“We didn’t eat like this,” my cousin Patrick jokes, cutting his steak at a homecoming dinner with family to celebrate his release from prison.
President Trump pardoned Patrick on Day One of his White House return. My cousin had been serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence at the Elkton federal correctional institution in Ohio for his actions Jan. 6, 2021.
Patrick is one of the “violent” J6ers Democrats and even some right-wing commentators and congressional Republicans say Trump shouldn’t have pardoned. But like many of these cases, Patrick’s has — to use the words of Vice President J.D. Vance — “gray areas.”
Patrick McCaughey III was 23 years old when he drove to Washington, DC, with his father to protest what he saw as election manipulation. “I went down there expecting we would probably listen to a couple speeches and protest visibly, stand in location and make our voices heard,” he tells me. “It was my first real political event, protest, rally.”
Patrick readily admits he didn’t act well that day. He used a riot shield to push against a line of officers blocking the West Terrace entrance, pinning one to a doorway.
Yet if Democrats and the Biden Justice Department had treated J6ers — violent or not — the same way they treated Black Lives Matter protesters, pro-Palestinian protesters or regular criminal offenders, we would not be discussing pardons today.
“There were double standards in how sentences were applied to the J6 protesters versus other groups,” Vance said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “A double standard that was not applied to many people, including of course the Black Lives Matter rioters who killed over two dozen people and never had the weight of a weaponized Department of Justice come against them.”
Critics will say this is whataboutism, but for a party so focused on criminal-justice reform and “restorative justice,” the Democrats were quick to indict J6ers as “insurrectionists” and equate them with “domestic terrorists.” Many J6ers were overcharged, denied bail and a speedy trial and sentenced to excessive prison terms.
The federal prosecutors in my cousin’s case sought a more-than-15-year prison sentence. He had no criminal record. He’d never even gotten a speeding ticket. He owned no firearms. Yet when FBI agents banged on the door to arrest him at his father’s home Jan. 19, 2021, they did so with guns drawn.
‘Pick the right side!’
A hulky guy with glasses and an avid reader, Patrick was a high-school honors student and speaks three languages. His politics skewed right in his teens, but COVID hardened his libertarian views. He was living with his mother in Fairfield County, Conn., at the time and working in residential construction with his father. He says watching fundamental rights “being trampled upon with basic impunity” made him speak up for the first time.
He got thrown off Twitter twice for posting that masks aren’t effective. He wanted to make his voice heard.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Patrick and his father watched Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, then marched to the Capitol. Patrick separated from his father, took a selfie on the scaffolding set up for President Joe Biden’s inauguration and joined a crowd at the West Terrace entrance.
Surveillance and bodycam video of the mêlée at that entrance is extensive. Patrick uses a clear-plastic police riot shield to push against the line of officers blocking the doorway. “Just go home, man,” Patrick yells.
“Pick the right side,” a police officer shouts.
A person behind Patrick squirts what looks like bear spray at the police. A man to Patrick’s left reaches under the helmet of one of the officers, Daniel Hodges, and grabs his face. Hodges later said the man “tried to gouge out my eye.”
The crowd yells “Heave-ho” and pushes in unison to break the line of officers blocking the entrance. Hodges screams, wedged between a door frame and the shield Patrick holds.
“Let me back,” Patrick yells. He pulls Hodges’ face shield back down to, he tells me, protect him from the bear spray and tear gas. “He’s hurt,” Patrick shouts, pointing to Hodges.
“I really was screaming at the top of my lungs to have them go back so that we might be able to extricate Officer Hodges from the situation,” Patrick tells me.
At trial, Hodges conceded Patrick alerted another officer that Hodges was injured, and he was whisked to safety. Yet Hodges also says he was “crushed” by the force of Patrick’s shield the whole time.
Patrick never made it into the building. After Trump released a video later that day telling protesters to go home, he drove with his father back to his dad’s house in South Salem, New York.
At his sentencing, US District Judge Trevor McFadden called Patrick a “poster child of all that was dangerous and appalling” about Jan. 6. Patrick apologized to the court, saying, “My actions on January 6, 2021, will remain the greatest embarrassment of my life.”
He’s more nuanced with me. “I don’t regret going. I don’t regret my thoughts at the time,” he says. “But I think that, ultimately, I went down there to effect positive change, and through rashness or anger, I managed to defeat my own purpose.”
‘Vindictive mission’
I watched Jan. 6 on TV in shock and disgust. I couldn’t understand how these people — protesting in the name of MAGA — thought battling police or calling for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence helped their cause. I thought this would be a dark footnote to the Trump presidency and Trump’s reputation would never recover.
I was wrong. The Democrats all but ensured Trump’s survival.
For all the Democrats’ and the media’s talk about “insurrection,” nobody was charged with that crime. Biden lied repeatedly that J6 protesters killed Officer Brian Sicknick, even though he died of two strokes caused by an artery clot the next day. Vice President Kamala Harris likened Jan. 6 to Sept. 11. The Democrats’ entire platform became about “saving democracy,” and they used this as a pretext to prosecute Trump.
When Patrick was arrested, he thought his father would be able to bail him out after the arraignment. “I did not understand that there was going to be a judge from New York — a no-cash-bail state — who would say that I’m a monster and that I was too dangerous to be allowed out in the community,” he says. “That really was a wakeup call.”
