J6 Prisoners Suffered for Our Freedom

Less than one month before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, there is much talk of what should happen to the Jan 6 protestors. Trump has a deep connection with them — he was indicted for the same obstruction charges as they were, since overruled by the Supreme Court as prosecutorial overreach. Shortly after the Jan 6 events, he cut a record with prisoners held in what they call the DC Gulag, where they were singing the National Anthem, and he was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Listen below.

Trump has promised on Day One to pardon them — sometimes he uses the word commute. Some suggest this act of clemency should not apply to the violent ones who attacked Capitol Police officers, though the truth is their reaction was often in self-defense. Others argue that all the J6ers should be immediately released from prison cells, but not pardoned, leaving them an avenue to clear their names in the courts.

At last count there are 1,561 J6ers — US Attorney General for DC Matthew Graves is still ordering the FBI to arrest new defendants days before his tenure will end, in a malicious attempt to reach the magical number of 2000, the better for his résumé.

These political prisoners tell of being railroaded by DOJ prosecutors and the DC courts. They tell of abuse by a vicious Bureau of Prisons, in a trail of cruel and unusual punishment that includes solitary confinement and sadistic moves to from one prison to the next, to further disrupt their lives. They tell of kangaroo courts where they were sentenced in secret and slanderous lies of local and national news media, framing them as neo-Nazis, making recovery difficult. They talk of the legal system’s failure to honor their constitutional rights to due process and fair and speedy trials.

Their accounts are compelling. Often heartbreaking. Here are some.

• Jake Long has been in jail for 1,400 days without a trial. Founder of J6Pardons.com, he still languishes in a cell in what he calls the “decrepit” DC Jail Gulag – denied his Constitutional right to a speedy trial, a jury of his peers, facing brutal conditions in prison, what he calls “a shocking milestone” and “ a glaring abuse of power.” He says those “who dared to voice their support for President Trump and question the 2020 election have suffered inhumane treatment at the hands of a regime bent on crushing dissent.” On Jan. 20 he plans to file a $50 billion class action lawsuit against the DOJ. Already, 100 J6ers have signed on.

• After nearly three years of “nightmare jails and prisons like Northern Neck, the DC Jail, and USP Lewisburg,” James Tate Grant — convicted of leading the breach of the US Capitol on Jan 6 — was recently released. Citing “tremendous challenges, political persecution by the FBI and DOJ,” the 31-year-old writes that he lost a scholarship to a top 25 law school because of negative press. After spending 32 months in jail, he has moved back in with his parents, because no one will hire him. He plans to begin “righteous lawsuits against slanderous media companies and the jails where he was tortured.” He adds, “I was fully acquitted of 5 out of 9 charges at trial and was found not guilty of any crimes involving injury. Regardless, I spent almost 3 years in prison for pushing a fence that hit nobody.”

• The Supreme Court ruled, in Fischer v. United States, that the Justice Department over-stepped by using 18 USC 1512 — enacted after the 2001 Enron accounting scandal and usually applied to destroying evidence and witness tampering — to charge J6ers with obstruction. But the 58-year-old man for whom the lawsuit is named told The Federalist that he’s still struggling to reclaim his life. He recalls the scene. “The crowd lunged forward, pushing me. I fell on the ground just inside the threshold of the Capitol and found a pair of handcuffs on the ground. I stood up immediately and gave them to a police officer.” Fired after 18 years as a municipal police officer in Pennsylvania, he is now battling an aggressive case of prostate cancer, as “a cloud of federal prison and fines hangs over his head.”

• Tim Hale was in jail for 16 months before he went to trial. A military vet, he was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours every day. The jail offered no religious services, visitation rights, or even haircuts for a year, because COVID. He was ultimately convicted of four misdemeanors and a felony under the 1512(c)(2) statute for “obstruction of an official proceeding.” Six months after the Supreme Court ruling in Fischer, he was released. “I still lost 4 years of my life in court and in prison for a crime I didn't commit, he told The Federalist. “I lost my home, my career, my social media. I was denied my right to bail, denied a fair and speedy trial, denied due process, denied medical care, denied family and legal visits. I was wrongfully convicted and over-sentenced. I was also publicly smeared as a neo-Nazi. I'm not the person I was portrayed as by the government and the media.”

