Pardon recipients tell NR their lives have been devastated by what they believe was a political witch hunt.

If one thing gives Martin Cudo away as not really being a domestic terrorist, it’s his footwear.

When Cudo entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he said, he wasn’t wearing combat boots or even sneakers; he was wearing comfy slip-on Birkenstock clogs.

“I wore slippers to an insurrection,” the Lakeville, Minn., man joked. “I would have worn shoes with laces had I had any idea that I was going to do anything nefarious.”

Cudo, 44, was one of the hundreds of Donald Trump supporters who entered the Capitol building after the president’s January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and during the ensuing riot. But there’s no evidence Cudo engaged in violence that day — a criminal complaint filed against him describes his movements entering the building and taking selfies inside. He said he wasn’t aware at the time of the more raucous fighting on the Capitol’s east side.

But Cudo said his very presence inside the Capitol that afternoon and his eventual arrest in 2023 on charges of entering a restricted building and disorderly conduct cost him a lucrative career and left him virtually unemployable and ostracized in his community.

On Monday night, Cudo was one of the roughly 1,500 people who were pardoned — or in Cudo’s case, had his case dismissed — by Trump in an executive order; the president called the prosecutions a “grave national injustice” and said his action, among the first of his new term, “begins a process of national reconciliation.”

In an interview with National Review, Cudo said he was “very appreciative” of Trump’s pardon but said that even with it, “my life will never be the same.”

“My spirit hasn’t been destroyed, but my life has,” said Cudo, who believes he and other January 6ers were overcharged by overzealous federal prosecutors in what he calls “one of the biggest civil rights abuses against any class of people in modern history.”

Cudo is one of three January 6ers who spoke to National Review this week about their involvement in the riot, how their lives have been affected, and what Trump’s pardon means to them. Like other January 6ers who’ve spoken about that day, they generally downplayed the violence and claimed they saw little if any of it. They said that being prosecuted by a tyrannical government was “devastating” to their lives.

And they said they hope their pardon is just the first step toward making things right.

“Hopefully some sanity is returning back to the way we operate justice in this country,” said Dr. Austin Harris, who runs a Southern California medical clinic and who also entered the Capitol without violence. “I hope at this point that the pardons are the first step into really exposing what was likely completely an unnecessary charging of so many people.”

Jacob Chansley, who gained notoriety as the so-called “Q Shaman,” celebrated receiving a pardon from Trump on Monday. Chansley, who served prison time for his role in the riot, said the government and the mainstream media abused their power in his case.

“They told the whole country that I was a white supremacist, racist, insurrectionist, terrorist,” he told National Review. Imagine, he said, if government agents “broke into your home, kidnapped you, put you in a cell, charged you with a bunch of stuff, made stuff up.”

Not everyone is celebrating Trump’s pardons and sentence commutations, particularly for people who fought with police officers. Many argue that the president and others are minimizing the riot, which forced Congress to evacuate, led to nearly $3 million in damages, and left a dozen officers injured. At least four protesters died or were killed at the scene, including Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by a Capitol police officer. An officer who was pepper-sprayed during the riot collapsed eight hours later and died of a pair of strokes.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrat Kamala Harris accused Trump of “gaslighting” Americans by calling the storming of the Capitol a “day of love.”

Former D.C. Metropolitan police officer Michael Fanone, who says he was attacked by six people during the riot, told CNN that he has “been betrayed by my country” and “by those who supported Donald Trump.”

Officer Daniel Hodges said he was “beaten, crushed, kicked, punched” by rioters. “And all these people were just pardoned by Donald Trump, who says they were the real victims, that they were the patriots.”

While many J6ers argue that they were targeted for their politics by government agents who took little action against similarly violent left-wing rioters in 2020, some critics claim the January 6 riot was worse because it was an effort to block the certification of the 2020 election.

Even some prominent Republicans lawmakers have questioned the pardons and sentence commutations for the most violent protesters.

“Anybody who was convicted of assault on a police officer, I just can’t get there at all. I think it was a bad idea,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told a reporter.

Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota said he would “not defend” Trump’s decision.

But Scott Weinberg, a lawyer in Punta Gorda, Fla., who defended two January 6 clients, including Harris, contends the pardons were justified even though he acknowledges that the Capitol riot was a “tragedy,” albeit one committed by a “bunch of schmoes.”

“Democrat, Republican, or independent, January 6th was a terrible day. It wasn’t the worst day of all time, but it wasn’t nothing,” Weinberg told National Review. “And the problem was, the [Department of Justice] went overboard with these prosecutions, so it turned one injustice into another injustice. And that’s not how we do things in America.”

“These were just a bunch of yahoos that got out of hand, and they should have been prosecuted that way,” he added. “But the government, because of politics, had to make them look like they were a giant terrorist organization.”

