NBC’s Ryan Reilly on How Trump and Allies Like Ted Cruz Went From Calling Jan. 6 Rioters ‘Terrorists’ to Casting Them as Heroes

Few reporters have covered the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters more closely than Ryan J. Reilly, Justice reporter at NBC News, who has been on the beat since the images and video of Trump supporters violently storming the Capitol were broadcast worldwide in 2021 — images in stark contrast to Reilly’s own engagement photos taken outside the same building.

Reilly spoke with Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club after President Donald Trump —  on his first day back in office — issued sweeping pardons to more than 1,500 individuals arrested in the Jan. 6 attack.

For his reporting for NBC News as well as his 2023 book Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the U.S. Justice System, Reilly sat in on countless court hearings — at times, he recalled, he was the only person in the audience. He has empathy for the judges and prosecutors who worked tirelessly on these cases just to have them thrown out.

The rationale behind the pardons, Reilly said, was based not on new evidence that changed our understand of what happened that day, but on a years-long propaganda effort to revise history.

“It’s been amazing to watch how this propaganda effort has shifted the thoughts on this—not because of reason or logic or court evidence that’s come out. It’s just memes,” he said. “It’s not based on any evaluation of the law. It’s not based on anything else other than that the Constitution grants the president the right to issue whatever pardons he wants.”

Reilly also spoke about how Trump allies like Ted Cruz, who previously (and repeatedly) called Jan. 6 rioters “terrorists,” now cast them as “hostages” of the U.S. justice system.

While Trump ran on the platform of pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, few seemed to think he was actually going to follow through once in office. But to Reilly, this idea that Trump wasn’t going to act quickly held little weight.

“Donald Trump is pretty obsessed with January 6th,” he said. “And from a media manipulation perspective, this was a really effective way of doing it. What he’s done with these pardons all at once is really flood the zone. I honestly wonder if by next week this will still be a story because how many times can you write the same thing?”

Reilly went on to highlight recently pardoned DJ Rodriguez, who was arrested after video—pieced together by a citizen sleuth—showed him jamming a stun gun into the neck of Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone. He was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison.

Reilly recalled that upon his arrest, Rodriguez tearfully asked, Did we really think we were going to take over the Capitol and get away with it?

“He got a little bit of punishment, but in the end, he did end up getting away with it when Donald Trump was re-elected,” Reilly said.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: You have spent years covering the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters. This ended up being a very vast effort by the Justice Department. How did that take shape from the night of January 6 to today?

Ryan Reilly: When this first started, I remember feeling a little frustrated like, ‘Great, this is going to take over my beat,’ and, ‘This wasn’t what I really had planned.’ Ultimately, as this developed into what we now know to be the largest investigation in FBI and Justice Department history in terms of scope and the number of criminal defendants, I became really fascinated by it. It also told me a lot more about the bureau. I started learning a lot of things. I’ve had a hard pass at DOJ for 15 years now, so I’ve covered DOJ for a very long time. I knew it wasn’t always up to speed on technology. The FBI’s Hollywood reputation is much different from the reality. That’s not to say that there aren’t people there who have technological skills and are really hard workers. But just the pure economics of it for the FBI don’t really work out all that well. If you’re someone skilled at tech, you’re taking a huge pay cut to work for the FBI. In addition to that salary, maybe you get assigned somewhere you don’t want to work in the country. They don’t particularly have an interest in what your spouse does. Their job is secondary. There are a lot of challenges for them in recruiting a high-tech workforce. That was something that really interested me from the beginning. The online sleuths really hooked into this and were able to use technology in ways that amazed me. That’s how I got involved. In covering these initial criminal cases, some of the sleuths started reaching out to me about people they had identified whose information they had sent to the FBI, but it got lost. There was no feedback; they wouldn’t hear back. It was like sending a job application to a corporate site. There wasn’t a ‘Yes, we received this. We are working on this,’ because there are limits on how the FBI is allowed to respond to that. They were frustrated that a lot of the people they had identified didn’t seem to have any action taken on their cases. That’s what got me moving on this, and it became really interesting.

