Far-Right Leaders Granted Clemency by Trump for Jan. 6 Speak Out

Fresh from being freed by President Trump’s sweeping grants of clemency, two of the nation’s most notorious far-right leaders — Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers militia — spoke out this week.

While the men avoided any declarations about the future of their battered organizations, they asserted unrepentantly that they wanted Mr. Trump to seek revenge on their behalf for being prosecuted in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Before Mr. Trump offered them a reprieve on Monday night, both men had been serving lengthy prison terms — Mr. Tarrio 22 years and Mr. Rhodes 18 years — on seditious conspiracy convictions arising from the roles they played in the storming of the Capitol. The charges they faced and the punishment they got were among the most serious imposed against any of the nearly 1,600 people prosecuted in connection with Jan. 6.

Perhaps for that reason, their remarks, made to largely friendly audiences, were couched in a tone of cautious belligerence.

They were cagey about what sort of profile the organizations they once led would strike in a second Trump administration. But they clearly echoed assertions by the president and some of his allies that those who sought to hold Mr. Trump and the Jan. 6 rioters accountable should themselves face some sort of punishment.

“Success,” Mr. Tarrio said, “is going to be retribution.”

Mr. Tarrio made those comments to Alex Jones, the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist and proprietor of the news outlet Infowars. He called in to Mr. Jones’s show just hours after getting out of a federal prison in Louisiana and immediately thanked Mr. Trump “for helping us through these difficult times and releasing me.”

“Twenty-two years — this is not a short sentence,” he said. “That’s the rest of my life. So Trump literally gave me my life back.”

Mr. Tarrio then began a sustained attack on the criminal trial in Federal District Court in Washington where he and three of his lieutenants were found guilty of sedition — a crime that requires prosecutors to prove that defendants used violent force against the government.

He claimed that the jury was biased and that it was unfair to have held the proceeding in Washington.

“I think they didn’t care about the evidence,” he said of the jurors who convicted him. “They cared about putting Trump supporters in prison.”

The Proud Boys played a central role on Jan. 6 both in confronting the police at the Capitol and in encouraging other rioters to breach police lines. While Mr. Tarrio was not in Washington that day, prosecutors say he helped prepare his compatriots for street fights and remained in touch with them while the mob — with the Proud Boys in the lead — overran the Capitol.

In his first hours of freedom, he was also focused on seeking vengeance against those who investigated and prosecuted the events of Jan. 6. “Now it’s our turn,” Mr. Tarrio declared.

“The people who did this, they need to feel the heat,” he said. “They need to be put behind bars and they need to be prosecuted.”

At a White House news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump was asked whether far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers would now have a place in the political conversation given his expansive efforts to pardon their members or commute their sentences.

“Well, we have to see,” Mr. Trump replied. “They’ve been given a pardon. I thought their sentences were ridiculous and excessive.”

Mr. Rhodes also said he was looking for payback when he showed up on Tuesday afternoon at the local jail in Washington that has held several Jan. 6 defendants over the years and has served as the emotion focal point of protest against the federal prosecutions of the rioters.

He said, for instance, that he hoped Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the F.B.I., would “get in there and clean house” at the bureau. He also accused the people who oversaw his trial of breaking the law.

“What has to happen first,” Mr. Rhodes said, “is that the prosecutors who suborned perjury — that’s a crime — need to be prosecuted for their crimes.”

At his sentencing hearing in 2023, Mr. Rhodes defiantly declared that he was “a political prisoner,” comparing himself to the Soviet-era dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and to the beleaguered main character in the Kafka novel “The Trial.”

Outside the D.C. jail, he was equally unremorseful. When asked how history should remember Jan. 6, he said, “As Patriots’ Day — that we stood up for our country because we knew the election was stolen.”

As for any regrets, he said he had none, adding, “Because we did the right thing.”

The Jan. 6 prosecutions devastated the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as federal agents across the country arrested scores of people from both groups and prosecutors tried and convicted dozens of their members — often with the help of turncoats and informants from within the organizations.

The Oath Keepers in particular can be barely said to exist any longer as a viable entity. And while the Proud Boys dissolved their national leadership group — known as the Elders Chapter — under the weight of the Jan. 6 investigation, many of the group’s local chapters remain active.

Indeed, on Inauguration Day, rank-and-file Proud Boys descended in numbers on Washington for the first time since Jan. 6, marching with a banner congratulating Mr. Trump on his return to the White House. The display of presence on the streets — especially the streets of Washington — suggested that some within the Proud Boys wanted to make a public show of strength.

Mr. Tarrio, however, was somewhat circumspect about the group’s future, delivering his standard answer about the organization.

“I think the future of the club is going to be what it’s always been,” he said, “just a group of men that love America, get around and drink beer and protect Trump supporters from being assaulted.”

As for his own role in the group, he offered a typical winking reply.

“I do have a suggestion for the mainstream media,” he said. “They should stop calling me the ex-Proud Boys leader.”

Mr. Rhodes was equally evasive — though perhaps not quite as smug.

He said he did not know what the future of the Oath Keepers would be, admitting that “I might just decide to hang up my spurs.”

At any rate, he went on, he had other things to think about at the moment. When a reporter outside the D.C. jail asked him what was the first thing he planned to do when he got home, his answer was quick and simple.

“I’m going to report to my probation officer,” he said.