Why the January 6 Pardons Could Be Catastrophic for Public Safety

In 1988, Louis Beam, a prominent white supremacist who had been a Ku Klux Klan leader, founded an online magazine named The Seditionist. It was a snide allusion to the charge of seditious conspiracy he had faced at a high-profile trial in Fort Smith, Arkansas, that year. The government alleged that Beam and 13 other members of an underground white supremacist movement had intended to overthrow the government. But the jury sided with Beam and his fellow defendants.

The acquittal sent a thunderous message of approval to white supremacist leaders that their activism was legal and legitimate. In 1992, Beam used his magazine to pen his seminal “leaderless resistance” essay, promoting a strategy of “lone wolf” terrorism that continues to influence far-right groups in America today.

Unfortunately, we now face another situation involving seditious conspiracy laws that could embolden far-right groups.

In arguably the most consequential and dangerous act of his second administration so far, President Donald Trump issued sweeping pardons within hours of taking power to more than 1,500 people charged and prosecuted for the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which sought to keep Trump in power after Joe Biden’s electoral victory in 2020. Trump also commuted the sentences of several defendants who were convicted of serious crimes in the assault on Congress, including seditious conspiracy—effectively throwing open the prison doors for violent extremists to go free.

After the Fort Smith trial in 1988, the charge of seditious conspiracy was rarely used in the United States, aside from the prominent case of Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But it was resurrected after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, when leaders of prominent paramilitary groups violently breached the citadel of American democracy in an effort to prevent the certification of a peaceful and legitimate election.

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, federal prosecutors working for the Department of Justice secured guilty pleas and convictions against several leaders of groups involved in the attack, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. As my co-author Bruce Hoffman and I wrote in our book “God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America,” the prosecutions “demonstrated clearly that leaders of politically extreme organizations bent on violence and revolution would be held accountable for their subversive plans and preparations.”

Unfortunately, Trump’s sweeping clemency for everyone involved in the attack seemingly sends the opposite message to members of America’s extreme far right: that their violence is legal and legitimate, as long as those acts were intended to support Trump and his MAGA machine.

During the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a Kentucky man who was sentenced last year warned on camera, “If we gotta come back here and start a revolution and take all these traitors out, which is what should be done, then we will.”

Trump’s pardons have eviscerated deterrence against such attacks and intimidations, a development that may prove catastrophic for efforts to combat domestic counterterrorism – just as the message sent by the Fort Smith jury emboldened violence by the American far right.

Additionally, the return of battle-hardened leaders and foot soldiers to their paramilitary and militia groups will add further capacity to those organizations. Moreover, the popular narrative among far-right groups of their “victimhood” at the hands of a predatory government has now been boosted, and will likely strengthen their recruitment. “A lot of people stayed away from us after there were arrests,” one Proud Boys leader told Reuters after this week’s pardons. “Now they are going to feel like they are bulletproof.”

The pardons also represent a shot across the bow of American rule of law, and undermine the many civil servants who work to sustain it. The investigation that followed the Jan. 6 attack was the largest in Department of Justice history, involving dedicated patriots and professionals across the country.

The new president has repeatedly condemned the work of those public servants, referring to the Jan. 6 defendants as “hostages” and “political prisoners.” At a time when civil servants are quitting because of threats against them, a further rebuke of their service will only contribute to what terrorism scholars Pete Simi and Seamus Hughes have termed “the slow burn threatening our democracy.”

Perhaps most damaging, the pardons erode the norm of peaceful transfers of power, and subvert the example of American democracy at a critical moment in our strategic competition with other rising powers, many of them autocracies.

Already, we have seen the impact of Jan. 6 on American soft power: In Brazil, a country on the frontlines of the great powers' battle for influence, a 2023 election riot clearly mimicked what happened at the U.S. Capitol.

The U.S. insurrection also remains a potent propaganda tool for foreign adversaries. “On the issue of human rights, democracy and freedom, double standards should be discarded. I hope the relevant countries can think about this and learn real lessons from it,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said at the time.

Trump’s insistence on lionizing those involved in the Jan. 6 riot only hurts America in the eyes of allies and adversaries alike. Coupled with Trump’s military threats against NATO allies such as Denmark, this bodes poorly for Trump’s effort to sustain American leadership around the world.

The critical, life-or-death job of keeping Americans safe will now likely be harder than ever for law enforcement and intelligence officials who work to protect national security. Even more importantly, the pardons will further weaken an American democracy that is already teetering on the edge.