That’s also the subject of your book Sedition Hunters, which is a great look at how ordinary people ended up helping with these prosecutions. Fast forward to the 2024 election, and Trump is obviously running on pardoning the rioters. There has been this strange revisionist history that started probably the days after the attack. Remember, Trump and his supporters initially said this is a horrifying thing that happened. Then over the years, Trump turned around and said these people are actually victims. He started calling them hostages. I think very few people thought that he would pardon everyone involved in the riot. In fact, Vice President JD Vance and Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, both said in recent weeks that Trump would never pardon the the rioters who beat police. Vance, I think, used the word “obviously” — as in, obviously, Trump wouldn’t pardon people who beat cops. Which, I think, Vance has learned now, is not a word you can ever use when it comes to any action Trump could conceivably take. Looking at the people that Trump has now pardoned—who are they?

Yeah, so one I want to highlight, who really got me started in all of this—and actually, my colleague Peter Alexander pressed Donald Trump on this at the White House earlier this week in a fascinating exchange, a back-and-forth with Donald Trump—is this individual named DJ Rodriguez. He was the first major story or the second major story I wrote about identifying one of these rioters. He was a California Trump supporter who had been at all these rallies. He was wearing a MAGA hat with these unique pins. One of the online sleuths went through all these videos that they found on the internet, frame by frame, and found him jamming a stun gun into Mike Fanone’s neck.

What you could do was piece that tape together with other pieces of tape and identify who this person was. This was basically when Twitter was still Twitter—not X. A lot of this unfolded there. People made connections, got into DMs. But this tip had been sent to the FBI, and it had sat there for a month. Nothing had been done about it. This was one of the sleuths—Forrest Rogers—that I initially connected with. He’s one of the few who has put his name out there. He was working with an organization called the Deep State Dogs that he had formed. He really championed this effort and worked with many other online sleuths. That’s how I got the ball rolling. I was at HuffPost at the time, and it was interesting because you’d think it would be a huge hurdle to get an organization to publish these names and get that through legal. But the evidence was so overwhelming in this case that it was like, ‘Okay, yeah.’ Someone looked at it, and everything checked out. We had the ID in several different ways, so this was beyond a reasonable doubt. Ultimately, a month after that story ran, DJ Rodriguez was arrested at his mother’s house and questioned by the FBI. He tearfully confessed on video, calling himself “so stupid” and regretting what he had done. He said, “Did we really think we were going to take over the Capitol and get away with it? That’s so stupid.”

He also said the commander-in-chief had called them to D.C. All of that eventually came out on videotape. He ultimately pleaded guilty to driving that stun gun into Mike Fanone’s neck and was sentenced to 12.5 years in federal prison. Walking out of the courtroom after his sentence, he said, “Trump won.” Cut to today—he’s one of the individuals who has been pardoned. So, ultimately, that tearful confession where he talked ‘Did we really think we were going to do this and get away with it?’ Well, he got a little bit of punishment, but in the end, he did end up getting away with it when Donald Trump was reelected. He’ll serve far less time than he was supposed to.

A prosecutor wrote an op-ed in The New York Times warning that Trump has essentially freed his own private militia, and these people are more dangerous than ever. I’m a little skeptical of claims like that. There’s been some hyperventilating by the Democrats about who these people are. I’m under no illusions about how horrifying that day was, but to me, a lot of it did seem like cosplaying. These people beat their way into the Capitol and then wandered around not really knowing what to do. I know there were dangerous leaders in there, but do you worry there could be more organized violence by these rioters?

Yeah, to your point, I think the Justice Department went after some of these more minor figures in the beginning because they completely misconstrued the scope of this investigation. In the early days—it only came out later through reporting and going to all these court hearings—but their initial estimation was only 800 people entered the Capitol. That seemed like something they could manage. What we found out in the end was they were way off. They got maybe a quarter of the total. More than 3,500 people entered the Capitol, and that’s not including all the people who assaulted officers outside who could have been charged. Theoretically, they could have charged everyone who knowingly went past the barricades, but that would have been basically impossible. If they’d had a better sense of the scope of this—this is all Monday morning quarterbacking, this is all looking back with 20/20 hindsight—but if they knew how many cases there were, they likely would have narrowed the scope of the cases they went after.

