ABOVE THE LAW” Martin has also made repeated public offers of DOJ assistance in combating the Trump administration’s enemies. Shortly after Wired reported the names of engineers working for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—prompting a flurry of social media attention and public complaints from the billionaire—Martin posted an image of a letter to Musk on X. In it, he typed, “Dear Elon,” which he then crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “Elon.” “I ask that you utilize me and my staff to assist in protecting the DOGE work and DOGE workers,” Martin wrote. “Any threats, confrontations, or other actions in any way that impact their work may break numerous laws.” Five hours later, Martin posted that his office already had found that “certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.” Martin released a new letter February 7—which he clarified had been “sent only via X.” He again crossed out a typed “Elon” in favor of a handwritten “Elon.” > Follow up. > Sent only via X: to ⁦@elonmusk⁩ pic.twitter.com/FVO7pDFf3Q > > — Ed Martin (@EagleEdMartin) February 7, 2025 “Thank you for the referral of individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees,” Martin wrote. “If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” He added, misspelled and in bold: “Noone is above the law.” Martin has since routinely used his X account to publicly suggest that the Trump DOJ might take action in response to allegations lobbed on social media. “Duly noted,” he wrote in response to a request from the Homeland Security Department X account that he look into an unsubstantiated DOGE claim that a “Biden transition team member” had rigged a contract. “We are on it.” As large protests against DOGE began last month, Martin retweeted a post by Mike Cernovich, a commentator known for his role in boosting a false conspiracy theory related to Pizzagate back in 2016. Cernovich was now suggesting that Trump fans take advantage of Martin’s presence at the DOJ to “attend far left wing rallies, capture the reaction, and where appropriate, seek criminal prosecution.” Martin in January personally wrote to Schumer, threatening legal action over a 2020 speech warning Supreme Court justices against curtailing abortion rights. “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” Schumer said at the time. The Democratic senator wasn’t threatening actual violence, but he expressed regret for his statement the day after he made it, saying he meant “there would be political consequences.” And his chief of staff appears to have explained that in a response to Martin’s query. But Martin, in a February email, asserted that Schumer had ignored him, calling the snub “a personal disappointment and professionally unacceptable.” That’s nearly the same phrase Martin used to berate his staff for email leaks. He urged Schumer to “complete this inquiry before any action is taken. I remind you: no one is above the law.”  Days later, Martin forced the resignation of Denise Cheung, a 24-year DOJ veteran, after she declined to launch a criminal probe and freeze assets of an environmental group awarded a contract by the Biden administration. Martin then personally submitted a seizure warrant application, an extraordinary move for a US attorney. A magistrate judge rejected the request, finding the application lacked sufficient evidence of a crime, the Washington Post reported. > pic.twitter.com/utpmdIEmk7 > > — U.S. Attorney DC (@USAO_DC) February 24, 2025 The same week, Martin helped defend the administration from a lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, which had been barred from some White House events over the news organization’s refusal to adopt “Gulf of America” in its style guide. “As President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President,” he declared in a graphic posted on X by the US attorney’s office while a court hearing in the case was taking place. The AP, he complained, was refusing “to put America first.” On February 17, Trump officially nominated Martin for the permanent US attorney job. His conduct so far could complicate his Senate confirmation. Even Sen. Josh Hawley, Martin’s fellow Missouri election denier, has declined to commit to backing him. But the same antics that leave some Republican lawmakers wary of Martin appear to make him exactly who the president wants.  Meanwhile, Martin is still firing off communiques. A few days after ousting Cheung, he sent his staff pictures from a meeting with Joe diGenova, a pro-Trump former DC US attorney who once claimed Fox News “is compromised when it comes to” George Soros. “These weeks have been a whirlwind,” Martin commented. “Meeting so many new people.” In a March 15 Substack post, Martin again groused about his emails leaking. “Personally insulting and professionally unacceptable,” he wrote. “But regularly happening.” He added that he is “actively and carefully (quietly!) investigating. And when I find the leaks, you will find the accountability.” The same day, Martin renewed his search for “Mr. Coffee,” posting a video he’d previously made suggesting “the real architects of January 6” were connected to the FBI. “Worth a look, no?” the interim US attorney wrote. “Who lied to us?”

