Freed Jan. 6 Rioters March To Capitol Demanding More From Trump Administration

WASHINGTON — Dozens of rioters let out of prison by President Donald Trump marked the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by retracing their steps from the White House to the Capitol.

But instead of doing Trump’s bidding, as they’d done five years ago, on Tuesday they asked Trump’s administration to do more for them, even after the president rewarded them with a mass act of executive clemency.

“I am very happy with what the man that sits behind the desk [in the Oval Office] has done. But it’s not enough,” Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys street gang, said at a rally by the White House.

Tarrio said his loyalty to Trump doesn’t extend to any of Trump’s appointees, who he complained have failed to prosecute the people who prosecuted Tarrio and 1,500 other Trump supporters for attacking the Capitol.

“The Justice Department needs to take action,” Tarrio said.

The group marched from the Ellipse to the Capitol, where rally organizer Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by police as she tried to break into a room inside the Capitol, laid flowers on the west side of the building.

“It’s a day Congress let us down and continues to let us down,” Witthoeft said in remarks before the march.

The mass pardon recipients also heckled a police officer after they were escorted down Constitution Avenue and shielded from a small counter-protest. One beneficiary of Trump’s clemency called an officer “a diseased animal” who should be “put down like a dog” for having fought the mob, while someone nearby unleashed a string of slurs.

The former rioters also briefly heckled Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), the lone member of Congress to appear anywhere near the protest.

Nicole Reffitt helped Witthoeft organize the event. She said she did not want members of Congress or the Trump administration involved, explaining they would make it too much of a spectacle. Reffitt, whose husband had been sentenced to seven years in prison for leading a charge onto the Capitol grounds, said she was not dissatisfied with Trump.

“He can only do so much,” Reffitt told HuffPost. “I am dissatisfied that there have been no arrests for obvious lying to Congress. Some of these congressional members have committed worse crimes than any one Jan-sixer on that day.”

Gratitude toward Trump and dissatisfaction toward his administration were common sentiments among the marchers, who wanted more retribution against their perceived enemies as well as restitution for their own suffering behind bars. One banner thanked Trump for the pardons, for instance, while another asked for restitution for time spent in prison.

“I feel like we should be compensated for what was taken from us,” Thomas Smith, who got seven years off his prison sentence for attacking police, told HuffPost. “We were attacked for standing up for what we knew to be a stolen election, and now it’s been proven that it was.”

This is untrue. Trump routinely says he won the 2020 election, but his fraud claims were repeatedly repudiated by courts as well as by several of his own advisers. He was charged with crimes for trying to reverse his election loss, including by summoning a mob to disrupt the congressional certification of the results, but essentially beat the rap by winning the 2024 presidential election, since the Justice Department has a standing policy of not prosecuting sitting presidents.

Smith said the government could make the rioters whole by settling any of several civil lawsuits filed by members of the mob now demanding compensation. The Justice Department has already paid Babbitt’s estate nearly $5 million for her allegedly wrongful death. This week, Democratic members of Congress filed legislation to prevent the Justice Department from offering similar settlements to other rioters.

“Five years after a violent swarm of insurrectionists stormed our nation’s Capitol, assaulted law enforcement officers, and attacked our very democracy, issuing cash payouts to these rioters is unthinkable,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Tuesday in a press release.

After Witthoeft laid the flowers and the crowd began to disperse from the Capitol grounds, a group followed and continued to heckle a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer they claimed had unjustly beaten a female rioter.

A Trump supporter asked the officer if he remembered the guy with a baseball bat. “I wish I would have fucking licked you,” the freed rioter said.