WASHINGTON (States Newsroom) — Five years after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the struggle to define the event and assign blame carried on in events across the city Tuesday that remained nonviolent, though still disturbing.
A crowd of no more than a few hundred of President Donald Trump’s supporters commemorated the deadly attack with a somewhat subdued march from the Ellipse to the Capitol that was in stark contrast to the riot five years ago.
Inside the Capitol, U.S. House Democrats gathered in a small meeting room, apparently unable to secure larger accommodations for an unofficial hearing that largely rehashed the findings of a House committee that spent 2022 investigating the attack.
Trump, meanwhile, addressed House Republicans three miles west at the Kennedy Center. In an hour-plus address, he blamed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the violence on Jan. 6, 2021 and recommended the GOP lawmakers pass laws to make election fraud more difficult. Trump’s claim that his 2020 election loss was due to fraud sparked the 2021 attack.
“Our elections are crooked as hell,” he said, without citing evidence.
House Dems blast pardons
Inside the Capitol, at a morning event that U.S. House Democrats organized and in which Republicans didn’t take part, lawmakers and experts criticized Trump’s pardons of people involved in the 2021 attack, one of his first acts after returning to office last year.
They also decried his continued recasting of the events of the day.
White House officials launched a webpage Tuesday that blamed the attack on Democrats, again including Pelosi, and restated the lie that initiated the attack: The 2020 election that Trump lost was marred by fraud and should not have been certified.
“Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6,” the page reads. “…In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.”
Pelosi at the hearing on Tuesday condemned Trump’s version of the attack.
“Today, that president who incited that insurrection continues to lie about what happened that day,” the California Democrat said.
Other Democrats and their invited witnesses also described the pardons as signaling that the president accepted — and even encouraged — his supporters to pursue illegal means of keeping him in power.
Brendan Ballou, a former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor who resigned shortly after Trump’s 2025 pardons, told the panel the executive action sent Trump supporters the “clear message” they were above the law.
“The January 6 pardons also fit into a broader narrative of what’s going on with this administration, that if people are sufficiently loyal and willing to support the president, either in words or financially, they will be put beyond the reach of the law,” he added. “It means that quite literally for a certain group of people right now in America, the law does not apply to them.”
Former ‘MAGA granny’ testifies
Homeland Security Committee ranking Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi led the panel discussion, with Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland and several others also sitting in on it.
The first panel of witnesses included Ballou, other experts and Pamela Hemphill, a former Trump supporter from Idaho who traveled to the nation’s capital five years ago to “be part of the mob” in support of the president before becoming an advocate for reckoning with the day’s violence.
An emotional Hemphill, 72 and once known as “MAGA granny,” apologized to U.S. Capitol police officers.
“Once I got away from the MAGA cult and started educating myself about January the 6th, I knew what I did was wrong,” Hemphill told the panel. “I pleaded guilty to my crimes because I did the crime. I received due process and the DOJ was not weaponized against me.
“Accepting that pardon would be lying about what happened on January the 6th,” she added.
She explained her decision to decline Trump’s blanket pardon of offenders convicted of crimes related to the attack, saying it papered over the misdeeds of people involved in the riot. She implored others not to accept revisions of the narrative about what happened in the attack.
Subsequent panels included current and former House members, including two, Republican Adam Kitzinger of Illinois and Democrat Elaine Luria of Virginia, who sat on the committee tasked with investigating the attack.
Flowers for Ashli Babbitt
The crowd of marchers, which included pardoned Jan. 6 attack participants, gathered in the late morning to retrace their path to the U.S. Capitol five years ago.
Organizers billed the march as a memorial event to honor Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by U.S. Capitol Police during the riot in 2021 as she attempted to break into the House Speaker’s lobby.
The crowd of roughly a couple hundred walked from the Ellipse, where Trump spoke to rallygoers in 2021, to just outside the Capitol grounds, where police contained the small crowd on the lawn north of the Reflecting Pool.
Law enforcement officers permitted Babbitt’s mother, Michelle Witthoeft, and a few others to walk closer to the Capitol to lay flowers at roughly 2:44 p.m. Eastern, the time they say Babbitt died.
A group of counterprotesters briefly approached the demonstration, yelling “traitors.” Police quickly formed two lines between the groups, heading off any clashes.
Proud Boys former leader on-site
Among the crowd was former Proud Boys national leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. Trump commuted Tarrio’s sentence upon taking office for his second term.
While looking on at marchers, Tarrio told States Newsroom he was “just supporting.”
“It’s not my event. I’m just trying to help them with organizing and marching people down the street, I guess. But we’re here for one purpose, and that’s to honor the lives of Ashli Babbitt and those who passed away that day.”
When asked if marchers were also honoring the police officers who died in the days and months after the attack, Tarrio said he mourned “any loss of life” but added “I heard some suicides happened. I don’t know. I haven’t really looked into that. I’ve been in prison.”
U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick suffered injuries during the riot, according to the Capitol Police. He died the following day from natural causes, according to the District of Columbia Office of the Medical Examiner.
Four responding police officers died by suicide in the following days and months.
As the march continued, a group of Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police officers on bicycles stopped Tarrio and asked him to confirm the march route to avoid any “confusion.”
When counterprotesters began to heckle the Jan. 6 attack supporters, Tarrio waved the marchers forward, “C’mon, c’mon, keep moving.”
Jan. 6 rioter Rasha Abual-Ragheb, 45, of New Jersey, addressed the crowd earlier and thanked “Daddy Trump” for her pardon. Abual-Ragheb, who pleaded guilty to parading, demonstrating and picketing in the U.S. Capitol, showed off a tattoo on her arm reading “MAGA 1776.”
Willie Connors, 57, of Bayonne, New Jersey, stood on the edge of the crowd with a yellow “J6” flag tied around his neck. Connors said he didn’t enter the Capitol during the 2021 attack, but said he was in the district that day to protest the 2020 presidential election, which he falsely claimed was “robbed” from Trump.
“Donald Trump, I’ll take the bullet for that man. He’s my president,” Connors said.