Weinberg argued that even the worst of the rioters and the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys militias, including Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio, “have been punished enough.” By pardoning the rioters, Trump “finally ended this entire nonsense,” he said.

‘All Right Guys, Get Out of Here’

Cudo said he had no plans to attend Trump’s January 6 rally but went to Washington, D.C., with his mom and her husband, who’d asked if he’d come “to keep them safe from expected counter-protesters, and just because D.C. is a dangerous place — it can be.”

He said they arrived at the rally location early in the morning, but the gathered crowd was so big that they ended up far back by the Washington Monument.

When the speeches ended, Cudo’s mom and her husband went back to their hotel. Cudo decided to follow the crowd to the Capitol. He’d never been to a protest, he said.

Cudo said he was on the west side of the building, where he recalled people singing and later chanting. He claims that he never saw violence, though he acknowledged he saw officers in riot gear on the Capitol stairs and heard flash bangs going off.

“I didn’t see confrontation between protesters or police,” he said. “My interaction with all the police, like, I was telling them jokes . . . making them smile.”

When the officers stopped blocking the stairs, he said, “everybody cheered and then walked up.” Cudo joined them. He smoked a cigarette, he said, and then entered the Capitol through an open door and snapped some selfies. In all, he said, he was in the building for roughly seven or eight minutes.

He compared the demeanor of the officers to that of bouncers trying to clear people out at bar close. “They were, ‘All right guys, get out of here,’ waving their hand,” he recalled.

Cudo said he initially thought that at worst he’d get hit with a $35 ticket for trespassing, but his perception changed when he got back to his hotel and saw the news coverage. “They were calling us insurrectionists and domestic terrorists,” he said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is not what I saw when I was there, this is not what I experienced.’ I was like, ‘Holy smokes.’”

Exactly a week later, FBI agents interviewed Cudo back in Minnesota. The FBI had been tipped off by a friend of Cudo’s of 25 years — they were in the same fantasy football league, drank beers together in the garage, Cudo recalled giving him friendly “noogies.” Cudo described the friend who tipped off the FBI as a reasonable, center-left guy, just as Cudo considers himself a reasonable, center-right guy.

“The same political environment that would bring somebody to fly to D.C. for a rally is the same political environment that would make a friend of 25 years tell the FBI that that person was there,” Cudo said.

When he was interviewed by the FBI, Cudo said, they had photos of him in and around the Capitol wearing a Trump 45 hat. He acknowledged that he was the person in the photos. There was no reason, he contends, for the FBI to then go to his employer, Ecolab, to verify his identity. After they did, he said, he was fired from his food safety job.

Cudo said he got another job at another major company but was fired after his 2023 arrest. He said he’s been “blacklisted” from the industry and went from making about $200,000 a year to being essentially unemployable. He said he can’t get a call back for jobs he’s overqualified for, and recruiters “ghost” him once they do a quick internet search.

“I got evicted from my house. Certain parents won’t let their kids play with my kids. It’s been devastating,” said Cudo, who added that “this is leading to bankruptcy. I’ve liquidated every dime I have.”

‘Just Walking in a Hallway’

Harris, the Southern California doctor, was in the Capitol longer than Cudo, but also said he simply walked in and did no damage. He said he was there when Babbitt was shot and provided her aid the best he could with no tools. He said the police didn’t help.

“They just let her bleed out on the floor and took her body down the stairs,” he said.

Harris said he went to the rally because he thought it might be the last time he could see Trump speak. He said he went to the Capitol expecting to hear planned speeches from medical professionals opposed to Covid lockdowns and rushed vaccines.

He said there was initially no violence. “Suddenly, a couple of officers from way up on the, like, upper patio above the stairs started lobbing tear gas and flash bangs and firing rubber bullets into a crowd that was completely peaceful until that moment.”

Officers started squeezing the crowd together, and someone on a nearby wall pulled Harris out of the scrum, he said. He walked up to the Capitol, where police were “chatting amongst themselves and pretty much ignoring everyone.” He entered the building.

“Curiosity got the better of me,” he admitted. “I just walked in. I wasn’t trying to demonstrate. I wasn’t yelling. I wasn’t doing anything.”

After the riot, the FBI was alerted to a Facebook post in which Harris noted that he was safe and called the riot a “false-flag event” carried out by “Antifa dressed up like Trump supporters.” Harris still maintains that riot was by and large carried out by people whose purpose was to “demonize an entire half of the country.”

Harris said he was eventually arrested while driving to work. “All of a sudden the police pull me off the freeway, and all of a sudden FBI cars are running around, and I get slammed up in a car and arrested and put in leg irons in my scrubs,” he said. “Completely unnecessary, total show of force like they did to so many people.”

