Five years after the historic and damaging event attack on the US Capitolmillions of dollars of damage has been repaired and the cleanup is long over. Many physical injuries have been healed. And President Trump’s pardons ended the largest criminal prosecution in American history, while exonerating more than 1,500 defendants of criminal liability.
What remains is a poisonous, lingering resentment over the riot and a continuing battle to preserve the basic facts about what happened on January 6, 2021.
The president and some of his supporters have accused the Biden administration of using the Justice Department as a weapon against the Jan. 6 defendants. In doing so, Mr. Trump and his surrogates have adopted arguments inconsistent with the facts of the cases, the timeline of events, and the public statistics of prosecutions related to the Capitol siege.
In a letter to colleagues last week, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced that a public meeting, with testimony, would be held on Tuesday to refute the claims about January 6. Jeffries’ letter said the meeting would “expose the election deniers who hold important high-level positions in the executive branch and detail the threats to public safety posed by the hundreds of violent criminals who were pardoned on the President’s first day in office.”
Dan Hodges, a local Washington, D.C. police officer who was injured by the mob attack, said he was frustrated by the ongoing “rewriting” of January 6 history.
“Five years ago, I was thinking: This is probably the most filmed crime in American history. This is just a massive amount of evidence. No one can deny what happened here,” Hodges said in an interview. “But that’s exactly what’s happening.”
Hodges, who spoke to CBS News as a citizen, separate from his current role as a police officer, also said, “The attack was everything it appeared to be on television.”
Mr. Trump himself – who referred to The January 6 defendants, considered “hostages” for years, attempted to reframe or rewrite some of the key points of the January 6 prosecutions in the hours and days after the pardon was granted. He said many defendants were actually innocent, were responsible for only “minor” offenses or were being held in unjustly harsh conditions.
At a press conference in January 2025, Mr. Trump said: “These people have already served years in prison, and they have served them brutally. » He also claimed that the January 6 rioters had “served years in prison”, before adding that “murderers don’t even go to prison in this country”.
His statements exclude the more than 1,000 Jan. 6 riot defendants who have not served years in prison, and the hundreds of pardoned Capitol riot defendants who have not yet been tried or who have served prison sentences for cases in which they pleaded guilty.
Mr. Trump also defended his clemency actions at the same news conference, saying: “It’s a disgusting prison. It’s horrible. It’s inhumane. It’s a terrible, terrible thing.”
The president did not specify which prison he was referring to. Defendants in the Jan. 6 riots have served their sentences in a wide range of federal prison facilities across the country, all operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. These include prisons in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, California, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan and Florida, none of which have been called “inhumane” by the Bureau of Prisons, which Trump now oversees.
Although the local jail in Washington, D.C., has been criticized for its conditions in 2021 and 2022, when some January 6 defendants were temporarily held there, the jail is not a prison. The prison was also not used for those sentenced to federal prison terms.
In an interview with Fox News just days after returning to office, Mr. Trump justified his pardons by saying that “most people were absolutely innocent,” which runs counter to the decision of many defendants to plead guilty and admit to their crimes. His statement is also belied by the perfect record obtained by prosecutors, who obtained convictions in 100 percent of the jury trials held for the Jan. 6 defendants who pleaded not guilty.
During the interview, Trump also defended his pardon for the violent rioters who attacked police, saying, “These were very minor incidents.”
According to court records reviewed by CBS News, the injuries to the officers included violent assaults with a series of makeshift weapons, including bats, poles, bear spray, sticks, chemicals and fists. Around 140 police officers were injuredwith some facing cracked ribs, broken spinal discs and brain damage, according to the union representing Capitol Police officers. Several police officers also committed suicide in the weeks following the siege.
In an October 2025 social media post, Mr. Trump claimed that the Biden administration placed 274 FBI agents among the crowd at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, even though Biden had not yet been sworn in as president. Baseless claims that the riot was orchestrated by the FBI have circulated for years, although Trump-appointed FBI Director Kash Patel said the 274 agents were deployed to the Capitol for “crowd control.”
Some riot defendants have called the prosecutions a “weaponization” of the federal government by the Justice Department. Others used the term “staged,” “fake” or “Fed surge” to claim the violent riot did not happen as it appeared on live television across America.
“Aren’t we supposed to believe what we saw with our own eyes?,” asked Rep. Bennie Thompson, a longtime Mississippi Democrat who chaired the former Jan. 6 House Select Committee, which aimed to dispel myths and false claims about the riot. “We have to keep saying it, because these people with bigger microphones continue to call this ‘fake news.’
The White House declined to comment on what Mr. Trump said about Jan. 6 or who was involved, but spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement: “The media’s continued obsession with Jan. 6 is one of many reasons trust in the press is at an all-time low — they’re failing to cover the issues that actually matter to the American people.”
House Democrats are expected to call a number of police officers who were victims of the siege as public witnesses at their town hall meeting on Tuesday. Several members of Congress familiar with the matter told CBS News they expected Democrats to make public statements Monday and Tuesday to reinforce the facts of the Jan. 6 siege, amid Mr. Trump’s claims downplaying the riot.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office did not respond to requests for comment on Democrats’ planned public meeting or plans for official events to mark the siege.
Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, called Hodges to testify at an October 2025 hearing on political violence. Welch said he wanted the officer’s testimony to be public to dispel false narratives about Jan. 6. Several conservatives also testified at the hearing, in which Republican lawmakers highlighted acts of political violence and threats against Mr. Trump and other right-wing public figures.
“There is a process to rewrite what happened on January 6 and erase it,” Welch told CBS News. “And it’s wrong. They’re literally rewriting it.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who chaired a Senate committee that conducted a bipartisan investigation into the security breaches on Jan. 6, told CBS News, “Congress and Vice President Pence did our job that day: Democracy prevailed. »
“While we came together on a bipartisan basis to strengthen our election process, the president’s pardons and attempts to rewrite history are an insult to law enforcement and undermine our democracy,” Klobuchar said.
