The Further Criminality of the J6 Rioters is Wholly Unsurprising Given the Roots of Political Violence

As reported yesterday in The NY Times and likely dozens of other places, a new study by Lawfare found that roughly one in every sixteen of the January 6 rioters who were granted clemency by President Trump have "been arrested for and charged with—and in the vast majority of cases convicted of—other crimes, at least some of which were actively enabled by the clemency actions." The Lawfare study is the result of painstaking research. By sifting through records in multiple jurisdictions, the study's author, Katherine Pompilio, found more than twice as many instances of re-arrest than had previously been reported. Even so, the updated figure is probably an undercount, as she herself told the Times.

Who could have guessed? The short answer is: anybody who knows anything about political violence. Here's most of the abstract of a 2020 paper:

One of the most consistently supported conclusions in criminology is that prior criminal record predicts subsequent criminal behavior. This connection has been observed in dozens of research projects and is, along with the severity of the offense, the most commonly used criterion for making critical sentencing, parole, and probation decisions. But somewhat surprisingly, there is little empirical research on the connection between prior criminal record and participation in extremist political violence. The findings of the current study show that pre-radicalization criminal behavior, violent or nonviolent, is the single strongest non-ideological predictor of post-radicalization violence among U.S. extremists. We also find that the criminal backgrounds of U.S. extremists vary considerably depending on their ideological affiliations. Individuals on the extremist far-right, especially those motivated by white supremacist views, are substantially more likely to engage in crime prior to radicalizing than are individuals associated with other ideologies. We also find that U.S. extremists rarely specialize in specific crime types  . . . . 

Although the 2020 study looked at prior criminality as a predictor of future political violence, there is every reason to conclude that there is continuity in both directions--that is to say that just as general criminality predicts political violence, so political violence predicts general criminality. The finding that most criminals--including people who engage in political violence--are generalists supports this inference. So does the fact that the people who engage in political violence are much more likely than the general population to have previously been criminals. The fact that they committed past crimes of any sort predicts that they will commit future crimes of all sorts.

Meanwhile, the ideologically asymmetrical finding is telling. Roughly a third of the January 6 defendants had links to far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Meanwhile, the vast majority were white. Putting those facts together, it was entirely predictable that pardoning or issuing clemency to the January 6 rioters would mean pardoning a great many people who would go on to commit additional crimes.

Could Trump have been expected to have known any of that? It's not as though he reads anything. Even so, one would think that somebody close to Trump--such as his Yale Law School-educated Vice President--might have worried that pardoning J6 rioters who then committed additional violent crimes would be a bad look. And indeed, a few days before Trump's 2025 inauguration, J.D. Vance told Fox News that people who committed violence shouldn't receive pardons. However, according to an amazing Axios story from January 22, 2025, Vance wasn't actually against clemency for violent rioters but he thought Trump wouldn't want to issue them pardons because it would look bad. At the time, there was an internal debate among the people who would soon be in the White House about whether to withhold clemency for the most violent of the J6 rioters but the debate ended when Trump impetuously declared: "Fuck it: Release 'em all."

Given the level of incompetence in the current Trump administration and the fact that in the week leading up to Trump's 2025 inauguration, his staff were preparing a great many executive actions, it is possible that no one bothered to think about whether pardoning violent J6 rioters would not merely look bad but would actually lead to increased criminality. If so, then we might say that the administration was recklessly indifferent to the crimes the pardons would enable.

There is, however, a darker possibility: that Trump wanted the pardons to go to everyone not in spite of the fact that he would thereby reward and empower violent criminals but because pardoning "'em all"  would reward and empower violent criminals. Until an authoritarian regime consolidates its power, it cannot fully rely on the regular security forces. It takes time to build up the capacity of an official Praetorian Guard. In the meantime, it is very useful to be able to call upon a standby irregular force of brownshirts. Indeed, such a force can prove useful even after the dictator has control over the official security forces, which is why these irregulars tend to persist in authoritarian regimes, so long as the dictator keeps them sufficiently under heel that they don't assert their power against him.

Finally, and as an aside, I note that the block quote above was from a study published in June 2020 by the National Institute of Justice, which is housed within the Department of Justice. It's a reminder that during Trump's first term many parts of the government continued to operate more or less normally. It is difficult to imagine the current DOJ publishing a paper that includes among its findings the fact that right-wing extremists and especially white supremacists are most likely to engage in political violence. Such research would likely be nixed as woke if the ideological asymmetry was offered as an initial hypothesis or buried if it was a finding that emerged from the data. Indeed, it's a little bit surprising that (at least as of today), the report still exists on a DOJ website.

-- Michael C. Dorf