The political divide over January 6 is only deepening five years after the deadly US Capitol attack

By Annie Grayer, Marshall Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Five years after the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, the fundamental facts of that day continue to fuel deep divisions that have created dueling political realities.

On Tuesday, members of the former January 6 select committee – whose final report concluded that President Donald Trump incited the violence at the Capitol that day – will convene a hearing to reexamine their findings.

As that hearing is underway, members of the far-right Proud Boys – including its former leader Enrique Tarrio, who was serving a 22-year prison term for seditious conspiracy before getting pardoned by Trump last year – are expected to hold a march to the Capitol that they say will be “patriotic and peaceful.”

The day’s split-screen highlights how the January 6 attack has left a political schism in its wake. Many Democrats insist the day is a painful reminder of Trump’s past and ongoing threat to democracy and fair elections, while the president and most Republicans either ignore it or recast the day’s events and diminish the level of violence.

The lawmakers who dedicated 18 months of their careers to the comprehensive House investigation are grappling with how the truth about Trump’s role in January 6 can break through in this current political moment – where Trump continues to claim that he won the 2020 election and has taken significant steps to reward rioters and deflect blame for the attack.

“He has people who support him – they have a right to vote for whoever they want,” Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who served on the committee, told CNN. “I can’t change that reality. What I can do, is release the actual reality. And this is an occasion for us to reissue some of the documentation, especially the video documentation.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has still not hung a plaque honoring the heroism of the Capitol Police officers who defended the complex on January 6, even though federal law required it to be installed by 2023. Instead, many Democrats have poster copies hanging outside their congressional offices.

The speaker’s office told CNN that the law authorizing the January 6 commemorative plaque “is not implementable,” but did not elaborate on what they view as the shortfalls of the statute in a statement.

“If Democrats are serious about commemorating the work of USCP officers, they are free to work with the appropriate committees of jurisdiction to develop a framework for proper vetting and consideration,” a spokesperson for the speaker said.

Trump isn’t expected to hold any official commemorations for the anniversary on Tuesday.

Some of the pardoned rioters and their supporters say their march, down the same streets some of them walked five years ago, will honor Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran and QAnon supporter who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer during the riot as she tried to breach an area near the House floor while lawmakers were evacuating.

“This will be my fourth year laying flowers,” said Suzzanne Monk, who wasn’t at the Capitol in January 2021 but is a leading advocate for the January 6 community. “I promised Ashli’s mother I would come every year, as long as I’m alive.”

In response to CNN’s inquiry about the January 6 anniversary, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson argued that “the media’s continued obsession with January 6 is one of the many reasons trust in the press is at historic lows — they aren’t covering issues that the American people actually care about.”

‘History will record the truth’

House Democrats’ event on Tuesday – an “unofficial” hearing – is expected to highlight how some of the rioters Trump pardoned have gone on to commit violent offenses.

It will also showcase that many of the Republicans who spread Trump’s 2020 election lies are currently serving in powerful positions across the federal government, which Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin also featured in a report released Monday.

Among the expected witnesses for the three-panel event are Pamela Hemphill, a convicted rioter who has since disavowed Trump and rejected his pardon, and former Capitol Police officer Winston Pingeon, who testified against Trump at a 2023 civil trial in Colorado about whether the US Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” prohibited Trump from running again for president.

“The years may have muffled the screams we heard, and the horrible images of that day may have faded. So, as we mark this grim anniversary, it is important that we remember exactly what happened,” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the former chairman of the January 6 committee, is expected to say in his opening statement on Tuesday.

Part of the reason former committee members chose to mark the five-year anniversary this way, they said, was because they felt it was the best avenue to reach a wide audience – a similar strategy used during their investigation where blockbuster hearings brought their findings to life.

“We understood that this couldn’t just be a 900-page report that sits on the shelf, and that we needed to show people what happened,” Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, who served on the committee, said in an interview. “The idea was if people had five minutes or five hours to pay attention will they understand what happened that day and the gravity of the situation and the role that the president played.”

Even with firsthand accounts from inside the Trump White House, video footage of brutal police assaults, and thousands of pages of court filings, committee members will revisit the material at a time when Trump is using his powerful perch back in the White House to propel the lie that he won the 2020 presidential election.

On his first day in office, Trump pardoned nearly everyone charged in connection with the attack. Soon after, many of the federal prosecutors who spent years on those cases found themselves pushed out or re-assigned under the Trump-led Department of Justice.

“I know history will record the truth,” former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of just two Republicans to serve on the former committee, told CNN. “But watching so many be brainwashed into believed it was anything but what it was, can be disheartening. That said, I have so much appreciation for those who defended us on that dark evil day.”

Former Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, who is running for her old seat and also served on the committee, said she still struggles to comprehend how the facts of January 6 are not widely accepted.

“It’s hard for me to understand how someone can see the evidence right in front of them, see the facts, see the footage, hear the stories of the officers who were injured and the widows who lost their spouses as law enforcement officers died then or shortly after the attack, and then deny that it happened,” Luria said.

The hearing is also an opportunity to revisit a topic that many Republicans on Capitol Hill seem to avoid despite a Republican-led probe, launched at Trump’s urging, to re-litigate January 6.

Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk, who is leading the Republican-led counter-investigation, called the former January 6 committee a “partisan exercise designed to advance a narrative to target President Trump and his political allies.”

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, continues to pursue the prosecutors who brought the 2020-related criminal cases against Trump.