In some of those misdemeanor cases they went after, even though the punishment didn’t end up being very severe, that’s not something really reflected in news coverage because if someone gets sentenced for a misdemeanor and gets probation, is that really a story? It’s like, ‘Meh, that’s another one.’ I wouldn’t be writing a headline about that unless it was somebody particularly high-profile or had some role more broadly in America. But these average cases that were just working their way through, those cases were not something that got a lot of attention. What I noticed in many of Donald Trump’s answers—this is something I heard from law enforcement, online sleuths, Trump supporters, and January 6th advocates—all four of these groups told me that it was clear Trump didn’t know much about these January 6th cases at all. I think that reflects his media diet and what gets to him. When you hear him talking about this, he leaves the impression that all of these people were held in the D.C. jail. These individuals have been held all over the country in federal prisons.

Early on, there were more people in the D.C. jail, but later, most were sentenced. He says, “They’ve been held for years and treated horribly.” There are probably only about half a dozen people who have not been convicted and held for that long, like Jake Lang. But that’s due to their own actions, as a judge independently decided they were a danger to the public under the Rubicon that they’re supposed to look at. Jake Lang tried to repeatedly delay his case because he’s on video at the front lines—no question about it, he’s even bragged about it afterward—slamming a baseball bat at the police line over and over. A lot of the talking points and propaganda did ultimately take over. Because the Justice Department went after some of these smaller cases, it gave people on platforms like Twitter (X) plenty of material to lean in and create victims, to reverse course and hold up people as victims of the state.

One claim from Trump defenders is that some of the more peaceful rioters—those who didn’t break a window or punch a cop but merely walked through the Capitol—have been persecuted by the Justice Department. Their lives, they say, have been made a living hell, and they’ve been aggressively treated. Is that true? Is there any support for the claim that some of these more peaceful rioters have been mistreated by the Justice Department?

I would say this: It’s definitely a shock to have the FBI show up at your door and arrest you, no matter the circumstance. That’s not typically something the FBI does for misdemeanor cases. That’s why there’s been some pushback—a lot of pushback I would say—even within the bureau. Some of it is political—Donald Trump, as he says, does have a lot of fans within the FBI. It’s a conservative-leaning law enforcement agency, despite what we’ve heard over the past ten years about their scrutiny of Trump. So politics is part of it, but there’s also a little bit of pushback from agents typically working serious felonies, being assigned these cases from Washington, D.C. There’s definitely some tension over that, like someone asking, ‘Why am I arresting this person who walked in?’

But I do think there were these talking points that developed amongst the January 6th defendants very early on. It was always, ‘Someone let me in.’ Videos were misconstrued, and false videos were put out. There were certainly some moments where law enforcement, because of what they were hearing on the radio, were overwhelmed, but this idea they were invited in is complete garbage and nonsense. Video after video shows that. At a lot of these entry points, they are physically fighting people back. There are a couple of times when the mob is so large and there are one or two officers who have no protective gear on—there’s not much else they could have done in those scenarios. People can go back and Monday morning quarterback that, and some officers have been held accountable or have been looked at by internal affairs for whether they stood up and did their job that day, but overall, the thing to keep in mind here is just how many officers were brutalized and injured and how bad this was. Imagine hearing that over the radio, “Shots fired,” not knowing who fired those shots, not knowing what was going on—this mob had just stormed the Capitol. I think some videos have really been taken out of context and been particularly highlighted to undercut that narrative.

The giveaway at the end here is that for all we’ve heard about the FBI undercovers involved that day, for all we heard about, ‘Oh, it was Antifa,” for all we heard that maybe it was BLM or Hamas, this was a blanket pardon. So all of those people got pardons too. We heard about Ray Epps for so long, the Donald Trump supporter who had his life torn apart because there was a conspiracy theory about him floating online due to people misconstruing how the FBI works and how the Justice Department works. He was pardoned too.

John Sullivan is another individual who probably was the foremost face of this idea that there was some alternative group driving this because he was someone who had spoken at BLM protests, but he was really just more of a generic agitator. He liked to heat people up and get videos of it for social media—a provocateur is the best way to describe him. He got a pardon too. I think this reveals the purpose of those false narratives that I’ve spent way too much time debunking and shooting down over the past four years.

