Pardoned Jan. 6 rioter arrested again in Texas, extending brutal pattern

Listen to this article

Speed

At a congressional hearing last week, Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt complained that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee continue to focus on the Jan. 6 attack from five years ago. To hear the Missouri senator tell it, it’s time for the political world to simply move on from the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Among the many problems with Schmitt’s argument is that the relevance of the political violence hasn’t faded at all, especially as many of the rioters who received pardons from Donald Trump run into fresh trouble with the law. Two days before Schmitt’s complaint, Law & Crime reported:

A Jan. 6 rioter from Texas who was pardoned by President Donald Trump and claimed he had “completely changed” since the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack was arrested Sunday and charged with deadly conduct after allegedly threatening a churchgoer with a gun.

Ryan Nichols, 36, is accused of displaying and grabbing the weapon, a pistol, while threatening and confronting a man over a “prior disagreement” in the parking lot of Oak Grove Baptist Church in Harleton, according to local police officials.

If Nichols’ name sounds at all familiar, it might be because the Texan recently announced plans to run for Congress as a Republican, though he withdrew from the race soon after.

He’s the same man who pleaded guilty in 2023 to crimes he committed on Jan. 6, telling a judge he was “very sorry” for the “bad choice” that he made in early 2021. Nichols further claimed that he’d “completely changed” in the wake of the attack.

Three years later, he’s due back in court in early June, where he’ll say whether he intends to plead guilty or not guilty in the wake of his latest arrest.

Just days before Nichols was taken into custody, law enforcement officials in Florida announced a prostitution, human trafficking and child predator sting, which led to the arrest of two more Jan. 6 participants who’d received pardons from the incumbent president.

Two weeks before that, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter reached a plea agreement with prosecutors in North Carolina over charges of sexual exploitation of a minor and possessing sexually explicit images of children

Those developments come three weeks after a different Jan. 6 rioter who received a presidential pardon was sentenced to four years in prison on child pornography charges. Earlier in the month, a different Jan. 6 rioter, who was also rescued by Trump, was sentenced to life in prison for molesting two children.

Around the same time, another pardoned Jan. 6 rioter was charged with threatening a police officer who served at the Capitol. This came roughly a month after the same man was arrested in Minneapolis after destroying an ice sculpture that was outside the state Capitol.

Unfortunately, this is just the start of a larger list of insurrectionists who ran into trouble with the law after receiving clemency from Trump.

In February, for example, a different pardoned Jan. 6 rioter was convicted in Florida of child molestation and exposing himself to children. (The man, Andrew Paul Johnson, attempted to bribe one of his victims by saying the administration would send him money as part of restitution for those who attacked the Capitol.)

One week earlier, another pardoned rioter, Christopher Moynihan, who was arrested after allegedly threatening to assassinate House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated harassment as part of a plea agreement.