Ed Martin, the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, is a former advocate for January 6 attackers who has demoted, fired, or investigated scores of prosecutors in his office who worked on cases against rioters who assaulted Capitol and DC police that day. But Martin on Friday announced a new initiative he dubbed “Defend the Police,” which includes steps he said would help prosecutors in his office “get back to” protecting cops. “We will tolerate no more ‘assaults on police officers,'” Martin wrote in what he called an “open letter” Friday to police officers. > Martin also cheered DC plans to paint over the “Black Lives Matter” mural on > 16th Street. “Good riddance,” he wrote. Martin is a former “Stop the Steal” organizer who has previously blamed the Capitol attack on “antifa,” called for “reparations” for rioters, and urged jailing people involved in prosecuting insurrectionists. While hounding assistant US Attorneys who worked on January 6 cases, he has has gained widespread attention for missteps that include a seemingly overtly unconstitutional effort to dictate curriculum at Georgetown’s law school, attempting to personally prosecute Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for a 2020 speech faulting Supreme Court justices and declaring his office to be “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers.” But Martin, who has received President Donald Trump’s nomination to permanently run the US Attorney’s office, is attempting to generate more positive press, in part by promoting a plan to crack down on crime in DC, a key responsibility of the office he runs. Martin has dubbed that effort “Make DC Safe Again.” In his letter Friday, which begins with the salutation “Dear Blue,” Martin celebrated the reinstatement of two DC police officers, Terence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky, who were pardoned by Trump for their convictions stemming from the 2020 death of a moped driver, Karon Hylton-Brown. A jury found the officers had tampered with the crime scene, tuned off body cameras and lied to senior officers to cover up the incident, in which they violated department rules by pursuing Hylton-Brown, who was fatally struck by a car. Both men were convicted of obstruction of justice. Sutton was convicted of second degree murder. Martin said the men were “wrongly convicted of a bogus charge.” He also cheered DC plans to paint over the “Black Lives Matter” mural on 16th Street. “Good riddance,” he wrote. Martin also said, vaguely, that he is instructing prosecutors to “stand up against” defense lawyers who malign officers “for sport or advantage unfairly.” And he said that he is rewriting his office’s policy on a DC law that requires prosecutors to inform judges and defense lawyers when an officer accused of egregious misconduct testifies in court. Martin elaborated on the policy in a email to his staff, which was shared with Mother Jones, noting he has recently been “riding along with” DC police officers. “More and more, I hear from the Men and Women in Blue that they want to know we have their backs.” Martin wrote. “We do and we will.” Martin’s communications about the policy do not mention the January 6 attack, which resulted in injuries to more than 140 officers and likely contributed to the deaths of five.

One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in his second term was simple and sweeping: pardoning 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. That single executive action undid years of work and investigation by the FBI, US prosecutors, and one person in particular: Tim Heaphy. In the first episode of More To The Story, Reveal’s new podcast, host Al Letson talks with Heaphy, the lead investigative counsel for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, who’s arguably done more than anyone to piece together what happened that day. His work helped inform related cases that were brought against rioters, Trump administration officials, and even Trump himself. “I spent my whole career as a lawyer,” Heaphy says, “and I’ve always believed that accountability is essential to democracy. That when people violate community standards, violate laws—laws like you can’t interfere with an official proceeding, you can’t assault police officers—that there are consequences.” Heaphy, who investigated the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, also draws striking similarities between that event and the insurrection at the Capitol. Take a listen: Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find this episode of More to the Story in the Reveal feed on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast app. And be sure you click follow so you don’t miss a single episode. > The first episode of More to the Story is here!! > > Host @Al_Letson talks to the lead investigator of the Jan. 6 committee about > the sweeping effects of Trump's pardons—and watching the investigation getting > fundamentally rewritten. https://t.co/sqaHX4lzY1 pic.twitter.com/mh0reS74zh > > — Mother Jones (@MotherJones) March 5, 2025

In the four years since Donald Trump set off an insurrection at the US Capitol, the Department of Justice and the FBI conducted one of the largest federal criminal investigations in history. Among the nearly 1,600 people charged, the DOJ successfully prosecuted scores of Trump supporters whose crimes on January 6, 2021, included vicious attacks on law enforcement. Many of those convictions were straightforward, due to extensive video footage and other clear evidence documenting the violence. Approximately 140 police officers were injured that day, some severely; as a source familiar with Capitol Police operations told me recently, some officers suffered permanent disfigurement, debilitating cases of PTSD, and other lasting trauma. At least four officers who responded that day subsequently took their own lives. The Jan. 6 attackers—many of whom had gone to the Capitol prepared for violence—used weapons including chemical sprays, tasers, baseball bats, hockey sticks, pipes, metal flagpoles, and allegedly even explosive devices. On Jan. 20, immediately after being inaugurated as the 47th president, Trump granted clemency to them all. Convicts he freed from prison included those who dragged a police officer down the Capitol steps and others who attacked law enforcement using batons and shields seized from