After Daniel Rodriguez pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer during the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, he was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison by a federal judge who called him a “one-man army of hate.”
Two other men, Albuquerque Cosper Head and Kyle J. Young, were sentenced to more than seven years for their parts in the assault on the officer, Michael Fanone.
On Monday, President Trump pardoned all three of them, lumping them together with nearly 1,600 other people who had been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and who he suggested had been victimized by a politicized prosecution. His grant of clemency comes despite a wealth of evidence about their crimes, including videos used against them by the Justice Department.
Some of the videos document the gruesome moment when Officer Fanone, who rushed to defend the Capitol on his day off, was dragged into the crowd by Mr. Head, beaten by Mr. Young and then attacked with a stun gun by Mr. Rodriguez.
Video from Officer Fanone’s body camera shows Mr. Rodriguez driving the stun gun into Officer Fanone’s neck, causing him to scream. Officer Fanone, who has since left the police force, sustained grievous injuries that day and suffered a heart attack.
Even some close allies of Mr. Trump had opposed granting clemency to those rioters found guilty of violent crimes, especially the more than 600 who were convicted of assaulting or resisting police officers. Of those defendants, nearly 175 used a dangerous or deadly weapon, prosecutors say.
Four years later, the violence they committed is still shocking — and the facts of what happened are right there in the images, many of them now iconic.
Here are some of the most egregious acts of violence that took place during the Capitol attack, as seen in videos.
An hourslong battle pitting rioters against outnumbered police officers took place by an entrance to the Capitol where Mr. Fanone was beaten unconscious. On those same steps, an Arkansas man named Peter Stager used an American flag to pummel another officer who was lying prone on the ground after being dragged into the heaving crowd.
Edward Jacob Lang was charged with using a baseball bat to beat officers who were protecting the Capitol entrance. He was released on Tuesday night without ever having gone to trial and said: “The bonds of slavery in this country will no longer be felt. This is a great day in American history.”
Earlier in the riot, dozens of police officers were attacked as they tried to hold back a mob of hundreds at barricades outside the Capitol.
One of the people who assaulted officers there was Thomas Webster, a former officer with the New York Police Department. Mr. Webster, who also served in the Marine Corps, was ultimately sentenced to 10 years in prison after being found guilty of swinging a metal flagpole at an officer before shoving through a police line and tackling him.
Peter Schwartz, a welder from Pennsylvania, showed up at the Capitol on Jan. 6 armed with a wooden tire knocker, prosecutors say, and eventually attacked the police with a chair and chemical spray. He was later sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, received a 22-year prison sentence, the longest of any person charged in connection with Jan. 6. He was convicted at trial with three of his lieutenants — Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl — of seditious conspiracy. A fifth defendant in the case, Dominic Pezzola, was convicted of other serious felonies.
Under Mr. Trump’s order on Monday night, Mr. Tarrio received a full pardon. The others had their prison sentences commuted to time served.
A New York Times investigation in 2022 of court documents, text messages and hundreds of videos showed how these men planned for the Capitol riot for weeks and instigated multiple breaches of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Mr. Trump’s broad clemency order was only the most recent effort on his part to rewrite the history of Jan. 6. He has sought to play down the violence that day and recast it as a “day of love.”
Mr. Trump said the order would “end a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years” and begin “a process of national reconciliation.”
But, as some federal judges in Washington who have overseen hundreds of Capitol riot cases have recently said, nothing — not even a presidential decree — can alter the reality of what happened that day.
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote in a court order on Wednesday that dismissed a case against two Jan. 6 defendants at the government’s request. “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity.”
“This court,” Judge Howell concluded, “cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement.”
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