
Those who walked out of prison included Enrique Tarrio, the pardoned former chairman of the far-right Proud Boys group who was sentenced to 22 years, and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whose 18-year sentence Trump commuted to time served. Both were convicted of seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge stemming from the attack, one which required prosecutors to prove the men plotted to use force to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
"My son's freedom, his lively hood restored, has been a dream come true!" Tarrio's mother, Zuny Tarrio, said in a post on X.
As of Tuesday morning, 211 people-every clemency recipient-who had been in federal Bureau of Prisons custody had been released, officials said, a process that took about 12 hours.
Trump's stunning Day One move to give pardons or commutations to all of the roughly 1,500 people charged in the attack instantly upended the largest investigation in the history of the Justice Department, whose lawyers spent much of Tuesday moving to dismiss a steady stream of pending cases.
"Promises made, promises kept," Rhodes said Tuesday outside the local jail in southeast Washington, D.C., where other Jan. 6 defendants were starting to be released into the bitter cold. Rhodes traveled there shortly after leaving a federal prison in Cumberland, Md., to show support for his fellow rioters.
Those released before he arrived included brothers Matthew and Andrew Valentin, who had been sentenced just last week to 2½ years in prison for assaulting police during the attack.
This story is from the January 22, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
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This story is from the January 22, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
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