Harris, who has a medical clinic and two young children with his wife, said that “of course” he would have turned himself in if he’d been directed to.

He, too, called the impact on his life and career “devastating.” He said he was “forced under duress” to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of parading, picketing, or demonstrating in the Capitol, though he said that’s not what he was doing: “I was literally just walking in a hallway.”

He received three years of probation. His medical license would have been immediately suspended if he’d been incarcerated, though he said he’s still facing accusations from the California medical board. He said that he, his family, and his employees and patients have “suffered significantly as a result of really the weaponization that occurred following that event, which was totally disproportionate to any precedent.”

“We’re very grateful for President Trump,” he said.

The Painted Face of the Riot

While Cudo wore Birkenstock clogs to the protest, Chansley — the Q Shaman — entered the Capitol in face paint and a horned helmet, and carrying a spear.

He served prison time for his role, though he contends he was peaceful that day and his “intentions for going [to D.C.] were pure.” Chansley, who now hawks T-shirts and a book on the deep state on his website, has also expressed gratitude for Trump’s pardon.

“GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!! NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!” he wrote on X on Monday night.

Because he pleaded to a felony, he told National Review, he couldn’t buy a firearm, “which means I could only ever bring a knife to a gun fight. If somebody wanted to invade my space, personal home or what have you, there’s nothing I could f***ing do.”

Chansley said the media and the government, through its prosecution, “made me a social pariah” and the face of the riot. “They needed something to create this illusion that the chaos that happened outside also happened inside, because it didn’t.”

Chansley acknowledges he entered the Capitol building illegally, making it all the way to the Senate dais. Asked if he has regrets, he said he doesn’t believe in holding onto regret, which he called “bad spiritual hygiene.”

But would he do things differently if could? “Dude, I’d try to stop the whole f***ing thing from happening,” he said, though he questioned who would even “listen to the guy in horns and face paint telling everybody to calm down.”

Soon after the riot, Chansley told National Review that he considered the riot to be a win because it sent a message to political leaders. He said this week that he didn’t recall that statement. He said his religious faith has grown much stronger over the last four years, in part because of his experiences in court and in prison.

“That’s why when people ask me if I regret it or if it was a win, it’s hard for me to say that it was a loss,” he said. “My relationship with God is much stronger, bro, and there’s no way I would change that for anything. And that’s a f***ing win.”

A Wonderful First Step?

While Trump had long vowed that if he was reelected he would pardon many January 6 “hostages,” some were surprised at the sweeping extent of his order. Vice President JD Vance said last week that violent rioters “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned.

Some people who engaged in violence have expressed remorse for their actions that day. Mathew Capsel of downstate Illinois, who clashed with National Guard troops outside the Capitol on January 6 and received a pardon from Trump, told the Chicago Tribune that he has “a lot of regrets for what happened on that day, for sure.”

Pamela Hemphill who was sentenced to two months in prison for her actions on January 6, rejected her pardon, telling the BBC that Trump is attempting to “rewrite history.”

The people who participated in the riot “were wrong that day, we broke the law — there should be no pardons,” said Hemphill, nicknamed the “MAGA granny” on social media.

The J6ers who spoke to National Review said that while they appreciate Trump’s pardon, they believe there’s more to be done.

Cudo said he believes “restorative financial justice” for the civil rights violations he’s endured is “necessary, it’s deserved, and it’s just.” He noted that one thing that differentiates him from some of the violent protesters is that “I didn’t show up with a helmet, I didn’t show up with a gas mask, I didn’t show up with zip ties.”

He said he doesn’t bear a grudge against the friend who turned him in, though he acknowledged their relationship will likely never be the same. “I already had beers with him after he turned me in but prior to my arrest,” he said. “We’ve already mended that rift.”

Harris said he believes that while “the pardons were a wonderful first step,” the people who received them should also be able to appeal to have the original conviction dismissed.

“We have to get the truth out,” he added. “There has to be transparency and accountability about what the real evidence was.”

Like many other J6ers, Harris noted the discrepancy between the way government came down hard on them while taking a kid-glove approach to leftist rioters who burned and damaged cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland in the summer of 2020.

“The bottom line is, there has to be equality under the law,” he said. “If they’re going to say that these other instances are First Amendment–protected speech that maybe gets a little out of hand here and there — we’re not going to bring the full weight of government down on every protest, which would stifle the expression of free speech — then you have to apply that law equally on both sides of the aisle. And it clearly wasn’t.”

Hemphill, on the other hand, maintained that accepting a pardon “would only insult the Capitol police officers, rule of law and, of course, our nation.”

“I pleaded guilty because I was guilty,” she said, “and accepting a pardon also would serve to contribute to their gaslighting and false narrative.”