One woman rushed up and greeted a J6er she knew after he was released.
WASHINGTON—One day after President Donald J. Trump pardoned 1,500 Jan. 6 participants and commuted others’ sentences, not all those held at the D.C. Central Detention Facility had been released.
“It’s a very slow drip,” Chaplain Joshua Macias told The Epoch Times just after 7 p.m. on Jan. 21.
He was one of the supporters who had gathered to wait across the street from the D.C. jail, which local law enforcement were guarding. They held American flags and listened to music as they waited in the freezing weather.
At one point, a group of women gathered to do the Trump dance.
Proud Boy Tom Vournas was released a few minutes before 7 p.m. A woman, Stephanie Liu, rushed up to greet him. The New York resident said she had regularly interacted with him during his incarceration.
“He’s very spiritual,” she told The Epoch Times. “He told me, ‘I don’t blame anybody. I even don’t blame the person who report[ed] me.’”
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, also appeared just hours after his own release after his sentence was commuted.
Rhodes was held at the D.C. jail and an Alexandria, Virginia facility before being sentenced to 18 years in federal prison in 2023. He told The Epoch Times that the conditions in that facility, FCI Maryland, were far better than the two others.
“I’m very lucky,” he said, adding that guards never abused him.
“Most guards are conservative. More guards are Trump supporters,” he said.
One man who said he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 but never faced charges, James Justice, told The Epoch Times that the fateful election certification day four years ago felt like a setup against demonstrators who, in many cases, remained peaceful.
“Any act of violence—that’s not patriotic at all,” he said. “You hurt anybody, you damage our property, you should be serving a sentence or something. But if you didn’t do anything and you’re innocent, you’re walking around waving a flag, they should be pardoned.”
The scene outside the jail, where left-wing protesters were conspicuously lacking, suggests the atmosphere in Trump 2.0 will feel very different, including for the “J6ers,” those arrested in the wake of the breach of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
When Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) visited the throng, she promised to take the J6ers on a tour of the Capitol.
Even as he waited in the frigid weather, uncertain of how long more releases would take, Chaplain Macias remained optimistic.
“Law and order is back,” he said.
The jail directed The Epoch Times’ questions regarding the timeline of releases to the U.S. Marshals. As of press time, the Marshals had not responded to The Epoch Times.
Jackson Richman contributed to this report.