Will Trump Pardon All The Rioters? Our 6 Burning Questions About Trump’s Jan. 6 Promise

Since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump has avoided providing specifics about his promise to pardon Jan. 6 defendants. And it’s led to rampant speculation — especially among the 1,600 defendants who have been prosecuted for their role in the Capitol riot — about just how far he’s willing to go.

Vice President-elect JD Vance supercharged their angst Sunday when he said violent Jan. 6 defendants “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned, but quickly elaborated after Trump’s MAGA allies lit him up. Vance then laid out some additional clemency criteria that are tricky to parse.

A week before Trump takes power, here are six big questions about Trump’s clemency plans.

Will Trump blanket pardon all Jan. 6 misdemeanor defendants?

This seems to be Trump’s most obvious Day One move: Pardon the roughly 900 Jan. 6 defendants whose conduct netted only misdemeanor charges — typically reserved for those who trespassed in the Capitol but did not commit any violence or destruction.

These defendants have primarily received sentences of probation or brief periods of home confinement. Some with aggravating details, like a criminal history, lack of remorse or violations of their pretrial conditions of release, have faced jail time ranging from 10 days to 12 months.

A handful of prominent defendants — Infowars host Owen Shroyer, pro-Trump activist Brandon Straka, Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin — pleaded guilty to misdemeanors for approaching the threshold of the Capitol even though they didn’t go inside the building.

Though prosecutors have long argued that these defendants’ crimes provided cover for more violent perpetrators and helped overwhelm police, Trump has eagerly embraced their plight as an example of political persecution of his allies.

Vance captured this in his weekend comments on Fox News Sunday. “If you protested peacefully on January 6th, and you had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” he said.

Will Trump pardon people who committed assault? What about other felonies?

The 600-plus defendants charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding police — including nearly 200 who carried weapons — present the most vexing calculus for Trump. The president-elect has at times suggested he would consider pardoning some of these defendants, and their ranks include some of the most visible and active members of the community that has formed to support Jan. 6 defendants.

Many of them reacted to Vance’s comments with alarm; they’ve been arguing that every Jan. 6 case is tainted by legal infirmities and must be erased.

“The J6 Hostages families have been CRUSHED by the mixed messaging,” Jan. 6 assault defendant Jake Lang posted Sunday on X, invoking a moniker Trump has often used to describe those in jail for Jan. 6 crimes.

Other vocal advocates suggested Vance was misinformed or not speaking on Trump’s behalf and put faith in Trump to grant broader clemency than Vance suggested. The backlash prompted Vance to update his remarks on X, saying the incoming administration cares about “people provoked” and “people who got a garbage trial.”

Aside from the assault cases, hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants face charges for impeding police during a civil disorder — typically defendants who pushed against police lines or used their bodies to interfere with law enforcement, even if their conduct didn’t qualify as assault. More than 90 defendants are charged with destruction of government property, and a handful are charged with carrying firearms on Capitol grounds.

Neither Vance nor Trump have addressed these felony cases. Nor have they addressed whether, instead of outright pardons, Trump might deploy his power of commutation — freeing defendants from prison while maintaining their convictions.

What Does Vance mean by a “garbage trial?”

Jan. 6 defendants have long complained they’ve received unfair jury trials, in part because of the strong liberal lean of Washington, D.C. But the courts — including a slew of judges appointed by Trump — have roundly rejected those claims. Still, Vance raised the specter that Trump could look to pardon people whose trials were unfair. His metrics for that are unclear.

The vast majority of convicted Jan. 6 defendants have reached plea deals with federal prosecutors, but about 261 of them have been convicted in trials. Some of them have been decided by juries, though many of the defendants have opted for a “bench trial” decided by a judge. Only one defendant — who went to a bench trial — has been acquitted of all charges while defendants who faced jurors have all been convicted of at least one count they faced.

