More than three years after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Department of Justice is continuing to pursue those who participated through hundreds of aggressive prosecutions. That includes Donald Trump, whose political future and personal freedom may depend on whether a jury believes he is to blame for the violence. But the intensity of the Biden DOJ’s crackdown on Jan. 6 offenders has stirred controversy, drawn scrutiny from the Supreme Court in Fischer v. United States, and become a central focus of Trump’s third presidential campaign. In this series, Riot revisited: Jan. 6, Justice, and Capitol Consequences, the Washington Examiner will look at the legal weaknesses in the DOJ’s efforts to punish Jan. 6 defendants and the future of those cases should Trump reclaim the White House.
Jan. 6 defendant Daniel Goodwyn remembers what it felt like when a federal judge ordered his computer to be monitored by the government for alleged disinformation as part of his sentence for entering and remaining in the Capitol that day three years ago.
“It feels Orwellian,” Goodwyn, a 35-year-old from Corinth, Texas, told the Washington Examiner when asked about the computer monitoring program put in place by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton. Goodwyn said he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as a citizen journalist for an independent website known as StopHate.com. He entered the building via the Senate wing door at 3:32 p.m. and went inside the Capitol for no more than “a couple of minutes,” according to his criminal affidavit.
For the brief time he went in, Goodwyn would spend weeks behind bars and pay thousands of dollars.
As former President Donald Trump‘s 2024 election campaign marches full steam into a season marred by criminal trials, the Republican nominee has labeled Jan. 6 defendants like Goodwyn as “hostages” and “political prisoners,” with promises to pardon them if he is reelected after the 2024 election. In all, more than 1,350 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 protest, and prosecutors have gained more than 950 convictions.
Trump has led a chorus of critics who say the Justice Department has treated defendants too harshly and used more aggressive law enforcement tactics against Jan. 6 defendants than in nearly any other situation.
Goodwyn’s trial judge, a George W. Bush appointee who has been a jurist since 2001, fell under recent scrutiny by Republicans when he made a controversial appearance on CNN. But the judge sustained an even greater blow when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit published a March 26 mandate telling Walton to end and remove the computer monitoring he had issued as part of Goodwyn’s judgment in the case on June 15, 2023.
Walton has presided over dozens of cases for Jan. 6 defendants and has made several pointed jabs against the former president, including during one defendant’s hearing at which he claimed Trump does not “care about democracy but only about power.” His comments to CNN on March 29 even resulted in a long-shot ethics complaint filed by Mike Davis, a Trump ally and founder of the right-leaning Article III Project.
After accepting a plea agreement from federal prosecutors, Goodwyn was sentenced to 60 days in prison, a year of supervised release, a $2,500 fine, and a $500 restitution. He received credit for time served with three months of supervised release and received credit for the three weeks he stayed in pretrial detention. He finished his incarceration at the Federal Correctional Institution at Bastrop, Texas, on Aug. 25, 2023.
“I still haven’t heard of any other judge having this imposed on another defendant,” Goodwyn said, confirming to the Washington Examiner that his judge imposed the monitoring program after the defendant told his Jan. 6 story during a March 14, 2023, interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
For all Goodwyn has been through, he is part of a larger cohort of criminal defendants who claim to have faced unequal treatment by the criminal justice system over their alleged misdeeds from that day. While dozens of defendants like Goodwyn faced pretrial detention in the weeks and months after the riot, a Washington Examiner review of hundreds of cases found that 15 people charged in relation to the protest are still being held pretrial at the order of federal judges, many of whom are accused of assaulting law enforcement during the Capitol attack.
Though many pretrial detentions have largely ended, dozens more defendants were held in Washington, D.C.’s jail as of October 2022, according to an October 2022 letter from 34 inmates asking to be sent to the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay if conditions did not improve.
Yet the federal government has not stopped making defendants out of protesters from the Capitol riot, having arrested several notable figures in the media, including one as early as last month.
Steve Baker, who has written articles about the Capitol riot for Blaze News, surrendered himself to authorities in Texas on March 1 on allegations that he entered the complex amid the mob more than three years ago. Last September, a judge sentenced Infowars host Owen Shroyer to two months behind bars on misdemeanor counts for entering a restricted area, for leading a march outside the Capitol complex and leading protestors in a chant. And more recently, a 24-year-old conservative social media influencer named Isabella DeLuca was arrested on March 18 for allegedly stealing a table used to assault law enforcement as hundreds of Trump supporters entered the Capitol, according to a criminal complaint.
Perhaps one of the most stunning Jan. 6 cases that has not ended in a plea agreement was the trial for Colorado-based woman Rebecca Lavrenz, who is known in conservative circles as the “praying grandma.” Lavrenz was convicted earlier this month of four misdemeanor charges, including disorderly conduct and parading or picketing.
The 71-year-old great-grandmother and owner of a bed-and-breakfast business where she lives roughly 14 miles northeast of Colorado Springs could be sentenced to up to a year in prison and ordered to pay fines of more than $200,000, which excludes legal fees. Lavrenz said she felt compelled by God to drive across the country to the “Stop the Steal” rally more than three years ago and pray for the nation, adding that the “whole reason I went to the Capitol was to pray.”
Days later, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney’s Office told reporters that it is not investigating pro-Palestinian demonstrators who paraded through the halls of the Capitol basement on April 10, raising claims of a double standard of justice for Trump supporters who paraded through the Capitol three years ago.
The Washington Examiner spoke to one notorious defendant who said he was arrested for “filming inside the Capitol,” an act prosecutors said amounts to illegally entering restricted grounds.
“When I was filming inside the Capitol, I know this may be hard to believe, but I never thought for a second I would be doing federal prison time for filming,” said Anthime Gionet, also known as “Baked Alaska” in online circles.
Gionet was sentenced to 60 days in prison with two years probation for one misdemeanor count of knowingly entering restricted grounds. He told the Washington Examiner he still encounters tremendous hurdles when he travels on airlines.
“Every single time I fly still to this day, I have to arrive to the airport hours ahead,” Gionet said, also claiming that “the airline has to call the Department of Homeland Security and ask me questions about firearms and all sorts of stuff.”
The government thus far has a 100% success rate for Jan. 6 defendants who have taken their case to trial, albeit some of the charges haven’t stuck in trials. The Supreme Court is presently weighing whether the federal government was too heavy-handed when charging hundreds of defendants with an obstruction of an official proceeding statute, a case that could result in revisiting cases that have already been tried, depending on how the high court rules.
But Trump has told nearly everyone facing charges that day that “it’s going to be OK.”
“What you’ve suffered is just ridiculous,” Trump said before making a fateful promise to pardon most defendants during a Bedminster, New Jersey, event last August. “People who have been treated unfairly are going to be treated extremely, extremely fairly.”
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To defendants like Goodwyn, Trump’s promise is one that will greatly hinge on whether he will continue to support the former president past his reelection effort.
“Trump needs to pardon everyone. He doesn’t need to [go] through and decide whether or not to do that for everyone,” Goodwyn said.
