Trump is vowing to pardon Jan. 6 rioters. Allies and critics alike say he needs a refresher

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump’s recent “Meet the Press” interview has triggered concerns among allies and critics about his level of awareness of the details of the sprawling investigation into the Capitol attack that has produced hundreds of convictions in the nearly four years since Jan. 6.

Trump is weeks away from being sworn in, a day he has said that he’ll “most likely” begin immediately pardoning Jan. 6 defendants. “I’ll be looking at J6 early on, maybe the first nine minutes,” Trump told Time magazine. “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. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail.”

Interviews with Trump allies, supporters of Jan. 6 defendants, online sleuths who have aided the FBI investigation, and law enforcement officials reveal an unusual level of agreement: Trump’s recent comments made clear to them that Trump hasn’t kept up to speed on the Jan. 6 docket. More than 1,500 defendants have been charged and 1,100 convicted in the sprawling Capitol breach probe, with more than 600 being sentenced to prison. Defendants were arrested, convicted and sentenced all throughout 2024, but the cases received diminishing coverage.

Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker that he’ll be “acting very quickly” on Jan. 6 pardons, saying there might be “exceptions” if Jan. 6 defendants were “radical” or “crazy.” He also appeared to mistakenly believe that most or all Jan. 6 defendants were being held in the jail in Washington, when in fact only a handful of defendants are still being held pretrial and those who have been convicted are now housed in federal prisons across the country. One law enforcement official said the interview made “absolutely” clear that Trump wasn’t read in on the details of Jan. 6 cases.

A Trump ally who is familiar with the discussions within the Trump team said that the “Meet the Press” interview showed the president-elect’s blind spots on the sprawling probe.

“There needs to be a more specific, updated argument made to the public to defend pardons for Jan. 6 defendants,” the Trump ally said. “The D.C. jail is only one facet of the imprisonment of a few hundred J6ers who are in jail who have been sentenced.”

“Even people familiar with the day-to-day J6 prosecution, it’s difficult to keep up with what is happening. But it’s very important for the president to have a very succinct and compelling argument for these pardons,” the Trump ally said.

Another person with direct knowledge of the Trump transition team’s planning said that instead of sweeping pardons for most of the participants, their understanding is that a few defendants were being selected who would be “very worthy of a pardon,” but that the process would then continue for a few weeks and months to vet the remainder. Another source familiar with the discussion said that they expect Trump to go big and broad with pardons, but that there were no indications he’d gotten into the details at all yet. The Trump transition team had no comment.

Ed Martin, a conservative activist whom Trump recently named as chief of staff at the Office of Management and Budget, has broadly been involved in discussions about Jan. 6 pardons, one Trump ally said. Martin was on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, an organization that supports Jan. 6 defendants and their families, and which has hosted fundraisers at Trump’s properties. Martin was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6, although there’s no evidence he entered an area that had been restricted, and he’s spread conspiracy theories — including one about a man he’s referred to as “Mr. Coffee” in the aftermath of the attack. Martin, who stood behind Trump during a fundraiser for Jan. 6 defendants last year, did not respond to a request for comment.

Bill Shipley, an attorney who has represented numerous Jan. 6 clients, said Trump was going to have to “go wide” on pardons “to live up to campaign and post-election statements,” and said he was “optimistic” about the pardon process, even though he’d seen no indication a formal process had been set up yet.

“It seems to me that the scope of the pardons or commutations that will be forthcoming after Jan. 20 is going to be quite wide,” Shipley said. “I’ve seen no information yet suggesting the mechanism by which those pardons will be processed has been decided upon.”

Among the Jan. 6 defendants at issue are rioters who have been identified on tape brandishing or using firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device during the brutal attack, which injured more than 140 police officers.

Steve Baker, a Jan. 6 defendant who now works as a writer for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and has his sentencing scheduled for after Trump takes office, told NBC News that it was clear to him that Trump was busy building his administration.

“I’m not being critical at all. What I’m saying is considering all the other things he has on his plate right now … the one thing that he’s not up to speed on is the actual details of these Jan. 6 cases,” Baker said. “It’s not like everyone is sitting in the D.C. gulag right now. … It was abundantly clear that he was not aware of the individual cases. He knows bits and pieces of stories, just like most people do.”

