As the U.S. marks its 250th anniversary, president Donald Trump is reshaping the meaning of Jan. 6, 2021—pardoning nearly 1,600 rioters, commuting the sentences of major seditious-conspiracy leaders, and pushing the Justice Department to unwind convictions. Le
For the first time in modern American history. a president told a violent mob assaulting the government. “We love you.” For the first time. he did nothing for 187 minutes as the Capitol was ransacked. with lawmakers pleading for help as the country watched. And for the first time. he told an armed crowd during a ceremony necessary for the transfer of power that the election had been stolen—adding that if they didn’t “fight like hell. you won’t have a country anymore.”.
On Jan. 6, 2021, the country wasn’t just attacked. It was contested in the rawest way possible: by people treating democratic procedures as something to be fought through force.
Yet as the United States heads into its 250th anniversary, the president now in office has openly rewritten history about that day while embracing people previously convicted of seditiously conspiring against the United States—an offense legal experts say strikes at the foundation of a democracy.
Seditious conspiracy is more than angry speech. It involves plotting to put down the government by force or conspiring to prevent. hinder or delay the execution of the government’s laws. It differs from sedition. defined as the act of forcibly trying to overthrow the government. and from treason. which is defined as making an overt act of war against the U.S. or providing aid to U.S. enemies.
Of the thousands who stormed the Capitol. only 18 were charged with seditious conspiracy—and all were members of far-right extremist groups: the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Four pleaded guilty to the charge. Ten others. including Oath Keeper leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio. were found guilty after separate months-long trials in Washington. D.C.
Since then, the Justice Department has moved to wipe away those convictions entirely.
Kristy Parker. a former special counsel and former deputy chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section at the Justice Department. framed the stakes in the simplest terms: what happens to democratic memory. “Fifty years from now. 20 years. even 10 years from now. what are we going to tell students about what went on here at the dawn of the 21st century?” Parker said. She warned that if adulthood comes in a world where insurrections appear acceptable and elections become a contest over who “changes history. ” then the country’s citizens are less prepared to keep a democratic republic alive.
Parker’s warning lands on top of what happened after earlier American rebellions. uprisings and wars—moments when violence reshaped the story of the nation. Marcus Gadson. an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of “Sedition: How America’s Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis. ” argued that rebellion is threaded through U.S. identity, from the American Revolution to later violent episodes. But he also stressed the consequences of pretending violence is normal.
Jan. 6, 2021, was different from the founding myths people often reach for. It wasn’t about forming a constitution or securing independence from a monarch. It was the first time a president told a mob attacking the government, “We love you.”
Gadson’s point about historical framing—and what it does to civic life—was sharp. “You could see this trajectory that culminates to Jan. 6,” Hoffman said. Bruce Hoffman. a terrorism and insurgency expert and co-author of “God. Guns and Sedition: Far Right Terrorism in America. ” traced how extremist groups treated presidential signals as permission.
Before Jan. 6, the line between protected speech and prosecutable conspiracy had been hard for prosecutors to hold in court. By the time Jan. 6 arrived, Justice Department seditious conspiracy convictions were rare—fewer than a dozen successful convictions in the department’s history. In 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists who opened fire on the House floor were convicted of the charge. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman was convicted in the 1990s.
Other cases didn’t land. White supremacists in Arkansas accused of trying to overthrow the government and poison a water supply were acquitted in the 1980s. In 2010. members of the Christian extremist Hutaree militia in Michigan were charged and acquitted after a judge found prosecutors relied too much on protected speech.
After those acquittals, Hoffman said more familiar right-wing extremist factions—KKK or American Nazi Party—helped fuel a turn toward groups leaning into fears of a “conspiracy of liberal global powers” trying to dominate and control the world.
One inflection point Hoffman pointed to was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Heather Heyer was killed and 35 others were injured. He connected it to the moment Donald Trump told the nation there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Extremists took it as approval. an imprimatur. Hoffman said—“the top cover of the White House.” Hoffman also cited Trump’s refusal to disavow far-right extremists continuing into 2020. when he told Proud Boys to “stand back. stand by.” In trial testimony. evidence showed the remark helped recruitment efforts and that Proud Boys considered it a call to action.
By the time jurors convicted members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys of seditious conspiracy. they had reviewed a vast record. The Jan. 6 investigation was described as the Justice Department’s largest ever. Proud Boys jurors heard about text messages seized from Proud Boys’ secretive backchannels, where they coordinated movements. In the Proud Boys trial. jurors also heard testimony from a filmmaker who followed them for weeks and captured Rhodes and Tarrio. who had never met before. getting together on the eve of the attack.
In the Oath Keepers trial. jurors read letters in which Rhodes begged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and raise a militia to stop the election—warning Trump that “you and your family will die in prison.” Jurors heard about Rhodes trying to pass that letter to Trump. Oath Keepers told jurors they were ready to protect Trump by force. They also learned how Oath Keepers arranged an arsenal of weapons to back them up. Evidence showed that after Jan. 6 failed to reinstate Trump as president, Rhodes kept stockpiling guns.