Recent testimony from Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led two now-defunct federal prosecutions against Trump, contained revelatory insights about how prosecutors analyzed Trump’s actions around January 6. But the transcript was buried with a New Year’s Eve release. (It’s unclear if this was intentional.)

Justice undone

The Justice Department’s four-year probe into the Capitol riot was the most sweeping and labor-intensive investigation in US history, officials have said.

The work began immediately while rioters were still traversing the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – and ended abruptly on January 20, 2025, when a newly inaugurated Trump signed a mass clemency proclamation in the Oval Office.

At that point, prosecutors had charged nearly 1,600 rioters. At least 1,270 were convicted, mostly through guilty pleas, though there were about 260 trials that resulted in guilty verdicts. About 42% of convictions were in felony cases, with charges like seditious conspiracy, assaulting police, weapons offenses and destroying property. About 300 pending cases were dropped.

“It sucks. It really is a tough pill to swallow,” said Sean Murphy, a former Justice Department prosecutor who oversaw investigations into hundreds of rioters who attacked police officers that day. “Over the four years, I saw the faces of the rioters more than I saw the faces of my own children.”

Trump’s day-one pardons and commutations covered everyone charged in connection with January 6, and freed hundreds of violent criminals from prison. His proclamation said the move ended “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years.”

The move went further than what even many Trump allies had advocated for. Prominent Republicans like Vice President JD Vance had said Trump shouldn’t pardon the hundreds of defendants convicted of violent offenses.

Many Republicans backed partial clemency, and were likely influenced by Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of January 6 among the GOP base by painting it as a left-wing hoax. But there are still a number of Republican lawmakers, along with Democrats, and many ex-prosecutors who have held steady with their condemnations of the violence.

“When January 6 happened, everyone agreed it was a big deal and shouldn’t have happened,” Murphy said. “To see it called ‘a grave national injustice,’ referring not to what they did, but to our work as prosecutors, it’s a gut punch. It knocks you down. The question is how you want to get back up.”

Murphy resigned from the Justice Department in March.

‘Hardened’ and ‘unrepentant’ rioters

Few know the social dynamics behind January 6 better than Michael Premo, a filmmaker whose documentary “Homegrown” was widely released Tuesday.

Premo embedded with MAGA supporters in 2020, and followed one man who stormed the Capitol and was later sentenced to 12 years in prison for assaulting officers with pepper spray and a riot shield. The film examines the diversity within the right-wing movement – and the lingering threats.

“What drove people to this was the search for belonging,” Premo said. “They made new friends, online and in real life. Five years later, especially because of the pardons, it has become a lifestyle choice for many. They lost friends, family and income. They found community with other hardened J6ers.”

A small number of the nearly 1,600 charged rioters have subsequently been accused of new crimes, according to a new report released by Raskin on Monday, and a recent analysis from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a liberal-leaning group.

CREW found at least 33 pardoned rioters who have been rearrested and charged with offenses ranging from child sexual abuse to burglary. Others were accused of plotting violence against prominent Democrats like former President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“Trump sent a clear signal to his supporters that lawless action taken to serve his political goals is welcomed and will be allowed to proceed with impunity,” CREW’s chief counsel Donald Sherman said. “It’s no surprise we continue to see threats from the president’s supporters against his perceived enemies.”

CNN reached out to more than a dozen January 6 reoffenders and their family members. They all either declined to comment or did not respond.

Whitewashing history

Five years on, the script has flipped on January 6. Trump is now seemingly more powerful than ever.

The president had initially faced intense backlash: His job approval hit new lows, he was condemned by corporate America, and impeached by the House of Representatives on a bipartisan basis.

The Trump comeback, however, started within weeks.

Enough Senate Republicans, led by then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, rallied behind Trump to secure his impeachment acquittal. Trump easily clinched the 2024 GOP nomination. He defeated an effort, led by CREW, to block him from office under the 14th Amendment’s “insurrectionist ban.”

Sherman, CREW’s top lawyer, said he believes “every institution that was tasked with holding President Trump accountable for January 6 has failed, except for the Colorado Supreme Court.” (That court ruled that Trump was ineligible for office, but was later overturned by the US Supreme Court.)

“McConnell took a pass. The Biden administration dragged its feet. The Supreme Court bent itself into a pretzel to overturn our victory. Fani Willis had ethical missteps. And Jack Smith ran out of time,” Sherman said.

Trump used his triumphant return to the White House to claim that he was right all along about January 6. Many of the pardoned rioters have echoed his rhetoric that they – not the police or the lawmakers and staffers who ran for their lives – are the true victims of that deadly day.

“I think the narrative has been flipped,” Tarrio, the pardoned former Proud Boys leader, told CNN on Tuesday. “The narrative was flipped on Election Day in 2024. And I think right now, what you’re seeing is both sides of the argument.”

Last summer, the Trump administration reached a $5 million settlement with Babbitt’s family, even though the officer who killed her was cleared of wrongdoing. Leaders of the far-right Proud Boys sued the Justice Department in June, seeking million in damages for their prosecutions.

The Justice Department, perhaps surprisingly, asked a judge to throw out that case. But in the past year, Trump appointees have wiped evidence of the rioters’ crimes from the internet, scrubbed mentions of January 6 from some court records, and fired and suspended some January 6 prosecutors.

“We answered the call,” said Murphy, the former January 6 prosecutor. “We created that mandala, placing every grain of sand with tweezers, and we created something beautiful and massive. And I have to believe that it had some impact on the political and historical reality of the United States.”

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CNN’s Brian Todd contributed to this report.