officers. With his clemency order, Trump also put an end to scores of Jan. 6 criminal investigations that were still open, including alleged attacks on police. “It’s incredibly damaging—this was a major task force, an unprecedented effort, and now it’s all being thrown out as some supposed political witch hunt,” a source with direct knowledge of the sprawling investigation told me. “People need to understand the gravity of this. We’re already living in a heightened threat environment and now a social contract has been broken. Where’s the line now? This is deterrence thrown out and politically motivated violence being countenanced.” “Think of all the specific video evidence of those attacks on cops at the Capitol,” the source added. “It’s undeniable, and those offenders were convicted in a court of law. Respect for the law and law enforcement will be diminished by this.” Trump cultivated ambiguity after the presidential election about how far he might take his long-running vow to pardon J6 convicts, even suggesting that he might not include violent offenders. (A week before inauguration day, JD Vance went so far as to say on Fox News that violent peperpetrators “obviously shouldn’t be pardoned.”) But the fallout from Trump’s brazen decision is clear in multiple ways. As my colleague Dan Friedman reported, the sweeping clemency also unleashed legal chaos, muddying cases of violent suspects who also faced additional charges for illegal weapons, obstruction, and plotting to murder FBI agents. > “This is deterrence thrown out and politically motivated violence being > countenanced.” The blanket pardons—along with Trump freeing 10 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were imprisoned for seditious conspiracy—are part of a broad effort by Trump to cement a false narrative of his political career after his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020. As national security expert Juliette Kayyem told me last month about the imminent pardons: “He wants to erase his election loss and what really happened on January 6.” These efforts by Trump and his allies give his extremist supporters a narrative of martyrdom, she said, “a really good way to rebuild right-wing terrorist organizations.” “The attempted rewriting of history is astounding,” the source with knowledge of the FBI investigation said, concurring that the clemency from Trump “is emboldening in a big way” for violent extremist groups who supported him. Shortly after Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was freed from prison, he went on Alex Jones’ show and disparaged the criminal justice process, calling for retribution against the federal prosecutors who put him and many others behind bars. “Now it’s our turn,” Tarrio declared, thanking Trump. “The people who did this, they need to feel the heat.” Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers who was released from prison, also touted Trump’s baseless narrative of January 6 and called for payback, talking up Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, and urging him to “clean house.” Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called the clemency “a pretty catastrophic moment for domestic counterterrorism.” Ware told the Washington Post that members of these groups now see “the return of battle-hardened leaders, who in addition to having a kind of real-life legitimacy due to having actually fought the government, will also have a strong sense of victimhood and martyrdom, which will further radicalize and fuel recruitment platforms.” He said that this will “make combating terrorism far more difficult, not just over the next four years as groups feel like they have an ally in the White House, but beyond that as well.” As an emboldened Trump tests the limits of his renewed presidential power on this and other fronts, the political response to his Jan. 6 pardons has been grim in its own right. Apart from a few tepid and qualified comments of disapproval, Republicans in Congress have done virtually nothing to push back. Lawmakers from what was once known as the party of “law and order” even voiced support for Trump freeing the police assaulters and seditionists—echoing Trump’s unsupported claim that DOJ acted corruptly, or baselessly suggesting that Trump had a mandate from voters for what he did. Two days after Trump’s inauguration and the mass clemency, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson announced a new subcommittee whose purpose he claimed is to “expose the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee.” Johnson was referring to the bipartisan House committee that collected and made public in 2023 a large body of evidence on how Trump incited, and then did nothing to stop, the insurrection. In the days since Trump ordered the mass pardons, several federal judges who presided over January 6 cases used further court proceedings to reject Trump’s revisionist history. “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity,” one judge wrote. The mass pardons, wrote another, “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake,” further saying of the January 6 cases: “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”

Hemphill on the steps of the Idaho Capitol in 2020, in her insurrectionist era.David Staats/Idaho Statesman/ZUMA

After President Donald Trump issued late-night pardons and commutations to every one of the 1,600 rioters who carried out the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, police officers who were there that day, and their loved ones, are calling out Trump’s betrayal.  Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant who earlier this month recounted in a New York Times essay being “beaten and struck by raging rioters all over my body with multiple weapons until I was covered in my own blood,” posted on X on Sunday: “The law and order dude is about to pardon those who assaulted the police. Collectively more than 40 rioters attacked me that day.” When Gonell testified before the House Select Committee that investigated the attacks, he described how he and his colleagues were “punched, pushed, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical irritants, and even blinded with eye-damaging lasers by a violent mob who apparently saw us law enforcement officers, dedicated to ironically protecting them as US citizens, as an impediment in their attempted insurrection.” He added he had sustained injuries all over his body that required surgeries. Michael Fanone, a former DC police officer who previously testified about being “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor to my country” on Jan. 6, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night: “I have been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump. Whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming, and here we are.” He added that Trump’s pardons would free six of the people who attacked him on Jan. 6. “My family, my children, and myself are less safe today because of Donald Trump and his supporters,” Fanone told Cooper, echoing the concerns of those who turned in attackers to law enforcement, now worried that Trump’s pardons will prompt retaliation against them. > "I have been betrayed by my country": Former DC police officer Michael Fanone > talks to Anderson after President Trump pardons more than 1,000 convicted of > committing crimes during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. > pic.twitter.com/fhN3dhqbPz > > — Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) January 21, 2025 “I think that Republican Party owns a monopoly on hypocrisy when it comes to supporting or their supposed support of law enforcement, because, tonight, the leader of the Republican Party pardoned hundreds of violent cop assaulters,” Fanone said. And Craig Sicknick, the brother of Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who died a day after the Jan. 6 attack, reportedly of natural causes, told ABC News the pardons were “a betrayal of decency.” “The man doesn’t understand the pain or suffering of others. He can’t comprehend anyone else’s feelings,” Sicknick told ABC. “We now have no rule of law,” he added. (The Capitol Police say Brian Sicknick was assaulted by rioters, including by being attacked with pepper spray. The medical examiner who determined his cause of death later told the Washington Post, “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”) Trump’s pardons, and law enforcement’s condemnations of them, are especially rich considering that Trump has claimed to be “the law and order candidate.” As a reminder, the insurrectionists injured approximately 140 law enforcement officials on Jan. 6, 2021, including about 80 from the Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department, according to the Department of Justice. And five police officers who had been at the Capitol died, including four who died of suicide in the days and months after. Spokespeople for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Tuesday.

Donald Trump has gotten away with causing a violent attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as part of scheme to overturn the 2020 election, hiding top secret documents from the federal government, and other alleged crimes. Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday made official what Trump’s election victory made clear, moving to dismiss the election interference case in which Trump was charged with promoting conspiracies to defraud the United States, obstruct an official government proceeding, and deprive Americans of their civil rights through his attempts to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. Smith said he was dropping the case due to a Justice Department policy that bars prosecuting a sitting president. “The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed,” Smith said in the filing. The motion leaves Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution of Trump and various former aides as the only standing criminal case related to Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election. Willis has vowed to continue that prosecution. But with her case mired in appeals proceedings related to Willis’ past romantic relationship with the prosecutor she picked to run it, her odds of securing a conviction of the president-elect appear dismal. Smith also moved Monday to dismiss his case against Trump for obstructing justice by hiding from the Justice Department highly classified documents he had secretly removed from the White House. (Smith did not drop the charges against two Trump co-defendants.) Smith hopes to continue his appeal of a July ruling in which which Aileen Cannon, a notoriously pro-Trump district court judge in Florida, dismissed Smith’s case based on a legally unprecedented ruling that Smith’s appointment was invalid. But that appeal is aimed at preserving the legal standing of special counsel appointments and will not result in Trump’s continued prosecution even if Smith prevails. Smith said that the January 6 and documents cases need not to be dismissed “with prejudice.” That leaves the theoretical prospect that they could be revived after Trump leaves office. But it’s unlikely the Justice Department would be willing or able to successfully renew either case eight years after the alleged crimes occurred. The Manhattan district attorney’s office said last week that it would agree to postpone Trump’s sentencing in a case where he was convicted of falsifying business records as part of a criminal scheme to cover up payments made to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels, who has said she had sex with Trump in 2006. The district attorney Alvin Bragg has opposed efforts by Trump lawyers to have the case dismissed altogether. These outcomes mean that Trump has avoided legal consequences for four separate cases in which he was indicted—including one in which he was convicted—despite receiving no acquittal or exoneration from a judge or jury. That impunity, coupled with the Supreme Court’s highly controversial declaration that presidents enjoy “absolute immunity” from prosecution for official actions, appears set to enable Trump to pursue his goals—including using the Justice Department to prosecute critics—with few legal restraints. After taking office, Trump reportedly plans to fire Smith’s entire legal team, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution. Pam Bondi, a lobbyist and former Florida attorney general who Trump plans to nominate for US attorney general, has said prosecutors who brought cases against Trump “will be prosecuted.” With a pass for alleged past crimes and a pliant Supreme Court, Trump in his second term may be the first US president to operate above the law. He will probably not be the last.