Glenn Kirschner. a former prosecutor with the Justice Department for 30 years. called the seditious conspiracy case a “legal layup.” Kirschner said he observed weeks of the seditious conspiracy trials in person. He said, “We saw on video these Jan. 6 attackers literally trying to prevent the execution of the laws of the United States. the Electoral Count Act. the certification of a presidential election. ” and added. “I can’t imagine more compelling direct non-circumstantial evidence of sedition than what we saw on Jan. 6.”.
He also said, “You’re goddamn right the DOJ was charging these people with seditious conspiracy.”
At closing arguments in the second seditious conspiracy trial against members of the far-right extremist group, federal prosecutor Louis Manzo described the Capitol riot as the culmination of weeks of preparation and a moment of triumph for the Oath Keepers.
Trump’s legal exposure for Jan. 6 had been mapped out, too. He was indicted in August 2023 by then-special counsel Jack Smith for allegedly perpetrating three different criminal conspiracies tied to Jan. 6: conspiracy to defraud the U.S. conspiracy to corruptly obstruct the certification. and conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted. Smith said in his final report that Trump’s “lies” were used to “defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process.” However. Smith stopped short of charging Trump with insurrection. finding Trump’s claim that his conduct was protected under the First Amendment might be too large an obstacle.
Trump dragged out the proceedings, and questions about immunity moved all the way to the Supreme Court. With only a few months to go until the 2024 election. justices ruled 6-3 that presidents have immunity for official acts and presumptive immunity for official acts that may fall within the “outer perimeter” of their duties. The result was that Trump escaped criminal liability for Jan. 6 since the Justice Department bars prosecuting sitting presidents.
But the record of pardons, firings, and shifting official language came quickly once Trump returned to power.
On his first day back in office in 2024. Trump pardoned nearly 1. 600 rioters. saying. “These are the hostages.” He also commuted Rhodes’ 18-year prison sentence and Tarrio’s 22-year sentence. That day set the tone for Trump’s second term. with Trump describing rioters as “peaceful” and “patriots. ” despite more than 600 people being charged with assault. He downplayed the event as a “day of love,” while neo-Nazi, anti-government, antisemitic and white supremacist groups were present. People erected gallows outside the U.S. Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump has also falsely claimed there were no guns, which court records dispute.
Then came Jan. 20, 2025—his first day back in office in 2025—when President Donald Trump signed an executive order pardoning about 1,500 defendants charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Behind the scenes, the Justice Department’s approach shifted as well. The Justice Department—now led by Trump’s former personal lawyers, including those who represented him in the Jan. 6 criminal indictment—fired prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. The department also made thousands of press releases related to Jan. 6 disappear from the internet.
Rhodes returned to the Capitol after his pardon and with what had been described as the tacit approval of the Justice Department—which. before Trump returned to power. had barred him from Washington. D.C. Tarrio said last May that he had met Trump in Florida where they had “a great conversation” over dinner.
A pardoned Jan. 6 rioter, Elias Irizarry, has been hired to work in a Pentagon department focused on counterterrorism. Another pardoned Jan. 6 rioter. former FBI agent Jared Wise. became an adviser to the Justice Department’s self-proclaimed “weaponization working group. ” set up by former Attorney General Pam Bondi. another former personal lawyer to Trump. The group said its focus was to “restore credibility with the public” and to examine all investigations into Trump. including the Jan. 6 criminal probe. Wise resigned in April.
Parker compared the present moment to a much older tactic used after the Civil War. warning about the dangers of decades-long reframing efforts. “Rewriting history and reframing the truth of events is actually a well-worn playbook,” she said. She said it wasn’t unlike what the country saw after the Civil War. when there was a conscious. systematic decades-long effort to reframe what the Civil War was about through the Lost Cause Movement.
Gadson tied that concern to election legitimacy itself. He said Trump’s rewriting of Jan. 6 and his habit of claiming every election he doesn’t like or loses is rigged is “deeply problematic.” He argued that what happened on Jan. 6 was a byproduct of that and said he fears what will happen if people conclude they can’t win by working inside the political system.
The story is also being tested in court—not only over who is guilty. but over whether the country is turning accountability into reimbursement. Trump had planned to compensate Jan. 6 rioters from a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” carved out of a settlement deal he reached with the IRS. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the fund “wasn’t moving forward. ” but lawyers for the Justice Department have refused to put in writing that it is officially shuttered.
A highly skeptical federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against the fund has ordered the Justice Department to issue a clear declaration by July 17.
Kirschner and Parker described the current posture of the department as tragic. Kirschner said. “The Trump administration is treating seditious conspiracy as not even worthy of accountability. not even worthy of punishment.” He added that adding a fund to pay those who tried to destroy the nation was “insanely destructive” of what America is. He also characterized Trump as “treasonous and seditious” himself.
The final warning Gadson offered was not about history as trivia—it was about history as permission. He said that in the 19th century. elections were particularly affected by violence. and he pointed to the pattern that “Polling places historically have been places where violence has happened.” He called it part of the country’s history many don’t fully appreciate. warning that when violent impulses are given “free rein. ” the ramifications can be “really negative.”.
For a country entering its 250th year, the question now is not only what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. It’s what the government is deciding to let that day mean—and whether rewriting it risks making the next crisis feel less like a warning and more like a rehearsal.
Jan. 6 Trump pardons seditious conspiracy Oath Keepers Proud Boys Jack Smith Supreme Court presidential immunity Department of Justice Anti-Weaponization Fund