Five years after a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, dozens of the rioters who were granted clemency by former President Donald Trump marked the anniversary by retracing their steps. The event on January 6, 2026, revealed a complex sentiment among the participants: deep gratitude toward Trump paired with sharp criticism of his administration for not doing more to punish their prosecutors and provide restitution.
March from White House to Capitol Repeats History
The group, which included several high-profile beneficiaries of Trump's mass executive clemency, marched from the Ellipse near the White House to the Capitol building. This mirrored the path taken during the 2021 insurrection, but this time the tone was one of grievance rather than overt rebellion. Enrique Tarrio, the former national chairman of the Proud Boys, spoke at a rally by the White House, stating his loyalty to Trump but not to the president's appointees.
"I am very happy with what the man that sits behind the desk [in the Oval Office] has done. But it’s not enough," Tarrio said. He called on the Justice Department to prosecute the officials who had prosecuted him and approximately 1,500 other Trump supporters involved in the Capitol attack.
A Mix of Gratitude and Grievance
The marchers' emotions were a blend of thankfulness and dissatisfaction. Banners visible in the crowd thanked Trump for the pardons while others demanded financial compensation for time spent in prison. Thomas Smith, who received a seven-year reduction in his prison sentence for attacking police, told HuffPost he believed the rioters should be compensated. "We were attacked for standing up for what we knew to be a stolen election, and now it’s been proven that it was," Smith claimed. This assertion is false; Trump's claims of a stolen 2020 election were repeatedly rejected by courts and his own advisers.
Organizer Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed by police during the riot, laid flowers on the west side of the Capitol. "It’s a day Congress let us down and continues to let us down," she said before the march. Another organizer, Nicole Reffitt, whose husband received a seven-year prison sentence, said she was not dissatisfied with Trump personally. "He can only do so much," she said, but expressed anger that no members of Congress had been arrested for "obvious lying."
Confrontations and Calls for Retribution
The march was not without incident. Participants heckled a police officer escorting them, with one clemency recipient calling an officer "a diseased animal" who should be "put down like a dog." They also briefly taunted Democratic Representative Tom Suozzi of New York, the only member of Congress seen near the protest.
The demand for financial restitution is already moving through the courts. The Justice Department has paid nearly $5 million to Ashli Babbitt's estate in a wrongful death settlement. Some rioters are now pursuing civil lawsuits for compensation. In response, Democratic senators, including Alex Padilla of California, introduced legislation this week to block the Justice Department from offering similar settlements to other January 6 participants, calling such payouts "unthinkable" five years after the attack on democracy.
As the crowd dispersed from the Capitol grounds, a final confrontation underscored the lingering hostility. A group followed and continued to heckle a D.C. police officer, with one Trump supporter referencing a person with a baseball bat and stating, "I wish I would have fucking licked you." The fifth anniversary served not as a conclusion, but as a stark demonstration of unresolved anger and political division.
