Trump's Pardons and Purges Revive Old Question: Who Counts as a Terrorist?
by Hannah Allam
Feb. 10, 2025
The president’s sweeping clemency for Capitol rioters and his administration’s ongoing removal of career national security specialists foretell a permissive new climate for extremist movements, say current and former officials and researchers.
The day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a surprise visitor joined the crowd outside the D.C. Jail, drawing double takes as people recognized his signature eyepatch: Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers movement.
By the cold math of the justice system, Rhodes was not supposed to be there. He’d gone to sleep the night before in a Maryland prison cell, where he was serving 18 years as a convicted ringleader of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Yale-educated firebrand who once boasted a nationwide paramilitary network had seen his organization collapse under prosecution.
For the Justice Department, Rhodes’ seditious conspiracy conviction was bigger than crushing the Oath Keepers — it was a hard-won victory in the government’s efforts to reorient a creaky bureaucracy toward a rapidly evolving homegrown threat. On his first day in office, Trump erased that work by granting clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, declaring an end to “a grave national injustice.”
Rhodes, sporting a Trump 2020 cap, was back in Washington with fellow “J6ers” within hours of his release in the early hours of Jan. 21, 2025 . In the frigid air outside “the gulag,” as the D.C. Jail is known in this crowd, he was swarmed by TV cameras and supporters offering congratulations. Nearby, far-right Proud Boys members puffed cigars. A speaker blared Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/jan-6-pardons-trump-purges-domestic-terrorism-focus?utm_campaign=propublica-sprout&utm_content=1739239202&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
The Trump crime syndicate is vast.