Editor’s Note: We unabashedly and without exception support pardons for all January 6 political prisoners. We hope that President Trump will appreciate the fact that these “criminals” were acting in defense of the Constitution and are being used as examples to dissuade other patriots from engaging in peaceful dissent. Moreover, it has become clear that the “rioting” that took place was instigated by the Deep State and their many operatives in and out of the liberty movement.
The article below from The Epoch Times represents an analysis of the facts and does not necessarily reflect the perspectives of this publication.
(The Epoch Times)—After President-elect Donald Trump won a second term, multiple defendants charged for their roles in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, asked to delay their cases because they anticipate pardons from Trump.
Many were denied, but each nonetheless raised questions about how Trump will handle the cases.
According to data collected by NPR, more than 1,500 people have been charged in relation to Jan. 6, with nearly 1,000 pleading guilty.
At least a dozen cases have been dismissed, while plenty remain with changes following Trump’s election. At the beginning of November, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia announced multiple sentences and guilty verdicts.
Various factors could determine whether these individuals end up avoiding jail time, but perhaps the most important is Trump’s eventual control of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and who will lead that department.
On Nov. 13, Trump announced Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as his pick for attorney general. Gaetz has been critical of the prosecutions and introduced a bill in July that was intended to prevent prosecutors from retaliating against Jan. 6 defendants for seeking resentencing. Gaetz has also questioned federal involvement, stating that Jan. 6 “wasn’t an insurrection” but that it “very well may have been a fedsurrection.”
Assuming the presidency also grants Trump substantial pardon power under the Constitution: Trump has indicated that he’s open to pardoning those charged but left open the possibility that some would face punishment.
“We will treat them fairly,” he said in January 2022. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”
More recently, during an event in July, he was asked about individuals who assaulted officers. He said he would “absolutely” pardon the defendants “if they’re innocent” and added that “they were convicted by a very tough system.”
More than 70 defendants have received a mixed verdict, and so far, more than 1,000 people have been sentenced, with 64 percent receiving prison time, according to NPR data. Some defendants have also taken plea deals.
“I think there’s going to be a complete second look at all of the prosecutions,” Robert Ray, a former Trump impeachment attorney, told The Epoch Times, while noting the large number of cases brought. He added that a second look wouldn’t “necessarily yield a favorable result with regard to each and every defendant, but I think there’s going to be a pretty strenuous exercise of the pardon and commutation power to deal with overreaching [by prosecutors].”
John Pierce, an attorney who has represented Jan. 6 defendants, told The Epoch Times he expects a “blanket pardon,” while Trump–Vance transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the president-elect “will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis.”
Politics of Pardons
It’s unclear which individuals Trump will consider for pardon.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Lori Ulrich, an attorney with the public defender’s office, told The Epoch Times. She is currently representing Joseph Fischer, whose case made it to the Supreme Court this year.
Fischer and other defendants face a myriad of charges, including an obstruction charge the Supreme Court addressed this summer in Fischer v. United States. It’s unclear how Trump’s DOJ will apply that ruling, but the president-elect’s pardons could be influenced by factors such as the politics surrounding his pardons.
“If President Biden either pardons or commutes the sentences for Hunter Biden, that gives President Trump political cover to either pardon or commute the non-violent J6 offenders, [as well as] Peter Navarro, and Steve Bannon, if he chooses to,” John Shu, a constitutional law expert who served in both Bush administrations, told The Epoch Times.
Shu was referring to President Joe Biden’s son, who was convicted in September of various tax offenses. Both of Trump’s former White House advisers, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, could be pardoned after each served a four month sentences for defying subpoenas from the House committee that investigated Jan. 6.
A CBS poll found that three years after the events of Jan. 6, 78 percent of Americans expressed disapproval toward “actions of those who forced their way into the Capitol.”
William Shipley, an attorney for one of the defendants, suggested in a motion on Nov. 10 that the election didn’t reflect well on the DOJ’s efforts.
“Defendant Baker would point out that the ‘people’ on behalf of whom the Government purports to speak made themselves heard clearly on November 5, and that should mean something to the Department of Justice without regard to what Administration is now in charge,” Shipley said in a motion for defendant Stephen Michael Baker.
