Donald Trump has promised to pardon his January 6 rioters, telling Kristen Welker of Meet the Press last month, “Yeah, most likely, I’ll do it very quickly.” He reiterated as much in a news conference on Tuesday, saying, “I’ll be making major pardons, yes.” The scope of the pardons remains unknown—with more than a thousand people who have been convicted of federal crimes connected to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and hundreds more who have open cases—but one question overshadows the rest: Will Trump even pardon the hundreds of rioters who, as the Department of Justice emphasized this week, were charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder”? When Welker asked him as much—whether he “was going to consider pardoning even those who pleaded guilty to crimes, including assaulting police officers”—Trump twice dodged the question.
Joining Trump in such dodges are major police unions, including those representing officers who were assaulted on January 6. The Fraternal Order of Police, a national police union that endorsed Trump for president, has been quiet on the question of whether Trump should pardon rioters who attacked police, and the head of the FOP’s Capitol Police chapter on Monday declined to comment to The Washington Post (even while Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger came out against such pardons). The New Republic asked six additional police unions, which represent some of the officers charged in January 6–related offenses, if they supported the pardons. None of them responded.
Police unions are political organizations more than they are labor organizations. They’re not press-shy in general, and especially not when they’re asked to defend police officers. And yet, police unions, whose own members were attacked on January 6, have gone silent about whether their attackers might get pardoned. It would seem they’re reluctant to take a stand that could be at odds with Trump—more willing to appear hypocritical than to run afoul of MAGA. But there’s another way of looking this. There’s nothing contradictory about these unions’ implicit—and some of their members’ explicit—support for January 6 rioters. It’s merely another instance of the cops doing what they always do: allying with power.
Trump’s plan to pardon rioters is one strand of his broader rewrite of January 6 from a “heinous attack,” as he once called it, into “a day of love.” His story is the one many of his supporters have long been telling: The rioters weren’t criminals, but true patriots. Of the more than 1,500 people charged in connection with January 6, about 1,100 people have been convicted and sentenced; more than 700 of them have served out their sentence. Three hundred people who have been charged still have open cases; of those, about 180 people were charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder, both of which are felony offenses.” So far, more than 100 cases are set to go to trial in 2025. There are also close to 200 more cases that the FBI has presented to federal prosecutors for possible charges.
Not all of these cases involve police officers who were assaulted. The Department of Justice has stated that around 140 police officers were assaulted that day and that 608 people have been charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers.” I found around two dozen instances of current and former law enforcement officers who were charged with committing criminal offenses on January 6; some involved physically assaulting officers, many others involved obstruction of officers. (An earlier study identified 28 current and former officers who had been charged as of January 6, 2022, with 12 having been charged with assault.) A few of these officers were involved in some of the most violent attacks that day. Some were also active in the larger “Stop the Steal” effort, like Alan Hostetter, a former police chief and “Stop the Steal” organizer from southern California who was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison on four charges, including bringing a dangerous weapon to the Capitol.
Some were current officers. Karol Chwiesiuk, a Chicago cop who wore a CPD hoodie to the Capitol, sent several messages while inside the Capitol on January 6, including a racial slur and a selfie from inside Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley’s office. He was relieved of his police duties pending an internal investigation, a CPD spokesperson told NPR. Chwiesiuk was sentenced in 2024 to three years’ probation. The president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police did not respond to my request for comment.
Some of the rioters had been law enforcement officers for decades. Thomas Webster, a retired 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, was sentenced to 10 years for assaulting a police officer with a metal flagpole. He once was a member of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s security detail. Robert Fisher, a retired Boston police officer who was on the force for more than 20 years, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for assaulting an officer. Neither the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of New York nor the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association responded to my request for comment on Trump’s January 6 pardons.
Some January 6 rioters with law enforcement backgrounds had links to militia groups. A former police officer in North Carolina, Laura Steele, was sentenced to 12 months in prison, charged with several members of the Oath Keepers on January 6, for conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, preventing an officer from discharging their duty, and destroying evidence after the fact. The North Carolina Fraternal Order of Police did not respond to my request for comment.
Some of the police officers who were assaulted that day went public with their sense of being abandoned by law enforcement unions and elected officials. “After January 6th, neither myself or any other officer I spoke with who experienced that day ever had any outreach from the National Fraternal Order of Police,” Michael Fanone, a D.C. officer at the time, told CNN about six months after the attack. “That day officers were beaten and brutalized. Trump never reached out to us,” said another D.C. officer, Daniel Hodges, at a Biden campaign press conference in 2024. Hodges was the officer recorded, in a widely seen video, as he was crushed violently in a door at the Capitol. “You can’t call yourself pro law enforcement when you inflame and encourage political violence at every turn.”
In July 2021, the national FOP released a statement, seemingly in response to testimony from officers during the January 6 committee hearings. “There seems to be some confusion in the media and among paid law enforcement ‘experts’ as to where the FOP stands on the January 6, 2021 riots,” it stated. “Those who participated in the assaults, looting, and trespassing must be arrested and held to account.” But now that those who were held to account are on the verge of being pardoned, the FOP has suddenly clammed up.
It’s not like police unions have a history of staying out of political fights. Police unions established themselves by promoting the unions not merely as a way to protect their members’ rights but as essential for maintaining “law and order.” Police unions today express their power most forcefully with their defense of members who kill civilians, particularly from public outrage, which police unions often characterize as an attack on police. Just six months before the January 6 attack on the Capitol, police unions were out in force condemning the protest movement in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
This no doubt must be disorienting for the officers who were on duty at the Capitol on January 6, just as it was for them that day to see “Thin Blue Line” flags and other pro-police iconography sported by the people who were assaulting them. According to Hodges, the rioters were confused that the police hadn’t joined them. “The terrorists alternated between attempting to break our defenses and shouting at or attempting to convert us,” he testified before the January 6 committee. Some of those “terrorists” were current and former officers, a fact that must baffle those, like Hodges, who defended the Capitol but which is less confounding when considered within the broader context of policing in America, particularly in the Trump era. Police are rarely held accountable by law enforcement when they violate the law, so why would they expect the consequences for their conduct on January 6 to be any different? Why, especially, would cops expect to be held accountable when the president of the United States had urged them on?
