Jan. 6 defendants pardoned by Trump march across D.C. to ‘rewrite history’ 5 years after Capitol riot

WASHINGTON – A procession of Democratic lawmakers took to the Senate floor on Tuesday in commemoration of what happened on this day five years earlier, when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in an effort to reverse the outcome of an election Trump lost.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., recalled how she and her husband hid in her office and “prayed that our lock would hold” while rioters pounded on the door and someone shouted, “Kill the infidels.”

“The same forces that ignited the insurrection five years ago are still here,” Murray said, recounting how Trump told the crowd he would march with them to the Capitol before retreating to the White House and watching the events unfold on TV.

“The same violent people – the people who stormed and battered our Capitol Police, the people who brought bats and knives and zip ties, the people who left blood and feces and broken glass littered throughout the halls of this building – they’re walking free today, because President Trump thinks they were the victims.”

Shortly before Murray spoke, dozens of the Trump supporters who were charged with crimes in connection to the riot – all of whom the president granted clemency the day after he returned to office in 2025 – rallied on the Ellipse south of the White House before retracing their steps to the Capitol. The mood was by turns jubilant, vindictive and somber, as the pardoned rioters and their allies celebrated their freedom, called for the arrest and prosecution of their perceived enemies and honored the lives of the four Trump supporters who died on Jan. 6, 2021.

“This is not over, and we need your help to rewrite history – the correct way,” Sarah McAbee, who co-founded a foundation dedicated to supporting the jailed defendants, told the crowd before they marched to the Capitol.

McAbee lamented that because of the fallout from the riot, children are no longer talking to their parents, “the divorce rate is really high,” and pardoned rioters are struggling to find jobs and keep their homes.

“Families are falling apart as we speak,” she said. “It is a terrible thing to watch good Americans lose their lives and lose their livelihoods because they stood for something.”

Her husband, Ronald Colton McAbee, was convicted by a jury of five felonies and pleaded guilty to another felony charge after he struck one police officer and dragged another by his leg during the riot, according to court records. He was sentenced in February 2024 to nearly six years in prison but pardoned by Trump less than a year later, one of more than 1,500 people granted clemency.

There was no official event in the House or Senate, both controlled by Republicans, to mark the anniversary, and GOP lawmakers were largely silent about what transpired at the Capitol five years earlier. Retiring Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, one of only two Republicans who remain in Congress after voting to impeach Trump for inciting the riot, spent the day at a GOP retreat at the newly renamed Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and didn’t issue a statement on the anniversary.

The Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of moderate lawmakers, issued a statement “unequivocally” condemning “the violence that occurred that day” and affirming that any attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power “cannot be tolerated.”

At a hearing held by House Democrats, police officers who were injured in the riot testified alongside Pamela Hemphill, a 72-year-old Idaho woman who served 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge for entering the Capitol during the riot. After Trump pardoned her, Hemphill sought help from the office of Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, to formally notify the administration that she would reject it.

“I can’t believe people are still disrespecting you and trying to lie about January the 6th,” Hemphill said to the police officers during the hearing, whose colleagues she credited with saving her from being trampled by her fellow protesters. “I will do everything I can to stop the lies about our brave officers like you who protected us during the attack.”

During the attack in 2021, rioters vandalized Risch’s “hideaway” office in the Capitol building, smashing a window and rifling through documents. The senator has previously refused to address Trump’s pardons or other questions related to Jan. 6, but when asked about his office on Tuesday, Risch said the rioters had intended to vandalize the neighboring office of then-Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio.

“That was an error,” Risch told The Spokesman-Review. “They had my office mixed up with Sherrod Brown’s office, right next door, and his office was badly vandalized.”

Asked if what happened in Brown’s office was acceptable, Risch said, “Of course it’s not acceptable.” Of the damage to his own office, he joked with a laugh, “I’m still in therapy as a result of it.”

“They did go through my office, because they went in a window that was right up against the – they had the bleachers built, so they were able to get to the next floor. So they went through my office. But there was one photograph that was taken out of a photograph holder on my desk, and that was the only thing.”

Otherwise, Risch said, “there was no damage.” Video of the rioters in his office, used as evidence in the prosecution of one of the defendants and obtained by NBC News, contradicts that account. It shows Trump supporters entering his office through a door while the window is still intact, throwing objects on the floor, then smashing the window from the inside.

Ashli Babbitt, a 36-year-old Air Force veteran who was fatally shot by a police officer while she tried to climb through a broken window in a barricaded door, was a central focus of the rally. The group also celebrated the lives of three other Trump supporters who died during the riot – one of a stroke, another of a heart attack and a third of a drug overdose, according to medical examiners.

Before marching to the Capitol, speakers also recognized people who have died since they were charged in connection to the riot, one of cancer and several others by suicide. Four police officers who defended the Capitol and also died by suicide in the weeks and months afterward were not recognized by the speakers.

A flyer promoting the rally also mentioned Brian Sicknick, a police officer who died the day after the riot following multiple strokes – with a medical examiner ruling that the events of Jan. 6, when Sicknick was attacked by rioters, “played a role in his condition” – but the speakers didn’t honor the officer alongside the deceased protesters.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration added a page to the White House website presenting its own version of the events leading up to the riot, blaming then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for failing to “protect” the rioters.

The final speaker before the group marched to the Capitol was Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, a right-wing militant group. He arrived late for his turn to speak because he was busy being interviewed by a puppet voiced by a right-wing YouTube commentator. Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to planning the attack, thanked Trump for the clemency but said the rioters and their allies want more.

“Retribution is what we seek,” Tarrio said, adding that the judges and prosecutors responsible for convicting the rioters need to be fired.

“Not only do they need to be fired – they need to be prosecuted,” he said. “Because that is justice. It’s not just retribution – because that’s what you guys are going to print. You’re going to be like, ‘Oh, he called for retribution.’ We’re not going to their houses. We’re asking for accountability.”