The pace of FBI arrests and the opening of new Jan. 6 criminal cases quickened so much in late 2023 and early 2024 that District of Columbia federal courts could bend under the weight.
In the past two months, 93 people have been arrested and charged, according to Department of Justice (DOJ) reports.
At the current rate, some 445 new cases could hit the docket in 2024—more than in 2022 and 2023, according to one estimate.
In total, up to March 6, at least 1,358 people have been arrested by the FBI and criminally charged by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for crimes related to Jan. 6.
If the current trend is to hold, total arrests could be 2,150 by the time the statute of limitations on Jan. 6 crimes expires in early 2026, according to Jacob Rugh, associate professor of sociology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Mr. Rugh and researcher Isabella Felin have been publishing Jan. 6 statistics and data visualization on X and Instagram since August 2022.
William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who has represented more than 50 Jan. 6 defendants, said he noticed an upswing in cases starting in September 2023.
“Within the past two months, three months, it seems like you’re seeing six, eight, 10 a week,” Mr. Shipley said on Feb. 23 during an Epoch Times panel discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
“Every day, every day you see two or three more,” Mr. Shipley said. “My own view: it’s a political operation. Just my personal opinion. I think the Department of Justice, the Biden administration, is committed to continuing to keep this story front and center for purposes of the campaign.”
Mr. Shipley said there was a six- to eight-month pause in arrests and prosecutions starting in early 2023 due to the strain Jan. 6 cases put on D.C. federal courts.
“You’ve got a five-year statute of limitations, you don’t need to arrest everybody and prosecute them in the first 18 months, and there was a pause,” Mr. Shipley said. “There was a clear period of time where there weren’t arrests of any significant number happening.”
The top arrest states include Florida (129), Texas (104), Pennsylvania (93), California (90), New York (80), Ohio (71), and Virginia (67). Together they comprise nearly 50 percent of all Jan. 6 defendants, according to research by Mr. Rugh.
About 63 percent of Jan. 6 criminal cases have been adjudicated and defendants sentenced, according to DOJ figures. About 58 percent of defendants were given jail or prison time, 19 percent received home detention, and another 3.5 percent received a combination.
Of the 769 defendants who pleaded guilty to charges, 69 percent were for misdemeanors and 31 percent for felonies, the DOJ reports.
Some 1,276 defendants were charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, and 486 were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers.
More than 350 were hit with the controversial “corruptly obstructing, influencing or impeding an official proceeding” charge. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 16 on a challenge to how the DOJ has used 2002-era corporate fraud statutes to prosecute Jan. 6 defendants for interrupting the counting of Electoral College votes.
Perfect Conviction Rate
Perhaps the most remarkable Jan. 6 statistic comes from jury boxes in the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington D.C.
Every one of the more than 100 Jan. 6 defendants who chose a jury trial were found guilty of at least some of the charges. That’s a perfect 100-percent conviction rate for federal prosecutors, a statistic cited repeatedly in change-of-venue motions. One hundred percent of those motions have been denied.
Mr. Shipley told The Epoch Times that the DOJ’s historical conviction rate in the District of Columbia is about 65 percent, lower than the 90 percent that is “more typical” in other federal court districts.
He said, “The way the question needs to be framed today and put before the judges again is, ‘How many trials and how high a conviction rate is necessary before the judges start to consider maybe it’s not the evidence but the jurors?’”
District of Columbia jurors seated on Jan. 6 cases “are simply not open to listening to explanations from defendants who testify, or accept any of the ‘progress’ against the evidence made by defense counsel in cross-examination,” Mr. Shipley said.
The DOJ has stated since Jan. 6 that finding, arresting, and prosecuting those who were at the U.S. Capitol is a top priority, carried out at “unprecedented speed and scale.” The FBI launched the largest investigation in its history in response to Jan. 6.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, paints Jan. 6 in the dramatic tones of warfare as he pledges prosecutors will continue their work unabated into 2024 and beyond.
“In scenes often reminiscent of a medieval battle, officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with members of the invading force, many of whom carried dangerous weapons including firearms, chemical sprays, tasers, stabbing weapons and makeshift weapons across the Capitol [grounds] and in the Capitol itself,” Graves said on Jan. 6, 2024.
Jan. 6 was “likely the largest single-day mass assault of law enforcement officers in our nation’s history,” Mr. Graves said.
The preamble to the DOJ’s monthly statistical update on Jan. 6 cases states: “The Department of Justice’s resolve to hold accountable those who committed crimes on January 6, 2021, has not, and will not, wane.”
Mr. Shipley said the pace of arrests helps perpetuate the idea that supporters of former President Donald Trump comprise a threat to society.
“They want to continue to have that argument that some portion of the political opposition is actually a criminal element,” he said. “They use the branding of all these J6 defendants to say, ‘See that sliver of the MAGA movement, they’re insurrectionists, they’re foes of democracy.’”
The prosecution posture was set early on.
Prosecution Machine
Not even three weeks after the Jan. 6 incursion, the DOJ named senior prosecutors to go after the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and other alleged “white nationalist” groups, according to internal documents obtained by Judicial Watch.
A document dated Jan. 25, 2021, named assistant U.S. attorneys to investigate and prosecute white nationalists and militias, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, founder of the Oath Keepers who in 2023 was sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges, was named as an early target in a DOJ list obtained by Judicial Watch.
Mr. Rhodes was added to the target list on Jan. 11, 2021, and his case assigned to FBI special agent Michael Palian, who testified against Mr. Rhodes and other defendants in the first Oath Keepers trial in 2022. Mr. Rhodes was not indicted and arrested until Jan. 13, 2022.
“I’m not at all surprised that I was added to the target list on Jan. 11, 2021, long before there could have been any actual substantive investigation into me,” Mr. Rhodes told The Epoch Times in an email. “Goes to show that ‘show me the man, I’ll show you the crime’ was exactly their M.O.”
Mr. Rhodes said the media set the tone for such a focus on the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
“The fixation on the Oath Keepers came first from the mass media, which immediately in the hours and days after the Trump supporters entered the Capitol began to highlight the row of Oath Keepers walking up the steps and breathlessly calling it a ‘military stack formation’ and alleging that the Oath Keepers were leading the crowd,” Mr. Rhodes said.
“Total nonsense. But since Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were already the two groups the leftist media loved to demonize and focus on,” Mr. Rhodes said, “no surprise those two groups became the focus of print and cable ‘news’ coverage of Jan. 6, spinning the false narrative that Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were ‘central’ to the events of Jan. 6 or were the ‘leaders.’”
Rapid Indictment Team
According to the DOJ draft plan, a branch would be established for “Priority Incidents and Subjects,” including the Jan. 6 pipe bombs, the shooting of Ashli Babbitt outside the Speaker’s Lobby, the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, use-of-force allegations against Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police officers, and assaults on federal officers by rioters.
Another branch was to be established for priority investigations and rapid indictments and prosecution of Jan. 6 subjects. A branch would be established for “Advanced Litigation Support,” including mass data collection, discovery for defendants, and technology support to “store, process, analyze, and produce the unprecedented amount of data.”
Judicial Watch obtained the plan as part of a 2021 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the DOJ.
“These documents detail a troubling and unprecedented deployment of federal resources to prosecute Americans caught up in the January 6 disturbance,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The documents seem to describe a massive political and spy operation masquerading as a law enforcement operation.”
Treniss Evans, a former Jan. 6 defendant and founder of the legal advocacy group Condemned USA, said the prosecution efforts are squarely aimed at harming President Trump.
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