Jake Lang, a January 6 defendant accused of beating police officers outside the Capitol during the insurrection, sent out a mass text message at the end of 2024 looking ahead to what he feels will be a promising year for him and hundreds of others involved in the attack.
“Hey its Jake Lang!! The January 6 Political Prisoner!! I’ll be sending you IMPORTANT updates on this number,” the text read. “I’ll be home VERY SOON!!! God bless!!”
Lang, who has been in jail for four years as he sought continual delays to his trial, wants to see every person charged for their actions that day given a pardon, which became more likely when Donald Trump won a second term in November.
The promise of pardons from the man who inspired people to storm the Capitol looms over the fourth anniversary of January 6 and the first time Congress will meet to certify the electoral vote since five people died during and in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection. Four years later, more than 1,600 defendants have faced charges for their role in the attack. Many continue to deny their culpability and some have used their role in the insurrection to boost their personal and professional reputations.
If he is freed, having never stood trial or been convicted on the charges, Lang told the Guardian it would be a sign from God. He wants to go on a church tour afterwards to tell his story.
“It’ll be like a biblical sign, a modern-day biblical sign of the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tyranny, from the captivity of Pharaoh,” he said via phone from the DC jail, which he and other J6ers call the “DC Gulag”. “We are undergoing a very similar process, and our faith and the struggle that we’ve had to maintain our integrity and not bend and capitulate to the torture, to the tyranny, to the evil, to the wickedness inside the courtroom, to take the plea deal, many of us who have stood firm.”
Many of those in the J6 community have not expressed remorse for their actions. In recent weeks, they have pointed to a Department of Justice inspector general report that showed 26 informants were at the Capitol that day as evidence they were coerced and set up and therefore not responsible for what ensued.
Some have close ties to Trump and his allies. Pete Marocco, who online sleuths have identified as being inside the Capitol but who has not been charged and has not directly addressed whether he was there, is working with the Trump transition on “national security personnel matters”, Politico reported. Russell Taylor, a January 6 defendant, was invited to the Trump inauguration by Republican members of Congress from Utah and is seeking court permission to attend, the outlet also reported.
A couple have unsuccessfully sought public office. Jacob Chansley, the rioter known as the “QAnon shaman” who dressed in horns and shirtless as he entered the Capitol, filed paperwork in 2023 for a congressional run as a libertarian. Ryan Zink talked about his January 6 charges during his unsuccessful run for Congress in Texas and called himself a “political prisoner”.
Trump, who called January 6 a “day of love”, has not said how he will assess who receives a pardon, but that he will do it on a case-by-case basis. He hinted that some convicted of violent crimes may not receive pardons. He plans to issue J6 pardons quickly, he told Time magazine, “maybe the first nine minutes”.
“Well, we’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office,” he told Time. “And a vast majority of them should not be in jail.”
As of 6 December 2024, nearly 1,600 people have faced federal charges for the insurrection, according to the justice department. Of those, nearly 1,000 pleaded guilty, most to misdemeanors. Of those who went to trial, 215 were found guilty. More than 1,000 have been sentenced.
There are still 90 people on the FBI’s Capitol violence website who have been identified by online sleuths but not arrested, said Ryan Reilly, an NBC News reporter who wrote a book about January 6 called Sedition Hunters. The justice department is still filing charges and pursuing cases related to the insurrection and is focusing on the most egregious instances of assault, Reilly has reported, but it is not clear how much progress will be made by the time Trump takes office.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those who entered the Capitol will probably never be charged. Initially, federal prosecutors focused on people who entered the Capitol or committed violence outside – but they underestimated just how many people entered. “There’s going to be a bunch of people who will never be arrested,” Reilly said.
J6ers see Trump as their salvation from a witch-hunt against conservatives. Political violence experts have warned that if most offenders receive pardons, the criminal charges are unlikely to deter others from committing similar acts, and the reframing of January 6 provides permission for people to use violence to achieve their political goals in the future.
“The deterrence factor is certainly undercut, I think, by just the public narrative around January 6 itself and this notion that it was some sort of federal set-up that has been very popular in conservative media circles,” Reilly said.
Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago who has studied January 6 defendants, said that most of those sentenced have stayed off the radar online since. But of those who have spoken publicly, most have continued to support Trump and election fraud narratives, and have not disavowed the beliefs that led them to the Capitol.
Lang said he regrets that people died that day and in the aftermath but is “not ashamed” of anything he did on January 6 and believes the day “ended up being the imagery that the American people and the world needed to see of a united America – Black, white, Asian, Spanish, gay, straight, Christian, Muslim – all standing united together against a tyrannical oppression, against a Marxist coup d’etat”. The imagery was “very strong and beautiful” and that is what people will remember, he said.
About two dozen J6ers, Lang among them, are currently in the DC jail, where their supporters and family members routinely hold a vigil to pray for those charged. Some are still awaiting trial after they have sought delays in their proceedings because they face lengthy sentences. “They’re sort of rolling the dice here and hoping for whatever Donald Trump is going to do down the line,” Reilly said.
But most of those charged have already been sentenced. Jenna Ryan, a Texas realtor, is one of them. She pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol. She became one of the faces of January 6 and gained notoriety for saying on Twitter: “Sorry, I have blonde hair, white skin, a great job, a great future, and I’m not going to jail.” She was sentenced to 60 days in prison.
She still posts online about January 6 and is writing a book about the day. She believes she was tortured in prison, where it was very cold and she was at times not able to get food.
Some of those involved in January 6 have experienced job loss and financial hardships. Support groups, like the Patriot Freedom Project, have popped up to provide legal help, donation pages and employment leads. They also have merch – including a “Real Housewives of January 6” T-shirt.
Ryan said she changed her name and closed her company, but she also found others who wanted to work with her in the aftermath.
“I’ve had people literally have me sell their home because they knew how badly my reputation was damaged, and they kept me going when the whole world was against me,” she said.
She regrets going inside the Capitol “for two minutes and eight seconds” but sees January 6 as a federal set-up. She thinks the media has falsely portrayed the day and the people involved, and that many were falsely accused.
“You can’t help it if you’re in a trap,” she said. “Hopefully, I’ll never be trapped again. I’ll try to stay away from all traps.”
On TikTok, she has celebrated the expected pardons from Trump. The prospect of a pardon has her feeling overwhelmed and grateful – it would provide “validation that this is bogus”, she said. She hopes the J6 community will have some kind of gathering after the pardons.
“I just can’t imagine us not all being in one place, so grateful, and maybe go to Mar-a-Lago or something nice,” she said, “because we are now a family, because we’ve been through something no one else has experienced in the history of the United States.”
