Jamie Raskin: Jan. 6
Never Ended
Jan. 6, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET
By Jamie Raskin
Mr.
Raskin, who represents Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District, is the ranking
member of the House Judiciary Committee. He was the lead prosecutor in the
second impeachment trial of President Trump.
Tuesday is a heavy day
for the police officers who fought to put down the bloody insurrection at the
Capitol five years ago. It is also a solemn day for the F.B.I. agents and
federal prosecutors who worked the largest criminal investigation in American history
to bring the members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and all the other
police-attacking rioters to justice.
Five years after Jan. 6,
2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to
use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and
those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the
polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet.
It’s still very much
Jan. 6 in America.
Thanks to the fastidious work of the
House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack and the former special counsel Jack
Smith, we have a broad understanding of President Trump’s big lie about the
2020 election. He claims to have won but actually lost by more than seven
million votes and 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. We know about his defeat
from court rulings destroying more than 60 outlandish federal and state court
lawsuits alleging election fraud, the political shakedown he waged against
election officials such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia,
the recruitment of counterfeit electors in swing states, Mr. Trump’s campaign
to mobilize the Justice Department to his conspiracy and his efforts to coerce
Vice President Mike Pence to unlawfully reject Joe Biden’s Electoral College
votes so Mr. Trump could be anointed president.
These findings have not been
meaningfully refuted in any way. Although certain behind-the-scenes maneuvers
remain murky, in part because key witnesses like Mr. Trump have refused to
testify, no amount of whitewashing can erase the images of “stop the steal”
rioters assaulting police officers with baseball bats, metal pipes, Confederate
and Trump flagpoles, bear spray and other chemicals. The rampaging mob drove
members of Congress out of our chambers, conducted a search-and-destroy mission
for the mahogany boxes containing Electoral College votes and prepared a
gallows on the Capitol grounds for the vice president as they hunted him down,
chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
Mr. Trump and the
election deniers tell a different story. For MAGA adherents, Jan. 6 is a
kaleidoscopic projection of wild and contradictory conspiracy theories.
Sometimes they frame it as 1776, a historic day of revolutionary resistance to
the “deep state.” At other times, it’s a foreign-aligned corporate vote-rigging
scheme against him — notwithstanding that Fox News was forced to pay $787.5
million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over
the channel’s airing of those fraudulent claims.
At the same time, MAGA
depicts the whole insurrection as a false flag operation organized by antifa,
the F.B.I. and the speaker of the House at the time, Nancy Pelosi. Mr. Trump’s
incoherent revisionist mythology of Jan. 6 has become an organizing policy
commitment of his administration. On Inauguration Day, he pardoned or commuted
the prison sentences of each of the nearly 1,600 rioters and seditionists
(apparently no longer antifa fighters). This move bypassed the U.S. pardon
attorney and discarded centuries of understanding that pardons should go to
petitioners who have shown true remorse and contrition, rehabilitation and a
lack of dangerousness. Consider just a few pardonees:
Daniel Rodriguez
repeatedly plunged a stun gun into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone as the
mob chanted, “Kill him with his gun.” Officer Fanone suffered a heart attack
and traumatic brain injuries. The judge in the case called Mr. Rodriguez a
“one-man army of hate” and sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison for
attacking Officer Fanone — who was not on duty that day but rushed to the
Capitol to help his fellow officers.
Patrick McCaughey III
used a stolen police riot shield to crush Officer Daniel Hodges in a metal door
frame. Mr. McCaughey left Officer Hodges trapped, bleeding, unable to breathe
and crying for help. The judge in this case, a Trump appointee, described Mr.
McCaughey as the “poster child for all that was dangerous and appalling” about
the riot and sentenced him to more than seven years in prison.
Mr. Trump granted clemency to dozens
of people who had committed or been accused of violent and horrific crimes
after Jan. 6, such as plotting the murders of
F.B.I. agents, resisting arrest, assault, rape, burglary, stalking, stabbing, possession of child sex abuse
materials and D.U.I. homicide. One
of Mr. Trump’s pardoned Jan. 6 rioters, John Banuelos, bragged in court before
the pardons were issued that he would never do time. “President Trump’s going
to be in office six months from now, so I’m not worried about it,” he said.
On Oct. 17, 2025, nine
months after the mass pardon, police officers arrested Mr. Banuelos on new
charges of kidnapping and sexual assault relating to a 2018 incident. He
is accused of trapping his victim in his home and beating, strangling and
sexually assaulting her.
Mr. Trump punished law
enforcement officials en masse for doing their jobs. He conducted a
bureaucratic purge — with firings and permanent demotions — of hundreds of
experienced F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors because they investigated and
prosecuted the Jan. 6 cases assigned to them. He installed Jan. 6
insurrectionists in the highest ranks of the Department of Justice.
Ed Martin, who leads the
Justice Department’s Orwellian new Weaponization Working Group and serves as
the U.S. pardon attorney, is a Jan. 6 participant who said he would fight to
“stop the steal” until his “last breath.” In a social post, he likened the mayhem
at the Capitol to a Mardi Gras celebration. He hired as his
senior adviser Jared Wise, another proud Jan. 6-er who repeatedly yelled, “Kill
’em,” as rioters attacked police officers and whose trial on numerous charges
had just begun when Mr. Trump pardoned him.
These moves at the
Justice Department have cost the government thousands of collective years of
investigative and prosecutorial experience, demoralized the civil service and
reduced our government to the moral level of a gangster state.
On this uncertain anniversary, here
are the people who give me hope: the Republicans who placed their love of
country over their subservience to Mr. Trump; the Jan. 6 rioters who regret
their participation, like Pam Hemphill, who rejected Mr. Trump’s pardon; and
all the Americans — Democrats, independents and Republicans — who are
organizing a revival of creative political participation across the country.
Meanwhile, the official
government position toward the Jan. 6 anniversary is silence and indifference:
The Republican-controlled Congress is doing nothing to acknowledge the day.
In March 2022, Congress passed a law
requiring that, within a year, a plaque be hung in the Capitol in honor of the
hundreds of officers who put their bodies and lives on the line to defend
members of Congress and the besieged vice president. The plaque makes a promise
about our police officers: “Their heroism will never be forgotten.” It still
has not been installed.
Jamie Raskin is the ranking member of the House Judiciary
Committee. He was the lead prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of Donald
Trump and is the author of “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of
American Democracy.”
