A gay man who participated in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection said that he is rejecting a pardon granted by Donald Trump last week because he wants to take responsibility for his actions.
“It’s almost like he was trying to say it didn’t happen,” Navy veteran Jason Riddle told Vermont Public last week. “And it happened. I did those things, and they weren’t pardonable. I don’t want the pardon. And I also learned that I can reject the pardon.”
Riddle stormed the Capitol, entering the Senate parliamentarian’s office and drinking a bottle of wine. He reached a plea deal with prosecutors a year later and accepted a sentence of 90 days in jail and a fine of $750.
“He was witnessing violence in front of him while he was chugging wine and celebrating,” said U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich during Riddle’s sentencing hearing. “It is hard to fathom, given Mr. Riddle’s foreign military service and time in the Navy reserves.”
Now Riddle is one of the over 1500 people who Trump pardoned or whose sentence Trump commuted last Monday as one of his first actions in the White House in his second term. But Riddle has since left the MAGA movement and sees his actions in a different light.
“I’m a recovering alcoholic. At the time, I was not recovering,” he told Vermont Public. “I would combine alcohol with my politics and I’d put it online too. I spent a lot of time on social media in the comments section arguing with strangers about nothing. And it just became more or less my identity. The less I had a life, the louder I was about being a Trump supporter.”
“I fit right into the MAGA circle.”
He said that he went to the “Stop the Steal” rally that Trump held on the day that Congress was ceremonially certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. He said it felt like a “jubilant celebration” and he went with the crowd that broke the police barrier and entered the Capitol.
“People were smashing windows and breaking things, and I went in and spotted a liquor cabinet and – doing what a good alcoholic does — just poured myself a drink because why not?” he said, adding that it all felt like “a joke” that day.
“Once I was outside the building I started talking with this random gentleman, and he’s like, ‘I heard people are getting in there.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, they’re in there. It’s theirs.’ And I started chatting with him and he said, ‘They’re shooting people, too.’ And I was like, ‘No, they’re not. It’s a joke. I was just in there. It’s a party. They’re drinking and they’re vandalizing, but no one’s getting shot.’ And he was like, ‘No, someone got shot in the neck. I saw her get brought out.’”
He was referring to Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot by police as she tried to climb through a smashed window into the Speaker’s Lobby, where several lawmakers were being evacuated by police. She was carrying a knife and police warned her not to climb through the window. When she refused to stop, a Capitol Police officer shot her in the shoulder. She was taken to a hospital where she later died.
“That’s the moment it all changed,” Riddle said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. All right, I did something.’ And all that jubilation and all the immaturity, it all turned into fear.”
Riddle later went to prison, where he said that he was “treated like a celebrity” with even guards telling him, “Lets go Brandon,” an anti-Biden slogan.
“I definitely clung on to this patriot hero nonsense,” he said.
But then, after he got out of prison, Trump got indicted and posted to social media that his followers should protest for him. Riddle said that he knew that if people rioted again for Trump someone could get hurt.
“And that’s when I had the epiphany, the duh moment, where I’m like, ‘He asked this because he doesn’t care about anybody other than himself.’ That’s when on the inside I knew and I stopped supporting him,” Riddle said.
He said that he was at the gym last week with his husband when they saw on TV that he had gotten pardoned. While he had already served his time in prison, getting pardoned would mean he would no longer have a criminal record, which would make getting a job easier. But he refused to accept the pardon because “I did those things and they weren’t pardonable.” He also said that he didn’t want to have a Trump pardon on his record because future employers might notice that more than his misdemeanor record.
Trump not only pardoned many of the Capitol rioters last week, he also pardoned or commuted the sentences of other criminals. Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht was serving a life sentence for running an online marketplace for drug dealers that conducted over $200 million in illicit trade using cryptocurrency that involved over 100,000 people. Prosecutors said that people died because of the drugs bought on his website.
Trump said that prosecutors in that case were “scum” and “lunatics” when he pardoned Ulbricht last week. On Tuesday, Ulbricht was released from federal prison in Arizona.
