In the wake of January 6th, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. embarked on what has become the largest criminal investigation in American history. Around a hundred and forty police officers were assaulted during the attack. As of this month, more than fourteen hundred people have been charged for their participation in the riot, and some nine hundred have pleaded guilty; nine have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, a Civil War-era charge that was devised to prosecute Southern rebels. In 2022, advocates of those involved in January 6th began to suggest that Trump ought to do something to help his most loyal supporters; some were disappointed that he hadn’t just pardoned them all before leaving office. The next year, Trump spoke at a fund-raiser for January 6th families held at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. (According to a book about January 6th by the reporter Ryan J. Reilly, Trump had previously expressed interest in possibly bailing people out, until he learned that the federal system has no cash bail.) Then Trump himself was indicted, in four criminal cases, and he soon took to highlighting his own victimhood and martyrdom—comparing himself to Jesus on the Cross, with wounds on his “beautiful” body. Before long, he was also casting himself as a savior who would bring justice to these unfairly maligned patriots.
Trump opened the campaign for his second Presidential term in Waco, Texas, the site of the infamous F.B.I. siege of the Branch Davidian compound. He put his hand on his heart and played “Justice for All,” a version of the national anthem in which his own voice is spliced with January 6th participants singing as a choir from the D.C. jail. He often refers to Jackson and the approximately five hundred other riot participants who are now incarcerated as hostages or political prisoners. The braiding of his own cause with theirs became a centerpiece of his bid for office. He has promised to “free the hostages” as soon as he is reëlected—and to enact retribution on those who put them away.
As the January 6th investigations unfolded, some members of prominent militia groups, such as the Proud Boys, were convicted in high-profile cases. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, was sentenced to more than two decades in prison; Stewart Rhodes, of the Oath Keepers, got eighteen years. Several of the more garish participants, among them the QAnon Shaman, with his horned headdress and American-flag-painted face, became minor celebrities. Many Americans are still being arrested and charged in cases that continue to play out almost every day at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. Court documents reveal the myriad ways these participants narrate their pilgrimages to the Capitol. (One man: “It was what the founding fathers intended.” Another, per his lawyer’s filing, “returned home in a haze and . . . quickly identified the pernicious roots of his participation: his internet addiction, his alcohol abuse, his social isolation.”)
At rallies, Trump has connected his own legal fate to that of the J6ers, as they are being called, and of everyday citizens. “They’re not after me,” he says. “They’re after you. I just happen to be standing in the way.” Recent events have complicated that narrative. In one of Trump’s cases, he was charged with “obstruction of an official proceeding” for disrupting the certification of the 2020 Presidential election. Hundreds of January 6th participants have been charged with the same crime. On June 28th, the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors had overstepped in using the obstruction charge; Trump deemed the verdict “BIG NEWS!” and shared a post on Truth Social that called it “a massive victory for J6 political prisoners,” many of whom, like Trump, are now likely to have the charge dropped. But the vast majority of rioters convicted of obstruction were also charged with other felonies, meaning their sentences won’t materially change.
Then, in early July, the Supreme Court gave Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official actions he took while in office, suggesting that he may never be held to account for anything that happened on January 6th the way his supporters have been. Despite the former President’s recent legal winning streak, Brian Jackson and others like him remain incarcerated. They feel that their futures are in limbo, contingent upon the outcome of the upcoming election. If Trump wins, will he undo the Justice Department’s biggest investigation ever in order to set them free?
For more than seven hundred days, Perryman stood outside the D.C. jail for a nightly vigil, where supporters of the J6ers gather to take calls from inmates, pray, and sing the national anthem. Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot by police while climbing through a window of the Capitol on January 6th, started the vigil. When Perryman first arrived in D.C., she had nowhere to stay and no plans, but someone had sent her Witthoeft’s number. “My mom had just died, and when Micki came to the door and just gave me this big hug, I was, like, Here’s my mom,” she told me.
