The D.C. Central Detention Facility is two miles east of the U.S. Capitol, and about half a mile down the Anacostia River from the defunct R.F.K. Stadium. Execution by electric chair, and hangings before that, were once carried out in the corners of its dining rooms. Many of those convicted or awaiting trial for breaching the Capitol building on January 6th have been held there for the past several years. For a time, they all occupied the same pod—some called it the Patriot Wing—where they would sing the national anthem together every night. Trump added their choral rendition to his Mar-a-Lago iPad playlist and put it on at his rallies.
During the past year, when I occasionally visited a nightly vigil outside the facility, where families of the so-called J6 hostages gathered to pray and take calls from inside, I was often one of the only people to show up. For nearly a thousand days, a small group convened in the shadow of the dilapidated building, waiting for Donald Trump to get reëlected, and then pardon their family members. At times, the whole thing seemed a bit far-fetched. Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy, a Texas Three Percenter, was the first rioter to be tried, relocated to Washington after he was sentenced. (Guy stood on the steps of the Capitol with zip ties, body armor, a megaphone, and a gun; at trial, the prosecution argued that he “lit the match that started the fire” of the riot.) Nicole and Guy’s son, Jackson, had been the one to turn Guy in to the F.B.I.
After Guy’s sentencing, his daughter Peyton told a gaggle outside the courthouse that Trump should be held accountable, and deserves life in prison. (“I could really see how my fathers ego and personality fell to his knees when President Trump spoke, you could tell he listened to Trump’s words as if he was really truly speaking to him,” she wrote to the court.) When I met Nicole and both her daughters, Sarah and Peyton, at the vigil, their family life had become inextricably bound up with the outcome of the 2024 election. Nicole moved in with Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed when she tried to enter the Speaker’s lobby on the sixth. Their house, nicknamed “the Eagle’s Nest,” became a gathering place for families of defendants visiting Washington.
On Monday night, a few hours after Trump was inaugurated, in the Capitol Rotunda—the same room that his supporters had stormed a little more than four years ago—he pardoned all the January 6th rioters. As donors and guests danced at inaugural balls around the city, a mass of supporters had gathered across from the jail to demand that the J6ers be freed. A line of D.C. police officers physically blocked the entrance to the facility.
Paul Ingrassia, the newly-minted White House liaison to the Department of Justice, left a black-tie inaugural ball to go to the D.C. jail. Ingrassia spoke to the crowd in his tuxedo and a scarf. He announced that the brothers Andrew and Matthew Valentin, who had both been sentenced just days earlier for assaulting officers, were coming out. (They had shoved a barricade into officers and one of them attempted to steal a baton.) Some of the prisoners apparently were hoping to get out in time to drop by the inaugural balls.
The crowd seemed to be anticipating a cinematic moment in which all of the January 6ers would flood out of the facility as if in a mass jailbreak, rush across the police line, and join their supporters and family members, dancing to “Y.M.C.A.” on the grass. The next afternoon, however, they were still waiting. When I arrived, Nicole was crying tears of joy and leading a group in a dance to the song “Trump Train”; Guy had been released and was on his way to Washington. Ben Pollock, whose son and daughter were both being held in the D.C. jail after being charged with assaulting law enforcement and then going on the run, had come up from Florida to retrieve his children. He waved an American flag and said, “Hallelujah.”
Still, the block-party-sized crowd was impatient—why hadn’t everyone been let out yet? The Freedom Caucus representatives Lauren Boebert and Eli Crane drove over from the Capitol to tell the warden to hurry up. Boebert posted a selfie from inside the facility: “RELEASE THEM NOW!” She walked across the police line to the waiting crowd. “According to the United States Marshall, he’s dealing with them one by one, getting all the paperwork. I would love for President Trump or Attorney General Pam Bondi to step in and help us out here with the U.S. Marshalls and make sure this doesn’t become a paperwork issue. These men have already paid too much time—more time than they ever should have.” She invited released prisoners to the Capitol for a tour.
I ran into Brandon Fellows, who was released earlier this year and has been living in Washington since. Fellows had entered the Capitol through a broken window, carrying a Trump flag, and smoked part of a joint in a senator’s office. Afterward, he posted online, “Brought my heart joy to see these members terrified for their lives. For what they have done and are doing to this country I hope they live in constant fear.” (He believes he got arrested because he gave CNN his full name during a TV hit on his way out of the Capitol.) Fellows wore an Immigration and Customs Enforcement windbreaker and a black balaclava. He told me that he had been up all night outside the jail, waiting to see who would come out. He’d had brunch with Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, whose sentence of eighteen years Trump had commuted. (In December, 2020, Rhodes suggested that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, so that the President could call upon the Oath Keepers to suppress Biden’s “coup”; on the sixth, he did not enter the Capitol but, rather, as prosecutors put it, acted as “a general surveying his troops on a battlefield,” managing a “quick reaction force” of armed militiamen at a Comfort Inn in Virginia, who could be deployed if needed.) Rhodes, who had been serving his sentence in Maryland, made his way to D.C. hours after being released. He wanted to join the families waiting outside the jail.
As the afternoon stretched on, D.C. officials started giving parking tickets to supporters who had their cars on the grass. Someone passed out hand-warmers. A rented bus was idling in case a big group got released all at once; a sign in the window read “NO MAN LEFT BEHIND.” One woman told me that she’d heard a rumor that private planes were being lent to rioters who had been released in other parts of the country and wanted to come to Washington. Others were live-streaming their frustration about the continued wait and calling for the arrest of Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington. A couple of guys in Proud Boys gear hung around.
The blanket pardons had come as a surprise even to those close to Trump. Nicole had always told me that she thought they should be on a case-by-case basis. In the middle of the crowd, a journalist was asking Rhodes about the violent offenders who had been pardoned. (More than a hundred and forty police officers were injured on January 6th. David Dempsey, sentenced this summer to twenty years for stomping on officers’ heads and beating them with furniture, was pardoned.)
“Well,” Rhodes asked of the violent offenders, “were they put on trial?”