The buried lede here is that Donald Trump, on his first day in office, pardoned Antifa, Hamas, and the Deep State. Now, the judges that sentenced these people, the prosecutors that prosecuted them, what are they saying about these pardons?

I think we’ve had four different statements so far, and these are usually in response to these motions for dismissal, which, first of all, I should say, imagine working on one of these cases for so long, knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that these individuals committed those crimes, watching those videos, interviewing those officers, living their experience, really, because the body-worn camera—I would encourage anybody who hasn’t watched any January 6th body-worn camera footage to do so, because it does feel like you’re inside of it.

You have as close an experience as you can to what that individual went through that day, what those officers went through. So imagine being a prosecutor who worked on all of that, who saw all of that, who knew these officers individually, and then had to file something from the government, because you’re ordered to do so, dismissing that case. And it’s not based on any evaluation of the law. It’s not based on anything else other than that the Constitution grants the president the right to issue whatever pardons he wants. A lot of people did that because that is what the Constitution says. The Constitution allows Donald Trump, the president, to pardon whoever he wants. It’s an unchecked power, essentially. So that’s what they did because that was the law. And they did their jobs. But it’s definitely very frustrating for these individuals who know the truth about what happened and are frustrated that the broader American public doesn’t seem to.

I think what’s most astounding about all this—and forgive me for beating a dead horse here—is to see a party that for years has cast itself as the party that supports the police get behind the candidate responsible for the largest assault on law enforcement in US history. Have you been tracking the response from Republican lawmakers to this?

It’s been a mix. But I want to go back to before these pardons happened. I asked probably a couple of weeks ago when Donald Trump was actually visiting Capitol Hill, I happened to see Ted Cruz in the hallways being questioned by reporters. They had just met with Trump himself. I got a question in there—had they talked about these pardons that might be forthcoming and what to do with them, or about January 6th? He said, ‘No, we didn’t talk about that at all,’ and, ‘That’s just a media obsession.’ That was his line. I think history, and the past two weeks of history, has proven that wasn’t just a media question.

Indeed, Donald Trump is pretty obsessed with January 6th and has close connections to these individuals. He held fundraisers for January 6th defendants at his Bedminster estate and Mar-a-Lago. The new head of the U.S. attorney’s office, who does not have the type of background you would expect someone to have there, was a member of the board of an organization for the January 6th defendants. They, of course, sang that song for him that he played at his rallies. The connections run really deep there. I think this is an important issue that Donald Trump has helped make an issue. You look at what people say contemporaneously, and then you look at what they’re saying today. Donald Trump was obviously forced a little bit in the aftermath of this, with his family pushing him to go maybe a little bit further than he would. That was revealed by the January 6th committee. But you had Ted Cruz, the guy who said this is just a media obsession, call it a terrorist attack right afterward. Then, on the one-year anniversary, he called it a terrorist attack again.

But at that point, the political winds had shifted. That’s when Ted Cruz went on Tucker Carlson and made this big apology for what he said, saying, ‘What I said was dumb or stupid,’ and pretending that’s not what he actually thought. So I think that’s the shift we’ve really seen. It’s been amazing to watch how this propaganda effort has shifted the thoughts on this—not because of reason or logic or court evidence that’s come out. It’s just memes, right? It’s just memes and whatever sort of victims you can make on Twitter.

Elise Stefanik, the congresswoman who’s Trump’s pick to be U.N. ambassador, issued a statement that day saying it was a tragic day for America. She condemned the violence and destruction. She called it unacceptable, un-American, and said that the persecutors should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Then she deletes the tweet, of course, and now she’s calling the rioters hostages. Do you think Trump will face any political consequences for something like this? Or do you think that we just live in an era of pure impunity for Trump, now that he’s been elected for a second time on the back of Americans knowing about all this and saying, ‘We don’t care?’

