One day after President Donald J. Trump issued a sweeping legal reprieve to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, some of the defendants started having their cases dismissed or even began to be released from custody.
By Tuesday afternoon, two of the country’s most prominent far-right extremists — Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers militia — who played central roles in the Capitol attack had been set free.
Mr. Tarrio, who was serving a 22-year term for a conviction on charges of seditious conspiracy, received a pardon from Mr. Trump and walked out of a prison in Pollock, La. Mr. Rhodes, who was serving an 18-year term on similar charges, had his sentence commuted to time served and was freed from a prison in Cumberland, Md.
Defense lawyers said that another member of the Proud Boys, Joseph Biggs, who was one of Mr. Tarrio’s co-defendants, was also released after Mr. Trump commuted his sentence. Mr. Biggs had been serving 17 years in prison following his own conviction on seditious conspiracy charges.
Additional members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were expected to be freed in the coming days.
Defendants have also started to be released from the local jail in Washington, where several rioters have been held in recent years in a special area nicknamed the “patriot wing.” On Monday night, two brothers from Pennsylvania, Matthew and Andrew Valentin, were set free, only days after being sentenced to two and a half years each on charges of assaulting the police.
“They helped break the police line by shoving a metal barricade into officers, and Matthew Valentin violently grabbed an officer’s neck,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo for the men. “They followed that assault by stealing police batons and berating officers.”
Aside from pardons and sentence commutations, Mr. Trump also ordered officials in his Justice Department to dismiss any cases against Jan. 6 defendants that were still moving through Federal District Court in Washington, where all of the proceedings have unfolded.
On Tuesday morning, several judges there granted motions filed by federal prosecutors to drop Jan. 6-related cases, more or less without a fight.
One of those cases — for three members of the same family — was in the middle of a jury trial when prosecutors asked the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, to dismiss it altogether. The three defendants — Kenneth, Caleb and Nicholas Fuller — had been charged with multiple counts, including felony civil disorder for taking part in a shoving match against police officers, prosecutors said.
In court on Tuesday, Judge Kollar-Kotelly simply asked the three men if they agreed with the government’s decision to drop the case. When each one, not surprisingly, said he did, the judge declared the trial over and the men went free.
Caleb Fuller has denied that he saw or engaged in any violence and said the dismissal by the judge was a just conclusion to the case.
“We didn’t go there that day with the intention to hurt anyone — and we didn’t hurt anyone,” he said. “So being dismissed, I think it’s valid.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/us/politics/jan-6-defendants-freed.html