This spring, I fell into the habit of going to the vigil, which convenes at the dead end of a residential street behind the jail. When I arrived the first time I was greeted with “Hi, patriot!” A few other regular attendees were there: a Chinese American family from the area; a woman from a nearby homeless shelter, who dances with an American flag; a live-streamer who lives in a van. Just before 9 P.M., they joined hands in a circle. “We pray for our patriots that are being denied freedom,” Perryman said. “This country will return to you and to the rule of law, where justice is blind.” The group read a roll call of every incarcerated J6 participant, following each name with a chant of “Hero.” I leaned against the stone wall of the Congressional Cemetery, the first national burial ground, which borders the makeshift gathering; Capitol Hill residents sometimes walk their dogs among the tombstones as the vigil goes on. Floodlights shone down on us.
Several thousand viewers regularly tune in to live streams of the vigil, the second-longest-running in Washington. (The protest at the nuclear-disarmament tent outside the White House, which has been around since 1981, holds the record.) Trump has called in to the vigil to talk to Witthoeft; Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who died with a bloodied Trump flag wrapped around her as a cape, has become something of a MAGA martyr. “We’re with you,” Trump told Witthoeft. Congressman Matt Gaetz once came to pay his respects (and to seize on the opportunity to connect with the base). When he arrived, Perryman was on the phone with one of the “hostages.” Gaetz told him, “I just want to say how sorry I am that there are any Americans that are having to endure this two-tier justice system.”
Every evening, Perryman, Witthoeft, and Nicole Reffitt—whose husband, Guy, a member of the anti-government movement the Three Percenters, was the first rioter to go on trial—fielded calls from the “hostages” and speculated about their futures. (By the time I visited, the three women had lived together in Washington, in a rented house northeast of the Capitol, for a year and a half.) On most nights, just a few other people would come, unfolding flimsy camping chairs in the shadow of the jail. They would smoke cigarettes and huddle around a folding table littered with snacks and bottles of soda and self-published books about pardons.
Listening to Perryman and Jackson talk to each other on the phone was a nightly ritual; he’d call in and she’d hold the phone up to a microphone connected to a loudspeaker. His voice blared into the night in fifteen-minute increments, until an automated voice announced that the call was ending. Sometimes they’d just chat about their past, in Texas—“Remember that armadillo we saw?”—but frequently Jackson brought up Trump and his Presidential campaign. “The guys feel like this election is their lives hanging in the balance, because it truly is that way,” Perryman told me. “They could be either coming home in eight months, or they’re starting a twelve-year bid.” She looked down at my notebook. “It is our last stand,” she said. “If we don’t win in November, then there’s going to be an eruption. There’s no point being peaceful if democracy’s gone.” I watched what appeared to be a nearby surveillance van get a food delivery from a man on a moped. A local mother, walking out of the jail with her children after visiting a family member, stopped by the snack table; she didn’t seem to know what the gathering was about. Reffitt handed the kids oranges and cookies.
Perryman, Witthoeft, and Reffitt’s house had become something of a central node for a quixotic network of families connected to the January 6th cause. Perryman asked me over several times but would always rescind the invitation, when it turned out that a January 6th participant who hadn’t been caught might be stopping by, or that a mother whose son was about to be sentenced, and who was staying with them before the hearing, wanted to be left alone. On Sunday, after church, the three women would sit down to plan the week—what’s on the court docket, what hearings they want to go see, which families coming to town for trials might need support—and then make dinner. Afterward, Witthoeft and Reffitt watched British crime dramas downstairs; Perryman watched American crime procedurals upstairs. When they’re running errands, Reffitt sometimes gets recognized from media coverage of Guy’s trial. “Neighbors see my car now and they’re, like, She’s just grocery shopping, she’s not trying to insurrect,” Reffitt said.
The mood outside the jail sometimes came across as a bit desolate, as if I were at a protest for a lost cause or a book reading where only a few people had shown up. The evening that Trump’s guilty verdict came down, on thirty-four felony counts related to hush-money payments made before the 2016 Presidential election, the mood was jubilant. “Welcome to the club, Donald Trump,” Perryman said.