That motion, which asked for a delay in proceedings, was quickly rejected by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper this month.
Upon entering office, Trump’s pardon power would allow him to commute sentences and pardon convicts who have already served time, such as Ulrich’s client, Riley Williams. Williams was accused of helping to steal then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop. She was found guilty on two felony counts, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on two other counts, including aiding and abetting theft of government property.
Non-Violent Offenders
Shu told The Epoch Times that pardons for non-violent offenders were more politically palatable.
In August, the DOJ said that approximately 140 police officers were assaulted on Jan. 6, while more than 500 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees. It added that “approximately 163 individuals … have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”
Among those are Daniel Ball, who pleaded not guilty but whom the DOJ accused of, among other things, “throwing an explosive device that detonated upon at least 25 officers.” Others included a father-son pair who pleaded guilty in January, and Zachary Alam, who was found guilty last year.
David Gelman, an attorney and former Trump campaign surrogate, told The Epoch Times that re-examining the Jan. 6 prosecutions would have to occur on a “case-by-case basis” but indicated that Trump could consider violence in choosing how to exercise his pardon power.
Trump said at a town hall in 2023 that he was “inclined to pardon many of” the defendants who had been convicted. “I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” he said.
Earlier this year, he started one of his rallies with a recording of the national anthem sung by Jan. 6 prisoners. He also vowed in March that his “first acts” as president would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned,” he wrote on his Truth Social account.
In a motion filed just after the election, one of the Jan. 6 defendants, Anna Lichnowski, asked her judge to postpone sentencing partly on the basis that her offenses were non-violent, making her “a good candidate for a pardon,” according to her attorney.
Lichnowski was one of a series of defendants who filed motions for some kind of delay in their cases after Trump’s victory. Many of them have been denied, including by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who said that Trump’s potential pardon was “irrelevant” to Lichnowski’s case.
“The potential future exercise of the discretionary pardon power, an Executive Branch authority, is irrelevant to the Court’s obligation to carry out the legal responsibilities of the Judicial Branch,” Walton said in a Nov. 7 court order.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, similarly resisted the motions while arguing that the public is interested in a quick administration of justice.
Graves will likely exit the DOJ in Trump’s second term, experts speculated—something that is expected for many prosecutors at the beginning of a new administration. During Trump’s and Biden’s first terms, dozens of prosecutors were asked to leave.
The vast majority of defendants have been charged with a trespassing offense, the use of which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld in October. Defendant Couy Griffin, founder of Cowboys for Trump and a former county commissioner from New Mexico, had asked the court to review the DOJ’s use of this charge against him.
In a 2–1 decision, the court held that the DOJ could apply the trespassing law without proving that he was aware that former Vice President Mike Pence’s presence on the Capitol grounds was the reason for restricting that area.
Obstruction Charge
In June, the Supreme Court held in a 6–3 decision that the DOJ had misinterpreted a financial reform law in attempting to accuse the Jan. 6 defendants of obstructing an official proceeding.
The majority opinion in that case, Fischer v. United States, held that the DOJ erred in its attempt to disentangle two portions of the Sarbanes–Oxley financial reform law (Section 1512(c)(1) and (c)(2)).
The DOJ had argued that the law allowed prosecutions that targeted obstructive conduct in a catch-all way that included methods other than those mentioned at the beginning of the section.
A majority of the Supreme Court, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, disagreed and held: “To prove a violation of §1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so.”
It’s unclear how Trump and his DOJ will apply the Fischer decision to the defendants’ unique circumstances. It carries a 20-year maximum sentence.
In November, the DOJ said that “approximately 259 defendants who, at the time Fischer was decided, were charged with or convicted of violating 18 U.S.C. § 1512 to determine whether the charge should continue to be prosecuted.”
The DOJ said that after Fischer, the government “decided to forgo the Section 1512(c)(2) charge for approximately 96 defendants, will continue to pursue the charge for approximately 13 defendants, and continues to assess the remaining defendants.”
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Approximately 133 were sentenced, and more than half were convicted of that offense and other felonies, according to DOJ data from August.
Austin Alonzo contributed to this report.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