Patrick was flown to Oklahoma and spent time in several different jails before ending up in the DC jail. Patrick calls that a bright spot in his incarceration because the entire ward was filled with J6ers. Due to the risk of COVID, they were only allowed out of their cells for one hour a day, but he says they helped each other contact their families, find lawyers and created a “community much greater than any group of incarcerated people could expect.”
They sang the national anthem every day, signed each other’s pocket Constitutions and played charades once a week. In May, Patrick got out on bond with supervised release until trial.
Patrick’s father says “nobody wanted to take the case,” and he was advised that his son accept a plea deal. They refused.
Federal prosecutors charged Patrick with several counts of assaulting an officer, including with a dangerous weapon, disorderly conduct and a slew of other offenses. His case was joined with that of five other J6 defendants he’d never met. He was forced into a trial group with two of them over his attorney’s objections.
“I feel as if it was prejudicial to my case to be joined with these people,” Patrick tells me. “The government also dragged its heels for quite some time on allowing discovery.”
Patrick opted for a bench trial because, he says, “the jury pool was so against us, against January 6 defendants, that it would have been impossible to get a fair trial there.”
“Being a man of principle, no, I don’t regret going,” Patrick’s father says about the Jan. 6 protest. But he calls the trial a “kangaroo court” and concedes, “I was fairly naïve moving into the whole thing — that’s where I really find fault with myself.”
That the officer Patrick pinned with the shield was Daniel Hodges also didn’t help his case. Hodges has become one of the most outspoken Jan. 6 police officers. He campaigned for Biden and then Harris, traveling to Michigan with her team. After Trump pardoned the J6ers, Hodges spoke at a press conference with Rep. Eric Swalwell, calling on members of Congress to oppose Trump’s “horrific agenda” and warning the J6ers are now free to “try it again.”
“There was a lot of pressure placed upon the prosecutors and judge in my case to seek a conviction and to obtain one because there was so much media attention,” Patrick says, “combined with an officer who was only too happy to appear before Congress and to speak to the media.”
Hodges did not return my request for comment.
“The Justice Department was energized in a way to explicitly convict. It was not a fact-finding mission. It was a retributive, vindictive mission,” Patrick says.
On Jan. 22, 2022, Patrick was convicted of seven felony counts, including assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon, and remanded to prison. In April 2023, he was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years. He spent the bulk of his incarceration at the Elkton federal prison in Ohio, housed mainly with child molesters.
Madness of crowds
As a teenager and in my early 20s, I took part in a lot of radical-left protests. I missed the riot at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, but I got teargassed at a 2000 Washington, DC, International Monetary Fund demonstration. I know something about the madness of crowds. I asked Patrick about this at dinner.
“It is something very fundamental to human beings that if you get enough people in a certain spirit in one area, that they’re likely to behave less like rational individuals and more like a mob,” he says. “If you get into a shoving match with the cops, it’s not the best. I know that.”
Patrick says most of the people he’s met who traveled to Washington for the Jan. 6 protests had “good intentions,” though he concedes in a crowd that size there was likely a small percent who didn’t. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whose sentence Trump commuted, had a cache of weapons stashed in a Virginia hotel room that day. Eric Munchel wore tactical gear and carried stolen zip ties in the Capitol. The guy wearing the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt is probably not a mensch.
The overzealous prosecution of J6ers, though, has made these people martyrs to some on the right.
Patrick is responsible for his actions Jan. 6, 2021. I don’t condone violence. I’m not downplaying the significance of attacking the Capitol. But seven-and-a-half years is too much for the crimes he committed.
A pro-Palestinian activist, Ruben Camacho, was sentenced to just 48 hours of community service for punching a female police officer at a protest outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 2023. Edward Schinzing was sentenced to 15 months for breaking into and setting fire to a federal courthouse in Portland in 2020, with employees and prisoners still inside. A Black Lives Matter rioter who torched a Minneapolis pawn shop, causing the death of a person inside, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. That’s five years less than prosecutors wanted for my cousin.
Moving forward
Patrick is now 27 years old. He’s softspoken with a dry sense of humor. Despite the pardon, his J6 conviction will follow him for the rest of his life — whenever he applies for a job or apartment or goes on a date. He was already debanked. But he is not a threat to society, and more prison time would likely only harden him, not make him a better candidate for release. Isn’t that a pillar of the Democrats’ criminal-justice reform?
At our dinner, Patrick didn’t want to dwell on the bad experiences in prison. He spoke about how J6ers looked out for each other, helped new inmates navigate the prison phone system and organized rides and a hotel room when they were released at 1 a.m. Jan. 21.
He joked about getting caught once using a cellphone and the sense of humor the guard who assigned him to a 45-day stint in the special housing unit — a modern form of solitary confinement with one cellmate — must have had for pairing him with Frank Monte, New Jersey’s number-one Trump stalker. “I stayed away from cell phones after that,” he says.
Patrick plans to hike the Appalachian Trail this summer. Before Jan. 6, he’d been planning a trip to Japan. He taught himself Japanese. But he says he called the Japanese consulate last month, and it told him he can’t visit the country with a criminal conviction, despite the pardon.
In the longer term, Patrick plans to move to New Hampshire or Montana to be around more “liberty-minded people.” He wants to build his own house and start a family.
“I’m not anybody special. I have a regular job. I love this country, but that’s about it. In the great-man theory of history, I’m not one of them,” Patrick says. “I’m just overjoyed I’m free, that I’m able to interact with my family, to be with my loved ones, to enjoy my full rights.”
Caroline McCaughey covers politics and policy for The New York Sun.