Epps was the 16th person whose photo was added to the FBI’s Capitol violence website in the early days of the chaotic investigation and was quickly identified and then removed from the site. That sparked conspiracy theories that Epps was a federal informant, based on the premise that Epps was accidentally added to the list and then removed. (Many of the conspiracy theories emerged from the crowd on Jan. 6 itself, with members of the mob accusing their fellow Trump supporters of being either undercover federal agents or members of the left-wing group antifa that has engaged in violent protests.)

“What ever happened to Ray Epps? Now, I don’t know anything about Ray Epps, but it was sort of strange the way he was talking,” Trump said in the interview. “Where is he? What happened to him?”

The answer: Epps is on federal probation. Epps was charged by the Justice Department in 2023 and pleaded guilty to one count of disorderly or disruptive conduct on restricted grounds. Federal prosecutors sought a six-month prison sentence for Epps, which they said was justified because of his efforts to “inspire and gather a crowd” to storm the Capitol. A federal judge gave Epps probation, saying Epps had been “vilified in a matter unique to January 6 defendants” and was the only Jan. 6 defendant who “suffered for what you didn’t do,” and that “prison was not warranted” given the collateral consequences of the conspiracy theory on Epps’ life.

Epps, during his sentencing hearing in January, said that he now realized that the 2020 election “was not stolen” and that the violence was “generated by people like me, who supported President Trump and listened to his lies and the lies of others that the election was stolen.” Having his fellow conspiracy theorists target him was a wake-up call, Epps said.

“When Fox News and the Trump cult turned on me and my wife for a convenient shift of blame, it was life-changing, it was a life-changing reality check,” Epps said during his sentencing hearing. “My wife and I were forced to look elsewhere for the truth.”

A Trump ally told NBC News that while “the Ray Epps thing is titillating to the public,” it was not a coherent argument about why Trump was going to pardon Jan. 6 defendants. “Overall, that is not a compelling piece of this very necessary political and public argument that needs to be made,” the source said.

That wasn’t the only conspiracy theory Trump repeated during the interview.

Trump also said there “might be some people from antifa” in the Jan. 6 crowd “because those people seem to be in good shape.” Numerous Jan. 6 participants who had been falsely identified as being anti-fascist protesters have, after their arrest, been revealed to have been Trump supporters, although one “anti-establishment” activist is currently serving a six-year prison sentence after prosecutors argued he came to “foment anarchy.”

Trump also said video evidence was being hidden from the public. “You have a lot of cameras. They don’t want to release the tapes. They don’t want to release the tapes,” Trump said. In fact, the Justice Department has regularly released evidentiary videos from Jan. 6 cases following requests made by a media coalition, and a Republican-led committee has published thousands of hours of CCTV footage from Jan. 6 on the conservative video-sharing website Rumble.

Online sleuths who have aided the FBI in hundreds of arrests told NBC News that there are currently 90 people on the FBI’s Capitol violence website who have been identified and turned in to the FBI but have not yet been arrested. Among them are 59 people whom the FBI has labeled as “AFO,” meaning they are wanted for assaulting federal law enforcement, and nine listed as “AOM,” or wanted for assaulting the media. A law enforcement source told NBC News last month that investigators would focus on the “most egregious” Jan. 6 cases until Trump took office, and seven “AFOs” have been arrested since then, along with 10 defendants whose photos were not featured on the FBI website.

One online sleuth said Trump’s comments were “a rehash of the oldest internet conspiracies,” but joked that they did agree with Trump that House Republicans should publish more Jan. 6 footage, since some of the most critical video has never been uploaded.

Another sleuth said there didn’t seem to be much internal consistency in Trump’s arguments.

“He’s incensed that people who didn’t enter the Capitol got arrested. But he also wants to know whatever happened to Epps. And he’s promised to pardon everyone who was arrested. Like Epps, who was charged and sentenced and didn’t enter the Capitol. But whatever happened to Epps?” they said. “It’s just like arrrgh.”

Inside the Justice Department, there’s a sense of frustration about the pending pardons, but pride about the work that the Capitol Siege Section has done. Even if Trump pardons hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants, there’s a record of the reality of the attack that cannot be erased.

“You can’t unring the bell of the conviction,” one federal prosecutor involved in Jan. 6 cases told NBC News. “No one can take that away.”

The source said that prosecutors were determined to do their work until the end, whether that’s when a Trump-appointed Justice Department official orders the investigation shut down, or when the five-year statute of limitations expires in 2026.

“The mood has shifted, but we’re far from demoralized,” they said. “We’re going to ride this train ’til the end of the line, whether that’s Jan. 20, 2025, or Jan. 6, 2026.”