I had one Trump Justice Department official tell me after the pardon that, “We’re done with incremental.” From a media manipulation perspective, this was a really effective way of doing it because you do it all at once. If he had done these over time, then that’s a news story every time. What he’s done with these pardons all at once is really flood the zone. I honestly wonder if by next week this will still be a story because how many times can you write the same thing? The next probable news for this is probably when one of these people kills someone, beats their wife, kills someone in an accident, or commits an act of domestic terrorism. Who’s to say which comes first? I say that because some already have. People have been killed in drunk driving accidents. One of the individuals who was freed, had the charges against him dropped this week, was the only known individual to have fired a gun at the Capitol on January 6th—John Banuelos, who we identified back in 2022. At that time, we didn’t have the video of him firing the gun. We only knew he had the gun. Then, lo and behold, video later emerged showing he did indeed fire the gun. That shows how chaotic it was on the west front of the Capitol. A guy fired off two shots, and nobody figured it out for three years. That’s astonishing, right? That’s how chaotic it was at that point.

There was so much violence happening that someone could climb the scaffolding where the president is inaugurated, fire a gun into the air a couple of times, and it would take three years for that video to emerge. There’s so much video here. It’s just astonishing and overwhelming. It’s one of the most well-documented crimes in American history. But from the media perspective, some of that is tougher to get on the air in terms of being readily available. I was a media studies major, so I’ve been thinking about a lot of these things logistically. It’s tough because you can’t really play that body cam footage on TV. It’s annoying to watch because it’s so jarring and shaky. While they were being beaten by Trump supporters, MPD officers were not the best cinematographers. They were being beaten, so their cameras were all over the place. It’s jarring, and you can’t show that for long on television because it’s unpleasant to watch, because it’s shaking all over the place. A lot of this video hasn’t broken through.

For example, there was a video we published and got through the Media Coalition because it was introduced as evidence last year that I think was pretty revealing. Representative Troy Nehls, who has since written a book undermining the January 6th truth—he’s supported these conspiracy theories about Antifa, about Ray Epps, he goes through the litany of them. What actually happened contemporaneously, which emerged as evidence, is that Troy Nehls was at the door of the House of Representatives, and faced off with rioters directly. Officers had pointed guns at those individuals because members of Congress were still fleeing the chamber. This was right around the time Ashli Babbitt was shot. A couple of officers pointed their weapons at those rioters through the broken glass, the same place where the president walks through during the State of the Union.

What the representative said at that point, just days after he started being a member of Congress after 30 years as a sheriff, was, “I’ve been in law enforcement for 30 years. I have never seen anybody act like this. I’m ashamed.” That was his contemporaneous language at the time, as this group of rioters tried to break down the Capitol. Also, just to be clear, he was using “we” in the royal sense. He told them, “You ought to be ashamed,” but also said, “I’m ashamed of us.” It wasn’t as though he thought those people were Antifa at that time. He knew, as all representatives did, that Donald Trump had convinced millions of people that the election was stolen. It should be unsurprising that when you convince people of a big lie like that, some of them, or at least a percentage, are going to act out—especially if given the opportunity to in a mob-like scene where there seems to be no immediate consequence.

One thing I hear all the time from Trump defenders is that no police officers died on that day. There were the two Trump supporters who died. One was crushed in the mob. The other, Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead. What do you make of that argument that this wasn’t that bad because no cops died that day?

I think the early reporting there is what they really hooked on to because this was sort of chaos. There was so much happening that day, so in retrospect, I think it’s very understandable that there was some confusion in the early reports. Some people had information that they relayed to reporters that ended up not being accurate. That was like the Brian Sicknick story. And I think that’s what people hooked onto in those early days. What that allows you to gloss over is the ample evidence of all the people who were assaulted. One thing that just really strikes me is I think a lot of people, because of the way media coverage works, especially television, have this thought process that it was really just these four officers who were injured, and if you want to take the negative perspective on them and attack them or undermine them, you might say, “Look, three of them have written books,” or that sort of thing.

First of all, that’s not going to pay your bills for years. These people lost their law enforcement careers. They’re not sitting on this big pile of money—I can tell you that firsthand. That’s just not their reality. Those people were the ones to step forward and look at what has happened. Mike Fanone’s mom was swatted. Police showed up at her home because someone called in a fake report. He said that someone drove by and threw a bag of feces at her. This is the reality. Every time you speak out, you get this blowback. I think that’s why we haven’t heard from some of these other police officers who were assaulted that day. The thing is, when you go into court, you hear these stories from the officers directly. It’s names that aren’t out there in the public that no one really knows about. In some of these hearings I’ve sat in, there have been two people in the audience—sometimes just one person, me, in the court gallery.