• After Butler, a Federal Corrections Institute officer in Miami harassed prisoner Barry Ramey, mocking Trump, calling Barry a terrorist, censoring his mail and newspapers — his tenuous ties to the outside world. His fiance, Osprey Sensei, wrote about his account of Jan 6. “As protestors sang the national anthem, Capitol Police began their attack. They [the protestors] said they came in peace. They were bombarded with flash bangs, concussion grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Only after explosive devices were lobbed at his head, a man was shot through the face with a rubber bullet, and an older woman was shoved to the ground by Capital Police, all in a matter of seconds, did Barry respond.” In prison, he was once knifed in the face for watching Tucker Carlson.

• Conservative journalist Owen Shroyer stood outside the US Capitol on Jan 6, warning Trump supporters not to go inside. He did not go inside. He did not engage in violence. But he did have a megaphone. “The Democrats are posing as communists, but we know what they really are. They’re just tyrants, they’re tyrants. And so today, on Jan 6, we declare: Death to tyranny! Death to tyrants!”

  Prosecutors said his speech fomented what they labelled an insurrection. He spent 60 days in prison, half of it in solitary confinement.

No doubt all of these people would welcome a pardon. But a recent piece by J6er William Pope made the case for something else, something more.

Pope, who protested peacefully on Jan 6 , was still indicted on 30 years’ worth of federal charges. He put his doctoral dissertation on hold to represent himself, and along the way — using publicly available Jan 6 video — beat three of his charges. He also filed legals motions that forced exposure of the undercover police and FBI agents present in the crowd that day. And he is also one of a handful of J6ers to officially petition the courts for permission to travel to DC to attend Trump’s inauguration.

His suggestion: on Day 1, release all imprisoned Jan 6 defendants — not by pardon but by reprieve, a president’s alternative right. This would, he argues:

• Allow the Jan 6 defendants to seek exoneration in court, to clear their names, to open again the possibility of being hired for good jobs, and to vote.

• Avoid a situation where defendants such as Ray Epps, a suspected government asset in the crowd who encouraged violence, are swept up in a blanket pardon. Likewise, avoid a blanket pardon that would allow the Biden DOJ efforts to keep the pipe bomber case and other suppressed information under seal.

• Provide President Trump’s DOJ a chance to investigate a criminal conspiracy among federal agencies — as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney and the Jan 6 Select Committee — to encourage an insurrection. In the meantime, Pope suggests the Trump transition team “threaten criminal charges against anyone in the Biden administration who destroys documents.”

Another idea is from J6er John Strand, who refused the government’s plea deal and is appealing his conviction, on grounds that government witnesses lied by falsely claiming he committed assault. He was there that day as a licensed security guard for a scheduled speaker at the Capitol rally. He served part of a nearly three-year sentence.

In an open letter to President-elect Trump on X, he recently wrote,

If we do not enforce Due Process and Equal Protection, then our Constitution is a dead letter, and our Republic will perish. All J6 defendants must be immediately released, all current J6 prosecutorial actions by the DOJ halted. The second problem is no less urgent, and that is the incredible suffering of J6 victims and their families. The damage to these citizens is literally incalculable, their lives, utterly destroyed. Most of them are entirely innocent; they had zero criminal intent, and in fact were bravely participating in a sacred civic duty with the ostensible protection of the explicit provisions of the First Amendment. Dismantle the nefarious and exceedingly perilous false narrative of a “violent insurrection” by making a formal declaration of the truth: that all defendants have been harmed by Constitutional violations, that most defendants have been falsely smeared as “violent” when those allegations are routinely manipulated by a corrupt DOJ.

As a historian, I have one other idea: a commission on the 2020 election, to prove whether it was stolen, rigged or otherwise corrupted. For history’s sake, this inquiry might clarify why thousands of patriotic Americans went to DC on Jan 6 to protest.

This is not about revenge. This is about justice, about ensuring that the First Amendment right to speech extends not just to Black Lives Matter activists who burnt down buildings and killed people, but to MAGA patriots who came to the nation’s capitol to protest an election they believed had been stolen, as is their right.

In this season of Christmas, on the cusp of a New Year, I wish you, my wonderful readers, a joyous holiday and the peace and prosperity that are promised in our future. And for the J6ers and their families, I wish freedom, reunion and redemption.