Advocates for Jan. 6 defendants have claimed that all of the cases have been unfair because they’ve struggled to access and review the massive trove of evidence collected by prosecutors. And they say the jury trials have been unfair because of Washington, D.C.’s intensely Democratic voting patterns and the direct impact of the attack on the Capitol, which had repercussions for D.C. residents.

But judges — including those appointed by Trump — have universally rejected these arguments, backed up by precedent stemming from the Watergate era and the reality of what has played out in the courthouse during these trials. They’ve swept aside every effort by Jan. 6 defendants to move their trials to other regions of the country.

Judges in most Jan. 6 jury trials employ a thorough jury selection process, known as “voir dire,” in which prosecutors and defense lawyers can probe prospective jurors for bias. Those with clear political leanings are typically excluded, and all selected jurors must pledge under oath to decide the case only based on facts they see in trial and the law, as described to them by the presiding judge.

Courts have sharply rejected the notion that carefully vetted jurors will convict someone based purely on their political views, and they’ve dismissed as flawed or misleading the polling data gathered by defendants intended to bolster their case to move trials to another venue.

What happens to leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers?

Perhaps the most sensitive question of all is what happens to the 10 seditious conspiracy convictions prosecutors secured against leaders of two far-right groups: the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Those convictions are the crown jewels of prosecutors’ four-year probe.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio is serving a 22-year prison sentence for what prosecutors say was his effort to orchestrate the attack on the Capitol, deploying hundreds of carefully selected Proud Boys to help ignite the breach. Oath Keepers founder Steward Rhodes is serving an 18-year sentence for organizing dozens of allies to descend on the Capitol while amassing an enormous cache of firearms to prepare for a potential escalation.

Tarrio, who is closely tied to Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone, has formally asked Trump for a pardon. Technically, Tarrio himself was nonviolent, but his charges ascribe a significant amount of the chaos that occurred on Jan. 6 to him and other Proud Boy leaders convicted alongside him.

How will Trump’s DOJ handle ongoing Jan. 6 cases?

Nearly 500 Jan. 6 cases are still pending in federal court, including 170 where defendants have pleaded guilty or been found guilty at trial but have not yet been sentenced. Another 300 have yet to reach a verdict, including 180 felony cases of assaulting or impeding police. Prosecutors may bring additional cases before Trump is sworn in next week.

How to handle those cases will be an immediate decision for Trump’s incoming DOJ leadership.

Some lawyers expect the department to quickly seek a 30- or 60-day delay across the board to give Trump’s new leaders time to realign the department’s position on all Jan. 6 cases. But if Trump opts against pardoning the felony cases, it will create a perverse dynamic: The administration of a president who has downplayed Jan. 6 and championed the defendants who breached the Capitol in his name will be overseeing the trials and sentences of some of the day’s most egregious perpetrators.

A related issue is how Trump’s DOJ will handle the basic court filings in many of the cases heading toward pleas and sentencings. The department’s paperwork has long included boilerplate language describing the Jan. 6 attack as an egregious assault on democracy that threatened the transfer of power and represented one of the darkest days in American history.

“It is not hyperbole to call what happened on January 6 a crime of historic magnitude,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in a Monday court filing. “January 6 was an unprecedented disruption of the nation’s most sacred function — conducting the peaceful transfer of power … Future generations will rightly ask what this generation did to prevent another such attack from occurring.”

Trump’s DOJ is unlikely to cast the attack in such stark terms, even if it maintains some Jan. 6 prosecutions.

What does Pam Bondi tell the Senate?

This backdrop makes the upcoming confirmation hearings for Trump’s attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, a unique opportunity to pin down specifics on the incoming administration’s view of these cases. Bondi is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and Thursday.

Bondi herself has said very little about Jan. 6 over the years — and her silence has prompted some consternation from Trump’s allies in the Jan. 6 defendant community. Though clemency decisions are squarely in Trump’s domain, Bondi will be forced to defend his actions in court as the department seeks to maintain or unravel the ongoing cases.