President Donald Trump’s blanket pardon for the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, does not cover a conspiracy by one defendant to kill the law enforcement officials who investigated him, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Edward Kelley, who was convicted of the conspiracy last year by a federal jury in Tennessee, had argued that Trump’s sweeping clemency for rioters should also cover his conviction since the agents and officers he targeted were connected to the Jan. 6 investigation.
The Trump administration had opposed Kelley’s claim, saying the conspiracy was too far removed from the Jan. 6 attack to fit into Trump’s pardon. But simultaneously, the Justice Department has sought to apply Trump’s clemency to an increasingly broad range of crimes — unconnected to the Jan. 6 attack — in courts across the country, stoking confusion and, in some cases, pushback from the courts.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan is the first to confront the Trump administration’s vacillating views about how far Trump intended to go. Varlan, a George W. Bush appointee, said the Trump administration’s “change in position” about the pardon required the courts to interpret the pardon for themselves. And in his view, Kelley’s crime was too far removed from the Jan. 6 riot to qualify.
Though Varlan’s ruling aligned with the Justice Department’s position on Kelley, it rejected the administration’s contention that courts have no role in analyzing Trump’s pardon. He noted that the Justice Department had advanced “differing positions” about the blanket pardon, which Trump issued on his first day in office and applied to more than 1,000 people who stormed the Capitol.
Varlan emphasized that the Trump administration’s “change in position” required him to make his own determination about what Trump meant when he pardoned anyone “convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
In courts across the country, the Justice Department has almost uniformly attempted to expand the reach of Trump’s pardon, agreeing that it covers convictions for several defendants convicted of felonies for possessing illegal firearms in their homes — which were discovered as a result of the FBI investigation.
Those include Benjamin Martin, a California defendant with a history of domestic violence who was convicted last year for possessing an arsenal of firearms in his home. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered his release from a three-year prison sentence last week but declined to dismiss the case altogether. The district court judge who presided over his case declined to sign the document allowing his release, instead withdrawing from the case, leaving the chief judge of the district court to sign the document instead.
The Justice Department also argued in February that Jeremy Brown, a Jan. 6 defendant from Florida who was separately convicted for possession of firearms, grenades and classified information at his home, should be released based on Trump’s pardon. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals raised sharp questions last week about whether the pardon should cover those unrelated crimes and left the matter in limbo — though Brown has been released from a seven-year sentence on those convictions while the case plays out.
But the administration has also sought to exclude from the pardon three defendants: Kelley, David Daniel, a North Carolina man charged last year with possessing child pornography, and Taylor Taranto, who was charged in 2023 with driving through Washington with a van-load of illegal ammunition and threatening violence against the government.
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