Full, Complete and Unconditional. On Night One, He Pardoned Every Last One of Them.

The document in the photograph above is Proclamation 10887, signed this evening in the Oval Office while the inauguration confetti was still being swept. It is two pages long. It took four years of investigations, roughly 1,500 criminal cases, hundreds of guilty pleas and jury verdicts, and the sworn testimony of the officers who bled in the doorways... and it unmade essentially all of it before dinner.

Read that sentence carefully, because it is doing something audacious. The "grave national injustice" is not the mob, the beatings, the gallows or the chant. It is the prosecution of them. The injustice, in the official position of the United States government as of tonight, is that consequences happened.

I. WHAT THE PAPER DOES

Three moves, in descending order of ceremony. First, it commutes the sentences of fourteen named men to time served, a list that reads like the leadership org chart of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys seditious-conspiracy trials: Stewart Rhodes (18 years), Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and the rest. Second, it grants "a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021." All. Third, it orders the Attorney General to dismiss every pending January 6 indictment, with prejudice, meaning forever.

Note the fine print that isn't fine at all: Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys chairman serving the longest sentence of the entire docket (22 years, seditious conspiracy), is not on the commutation list. He did not need to be. Because he was convicted, the blanket clause reaches him, and a commutation would merely have shortened his sentence. The pardon erases it. The man with the heaviest verdict of January 6 got the fullest mercy in the document, by design of the drafting. He was out of prison within hours, telling cameras he did nothing wrong.

That was January 12. The men convicted of assaulting police officers with poles, chemical spray and stolen riot shields were pardoned tonight along with everyone else. "Obviously" turns out to have had a shelf life of eight days.

II. THE LEDGER OF THE FORGIVEN

This site has been keeping its own docket of January 6 since the night it happened. Here is what tonight's signature does to it, name by name.

THE MAN	THE RECORD	THE SENTENCE	TONIGHT
Kevin Seefried	Carried the Confederate battle flag through the Capitol; convicted of threatening a Black officer with the flagpole	3 years	Pardoned in full
Robert Keith Packer	Wore the "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt; told the FBI he chose it "because I was cold"	75 days	Pardoned in full
Timothy Hale-Cusanelli	Said "Hitler should have finished the job," per Navy interviews of his coworkers; among the first through the breach	4 years	Pardoned in full
Enrique Tarrio	Proud Boys chairman; seditious conspiracy; longest sentence of the docket	22 years	Pardoned in full
Stewart Rhodes	Oath Keepers founder; seditious conspiracy	18 years	Commuted, released tonight

Every entry in that middle column was proven in a federal courtroom, to a judge or a jury, under the rules of evidence, mostly on the defendants' own video. None of it is contested tonight. It is simply forgiven, and the forgiving is the point: you do not pardon the flag and the sweatshirt by accident, in a document you signed on your first evening in office, as close to a first official act as scheduling allowed.

III. WHAT IT SAYS TO THE MEN IN UNIFORM

Recall what the officers put on the record, under oath, in 2021: Officer Harry Dunn testifying that a woman in a pink MAGA shirt answered his vote with the slur and that twenty people chanted it back at him, "no one had ever, ever called me a n***** while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer". More than 140 officers injured. One of them asking a hearing room, in earnest, "Is this America?"

Tonight the government of the United States answered him. The people who screamed the word, swung the poles and built the gallows this site photographed on the night itself are, as a class, forgiven, celebrated and released, and the years of work that held any of them to account is the "grave national injustice" requiring repair. The proclamation calls this "national reconciliation." Reconciliation has a specific history in this country as the polite word for the arrangement in which white men who took up arms are welcomed back and the people they aimed at absorb the cost, and the archive on how that bargain worked out the last time runs to some length.

Four years ago we wrote that the crowd had told us what the day was, and that the pressure would come to file it under words with no color in them. The pressure won the election. The filing is now official, notarized and postmarked night one. This page keeps its own files, and in ours, January 6 still says what the flag said... and the pardon now says it in the president's hand.