Stewart Rhodes was in a jubilant mood outside a DC jail last week. The founder of a militia group had just been released from an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy for his part in the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
"The momentum's on our side, don’t stop now," he told some right-wing media outlets, as he waited outside the jail for his fellow 'Jan 6th veterans’ to be released.
"I want to see all the prosecutors investigated, I want to see all the cops that lied on the stand investigated, all the cops that used excessive force investigated," he added.
On 20 January this year, Donald Trump pardoned Stewart Rhodes along with nearly 1,600 other people who had been charged in connection with the 6 January 2021 riot.
Mr Trump said the order would "end a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years" and begin "a process of national reconciliation".
Many of the 1,600 were charged with minor crimes but he also commuted some serious sentences.
Mr Rhodes, some of his fellow Oathkeepers and Enrique Tarrio, the leader of The Proud Boys at the time of the assault on the Capitol, were convicted of seditious conspiracy, which is equivalent to a terrorism charge, while others received lengthy sentences for violently assaulting police officers.
Here is a rundown of some of the violent offenders freed by President Trump.
Stewart Rhodes - The Oathkeepers
Mr Rhodes is probably the best known of the 6 January rioters.
With his beard and eye patch, he is kind of hard to miss, but he did not always have this public persona.
The 59-year-old was born in Fresno, California.
He joined the army straight after high school and served for three years.
He was never deployed though and was honourably discharged in 1986 after breaking his back in a parachuting accident during training.
He lost his eye in a separate incident in 1993 when he accidentally dropped his pistol and shot himself in the eye.
He graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1998 with a major in political science and then moved to DC to work as an aide for Republican Congressman Ron Paul.
He went on to study at Yale Law School and practised law in Arizona and other western states before being debarred by the Montana Supreme Court in 2015.
In 2009, The Oath Keepers militia was born during what his wife described as a manic night, when he wrote a kind of manifesto of orders his followers would vow not to obey.
Among the ten orders were that Oath Keepers would refuse to disarm US citizens or confiscate the property of US citizens.
He formally launched the Oath Keepers on 19 April 2009, in Lexington, Massachusetts, where the first shot in the American Revolution was fired.
The group’s stated goal was to get past and present members of the military, first responders and police officers to honour the promise they made to defend the Constitution against enemies.
Mr Rhodes used social media to fuel the growth of the Oath Keepers during the Obama presidency until its membership swelled to more than 38,000 in 2021.
The group gained notoriety during several incidents which they saw as involving the overreach of the US federal government.
They included an armed standoff between police and Nevada ranch owner Cliven Bundy in 2014 who defied court orders to remove cattle from state land and a 2016 armed occupation of an Oregon Wildlife Refuge.
In November 2020, days after the presidential election, Oath Keepers attended another March on the Capitol in DC called the Million MAGA March.
In a leaked private video chat of Oath Keeper members from the night before, Mr Rhodes told his followers: "I’m telling you straight up, guys, if he (Donald Trump) doesn’t drop the hammer on this communist insurrection, we are going to end up fighting a bloody civil war in this country to defeat them. Horrific. More of us are going to die."
"We’re not going to get out of this without a fight, that’s a friggin’ fact," he added.
Another Oath Keeper, Michael Ottis Wilson, wrote on social media that it was "time to start executing lefties openly and violently" and "to start killing the news media live on air".
There were some clashes with police during the November march, but it largely passed without great incident.
On the morning of 6 January 2021, Mr Rhodes was in attendance.
An investigation by The New York Times, showed Oath Keepers dressed in tactical gear seemingly coordinating their movements before some of them entered the building.
Mr Rhodes never entered the Capitol building but prosecutors said he oversaw others as they tried to carry out "a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy".
During his trial, prosecutors revealed that Mr Rhodes was recorded in the days after the attack saying his "only regret" was that the group "should have brought rifles" to the Capitol that day.
More than 20 Oath Keepers were tried in connection with the 6 January riot and the organisation has been severely damaged.
But as Mr Rhodes embraced another released prisoner, Joshua Macias of the Proud Boys, he did not seem like he was finished.
"You know it doesn’t matter if we’re Proud Boys, Oath Keepers or whatever, we’re all Jan 6 vets now," said Mr Macias.
Enrique Tarrio - The Proud Boys
Enrique Tarrio was serving a 22-year prison term, the longest sentence given to anyone charged in connection with the 6 January riot when he was pardoned.
Mr Tarrio was not in Washington, DC on the day of the riot because a judge kicked him out of the city a few days earlier for vandalizing a Black church at a previous Trump rally.
At the time, he was the leader of The Proud Boys, a far-right militant organisation.
Mr Tarrio first gained prominence for his part in the torch-lit march in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 where the crowd chanted "Jews will not replace us" and a woman was killed the following day after a speeding car rammed a crowd of counter-protesters.
The Proud Boys, known for their black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts and their racist views were thrust into the US national consciousness during a 2020 presidential campaign when then-President Trump told them to "stand back and stand by".
