‘He has to deliver’: Trump’s dilemma on how far to go with promised pardons for January 6 rioters

It was an uncharacteristically warm November night in the nation’s capital Wednesday, when a few dozen people gathered on a street corner outside the city’s biggest jail. Some have come to the same spot for the last 800 nights, for a vigil protesting the incarceration of the January 6 rioters.

It was an uncharacteristically warm November night in the nation’s capital Wednesday, when a few dozen people gathered on a street corner outside the city’s biggest jail. Some have come to the same spot for the last 800 nights, for a vigil protesting the incarceration of the January 6 rioters. But this night was different. The mood was buoyant. Champagne was popped. “Raise a glass to President Trump,” Micki Witthoeft, the group’s leader, told the crowd, offering a toast to the man who had become the president-elect that morning. Witthoeft is the mother of Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran and fervent Donald Trump supporter who was fatally shot by a police officer inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as she tried to breach an area near the House floor while lawmakers fled. The people behind the vigil are the tip of the spear of a national movement of activists who have spent years campaigning for the release of January 6 defendants. They’ve pressed forward even though a majority of Americans still see the Capitol rioters as responsible for an attack against democracy, according to the most recent polling. Now, Witthoeft and others expect Trump to make good on his oft-repeated campaign pledge to pardon the January 6 “political prisoners,” as they are called in MAGA speak.