Five years after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump is using his second term to systematically rewrite what happened — and to reward the people who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
And five years after yelling “kill ’em” at cops during the Capitol riot, one of those protesters is now a senior adviser at Trump’s DOJ.
Jared Wise, a former FBI agent who stormed the Capitol and exited through a broken window, now helps lead internal reviews of Jan. 6 prosecutions.
Trump didn’t just drop the charges against Wise — he gave him a top job investigating the very prosecutors who once charged him.
Trump’s return to the White House has triggered an aggressive effort to erase the reality of Jan. 6 as a violent attempt to subvert democracy — and replace it with a grievance-driven narrative that casts rioters as victims and prosecutors as villains.
He’s pardoned rioters, fired investigators, floated compensation for insurrectionists and elevated Jan. 6 defendants into positions of power, according to reporting by NBC News and NPR.
At least 140 law enforcement officers were injured during the Capitol attack, and millions of dollars in damage were done as pro-Trump mobs tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win.
Immediately after Jan. 6, Republicans broadly condemned the attack. Sen. Ted Cruz famously called it a “terrorist attack” — a comment he later walked back as Trump regained political power.
Recasting that violence as a misunderstanding — or worse, a conspiracy — signals that political loyalty now matters more than accountability or the rule of law.
Trump isn’t just rewriting the story of Jan. 6 — he’s institutionalizing that revision inside the federal government, with consequences that will outlast his presidency.
Trump issued mass pardons to Jan. 6 defendants on his first day back in office, including people convicted of assaulting police.
Career DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents who worked Jan. 6 cases — and members of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team — were fired or pushed out.
Trump has publicly discussed creating a federally funded compensation program for Jan. 6 defendants.
His administration has already paid nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter shot while trying to breach the House Speaker’s Lobby — despite a prior DOJ finding that the shooting was justified.
Trump has said he wants “a lot of money” from the federal government over Smith’s investigation, claiming he was “damaged very greatly.”
Some Republican lawmakers are also threatening lawsuits over the seizure of phone records tied to the 2020 election probe.
As the statute of limitations expires for many Jan. 6 crimes, some former defendants are now working inside Trump’s Justice Department — including individuals caught on video urging rioters to “kill” police officers.
Public opinion among GOP voters has steadily shifted alongside Trump’s relentless false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Former prosecutors say watching Trump normalize the attack is “maddening” and deeply retraumatizing for victims.
“The sky is blue, the Earth is round, and Jan. 6 was a historically violent day,” one former prosecutor told NBC News. “Political convenience does not change the facts.”