During his trial, prosecutors presented a document found on Mr Tarrio’s laptop which contained a detailed plan to surveil and storm government buildings around the Capitol on 6 January.
A Proud Boys member, Jeremy Bertino, who took part in the riot, also turned evidence against the group and detailed swapping texts with Mr Tarrio, expressing amazement as the mob breached the Capitol and openly hoping that they would track down Nancy Pelosi.
Another Proud Boys member, Dominic Pezzola, was shown in videos to be the first to breach the Capitol by shattering a window with a stolen police riot shield.
Upon his release this week, Mr Tarrio said: "There’s absolutely nothing that I will apologize for, because I did nothing wrong, The Proud Boys did nothing wrong."
He claimed to have just watched the events on TV like everyone else, but like Mr Rhodes vowed revenge for what happened to him.
"The people who did this, they need to feel the heat, they need to pay for what they did," Mr Tarrio said.
Mr Tarrio was granted a full unconditional pardon while five other members of the Proud Boys, including Dominic Pezzola and Jeremy Bertino, had their sentences commuted to time served.
Daniel Rodriguez, Cosper Head, Kyle J Young
Daniel Rodriguez was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison for assaulting a police officer by a judge who called him a "one-man army of hate".
Cosper Head and Kyle Young received seven-year terms for their part in assaulting Officer Michael Fanone.
Social media videos showed Officer Fanone being dragged by the mob from a tunnel under the Capitol, before being beaten with flagpoles and baseball bats and being tased several times by the men.
Officer Fanone was at home when he heard the call for help over his police radio and immediately thrust himself into the front lines defending the Capitol.
He suffered multiple heart attacks as a result of the taser strikes and almost died.
Mr Fanone’s media appearances made him a national hero after 6 January, but he also testified against the rioters and became a target of threats.
This week he told CNN that he feels betrayed by the pardoning of his attackers.
"Six individuals who assaulted me as I did my job, will now walk free," he said.
"My family, my children and myself are less safe today because of Donald Trump."
He said he has received constant threats since that day and his 76-year-old mother had human faeces thrown at her while she raked her front garden.
Julian Khater and George Tanios
Julian Khater received an 80-month sentence for firing pepper spray in the face of Officer Brian Sicknick during the 6 January riot.
Mr Sicknick died after suffering multiple strokes following the riot, though an autopsy said the strokes were not directly related to the events of the day.
At the same trial in 2023, George Tanios who accompanied Mr Khater that day was sentenced to five months time served after the assault charge against him was dropped.
Craig Sicknick, brother of Brian, expressed his disgust at Mr Khater’s release and called Donald Trump "pure evil".
"The man who killed my brother is now president," he told the Reuters news agency.
Rachel Powell
Rachel Powell is not a member of a militia.
But she was clearly visible in videos in her pink bobble hat smashing windows of the Capitol on 6 January and became representative of the ‘ordinary’ Trump supporter who turned violent on that day.
At the time of the Capitol attack, she was a single mother of eight and grandmother of six residing in Mercer County, Pennsylvania.
She showed off her ‘J6’ tattoo to media as she was released and described the wait for her release.
"It’s like when you’re six years old and you know that Santa’s coming in the morning," she said.
Brian Jackson
Brian Jackson only served a few months of his three-year sentence handed down last August, for hurling an American flag at police officers.
During his trial, his defence lawyers urged the judge to disregard the white supremacist tattoos on their client’s body, which include a large swastika, or the text messages in evidence where Mr Jackson employed racial slurs to describe police in Washington, DC, because his best friend was African American.
Keith Packer
Keith Packer became one of the faces of 6 January when he was pictured wearing a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ t-shirt in the Capitol, with ‘work brings freedom’, the English translation of the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ Auschwitz sign, and ‘staff’ written on the back.
The Virginian had already completed his 75-day sentence, but it too has now been commuted.
Commutations and Pardons
President Trump commuted sentences of nine Oath Keepers and five Proud boys and full pardons to everyone else meaning more than 250 prisoners are being released, but he also pardoned more than 1,000 non-violent offenders.
Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert joined a crowd of supporters outside a Washington, DC prison as they waited for more to be released.
"I'll be the first member of Congress to offer them a guided tour of the Capitol," she said.
Ms Boebert famously gave guided tours to some of the rioters on 5 January 2021.
President Trump vowed to go after his enemies during his election campaign but hasn’t mentioned any sort of retribution against prosecutors of 6 January prisoners.
However, Joe Biden’s pre-emptive pardoning of the 6 January committee shows it is clearly something people are worried about.
Following 6 January 2021, there was a huge online effort to try to identify the thousands of rioters from social media videos.
I spoke to a number of those online sleuths who spent countless hours identifying suspects before reporting them to authorities.
The operator of the Twitter account ‘capitol hunters’, who did not want to be identified, said he was less worried about retribution from the released prisoners than he was about the new administration.
"The biggest danger right now is not random violence and harassment but Kash Patel in charge of the FBI," he said.
"The danger now is, as it was on Jan 6, political violence orchestrated from the top with some degree of plausible deniability."