You hear these really deeply emotional stories from officers who talk about what happened that day and how horrific it was. I remember one officer who faced off with an individual named Sedition Panda, who had assaulted him and grabbed his shield. He said that he had worked all these riots before and had never seen people charge a police line like that. He had worked in Baltimore. He had worked at sporting events at the University of Maryland with a bunch of drunk college kids, and he had never seen anything like that. The other thing he said is that he was originally from South Carolina—it might have been North Carolina. His joke on the stand was, “You’re born a Republican there.” This guy was straight out of Central Casting. This is not some left-wing Democrat. This is somebody where, if you looked at him, you’d say, “Yeah, that guy’s a Republican.” He was a law enforcement official, shaved head. He looked the part. He said he was born a Republican but had never seen anything like what he had seen on January 6th.

House Republicans have announced some sort of investigation into this. What are Republicans trying to investigate, and do you think they’ll find anything?

It’s a good question. I was a little bit surprised—not terribly surprised—but when I thought of the pardons, I was like, okay, they’re going to move past this. Theoretically, you wouldn’t think that a bunch of supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6th because they believed lies about the election would be something the Republican Party would want to dive further into and force their members to go on record ahead of the midterms, ahead of the next presidential election. But that’s the scenario we’re in. Trump has made his desire to go after people like Liz Cheney very clear. We saw those pardons from Joe Biden to prevent that. B

ut the House can go about this in other ways. This is a way for them to restart that if they want to, to call people to testify, and if they refuse, maybe that’s how they end up figuring out some new crime they committed. I think that’s an alternative angle for them. It’s certainly something to keep a close eye on as they move forward. They did a really effective job of undermining the truth about what happened on January 6th—by putting out all this video footage and selectively editing parts of it, clipping out the most boring scenes where it doesn’t seem like a lot’s going on, and pretending that’s all that happened at the Capitol that day. That was enormously effective. You saw that with Tucker Carlson, where he was like, “Oh, look, Jacob Chansley was just wandering the hallways!” It’s like, okay, but how did Jacob Chansley enter the building? Have you shown that video? There’s literally a cameraman right behind him. I can send you the clip right now. Just turn your volume down because it’s really loud from the alarm blaring and people smashing windows as the mob storms the U.S. Capitol. He entered with a tip on a spear that would have never made it through Capitol security, joining a mob that chased Eugene Goodman up the stairs. After that, yes, he did walk around the hallways, but that’s not the story, and it’s not the truth of what happened. That’s just a piece of propaganda.

Selectively editing those videos and giving people the ability to clip them and create nonsense stories out of them was really effective. One example of that to me was Senator Mike Lee. A video came out showing someone holding something in their hands, with their hands up, as they were walking out the door. The idea that X had was that this was clearly an undercover officer; clearly that’s a badge he’s flashing. You couldn’t see what it was, but that was the idea. This is a member of law enforcement in a MAGA hat pretending to be a Trump supporter. Guess what: that person had been in prison for five years when that video went viral. Mike Lee said he looked forward to questioning the FBI director about it, thinking it was a badge. What he was holding was a vape, and they figured that out because sleuths went back and saw him carrying that vape all day. That was the guy who stole a wallet from Nancy Pelosi’s office, who then stole a portrait of John Lewis and Nancy Pelosi together in Africa on one of their trips—this was right after John Lewis’ death.

That was an important photo that she had on her mantel. He swiped it and then had his Uber driver on the way back take a photo of him masked-up holding that portrait. So that individual, the Trump supporter who later called himself an idiot in court, was the one Mike Lee thought was an undercover officer, and many people believed that. Was there a big correction from Mike Lee? Was Mike Lee like, ‘Gosh, I really got that one wrong. I’m so embarrassed?’ No. It was just thrown out there, and a bunch of people believed it. And that’s the end of that story.