Pardoned for Jan. 6, She Came Home to a New Reality

On her 15th day of freedom as a pardoned participant in the Jan. 6 riot, Rachel Powell drove through western Pennsylvania’s gray winter to the county courthouse in Franklin. She needed to check off applying for a gun permit from her homecoming to-do list.

With her two youngest children trailing behind, Ms. Powell walked into the Venango County Sheriff’s Office, where a sign advised visitors to “Keep Calm and Carry.” She swept her long dark hair from her face and began filling out the concealed-carry application, only to stop short at the existential dilemma posed by Question G:

Are you now charged with or have you ever been convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year?

If she answered yes, her application could not be processed. If she answered no, she feared being charged again with breaking the law.

“Can I make a note that I answered this way because I have a presidential pardon?” asked Ms. Powell, who once owned an AK-47 rifle and a Glock pistol.

The two clerks behind the desk could provide little guidance, never having dealt with a presidential pardon. Neither could a deputy sheriff, who advised her to consult a lawyer because he did not want her to get into more trouble.

“Drumroll, please,” Ms. Powell finally said. “I’m marking no.”

She paid the $20 fee, was told the office would be in touch and walked out of the courthouse, into her changed reality. Five years ago, she was home-schooling her children and selling organic goods at farmers’ markets. Now, on her left biceps, she sported a memento from prison that reflected her life’s newfound purpose:

A crude tattoo that said “J6.”

Ms. Powell, 44, was among the nearly 1,600 people to benefit last month from an act of self-interested mercy that augured what justice might look like in the second administration of Donald J. Trump. Within hours of returning to office, the president granted reprieves to everyone implicated in the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of his supporters, motivated by his lies about a rigged election, stormed the Capitol and disrupted the electoral certification of his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Trump’s sweeping gesture reflected a continuing effort to alter, if not erase, the record of a day when people died, officers were beaten, the Capitol was vandalized and elected officials ran for their lives. The president has reframed the riot as an expression of patriotic love, and the federal officials who conducted the investigations into Jan. 6 as corrupt villains.

Shortly before he was to honor emergency workers at a Super Bowl ceremony in New Orleans this month, the president was pointedly asked why he had pardoned people who had assaulted police officers at the Capitol. His response defied the overwhelming evidence.

“I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “They didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”

Most Americans disagree. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, nearly three-quarters of those polled disapproved of Mr. Trump’s pardons for people convicted of violent crimes, and more than half disliked his pardons for even those convicted of nonviolent offenses.

The wholesale amnesty meant that about 250 imprisoned rioters were released from custody to a country whose president was now their savior. Some have disavowed the stolen-election lies, some have sought anonymity — and some are basking in their Jan. 6 street cred like heroes back from war.

Among those embracing their moment is the slight Ms. Powell, who personifies both the sorry-not-sorry posture of many Jan. 6 participants and the steep price paid for their fealty to Mr. Trump. Involved in the riot to an “astounding” degree, according to a federal prosecutor, she earned two nicknames, the Pink Hat Lady and the Bullhorn Lady, but may be best known as the woman who broke a Capitol window with an ice ax.

Ms. Powell recalled that day and its aftermath while relaxing in a rustic loft that her altered circumstances would soon force her to leave. A Trump hat signed by the man himself (“Rachel, we love you”) sat on a bookshelf, not far from a computer’s screen-saving photo of Mr. Trump with three of her sons.

Nearby, her son Nikolaus, 14, read a book about how to make potato guns, while her daughter Tessa, 8, hovered by her side. They half-listened as their mother recalled the tribulations of prison and the elation of a presidential pardon.

On inauguration night Ms. Powell was at the Washington jail, having been transported from a West Virginia prison for a resentencing hearing, when news of the pardons broke. Very quickly she was on the phone with Cynthia Hughes, a Jan. 6 advocate who was attending an inaugural ball three miles away, and the two women, one in formal dress and the other in inmate orange, made plans to meet at the event.

“I was like, I’m going to get out of here in my prison clothes and I’m going to go straight to the ball!” Ms. Powell recalled.

Once released — though not in time to have her Cinderella moment — she walked over to the so-called Freedom Corner, where Jan. 6 supporters had kept vigil outside the jail for years and where she was received like family. But being part of this family had come at great cost.

Ms. Powell grew up in dysfunctional circumstances, gave birth to her first child at 16, married at 20 and home-schooled her eight children. She divorced, moved into a farmhouse, worked at a bookstore and fell into a small business selling organic goods to neighbors and at open-air markets. She rarely followed national politics.

Then, in 2020, Covid restrictions disrupted her income flow and offended her sense of individual rights. Her anger and desperation led to activism laced with conspiracy theories and to incendiary social media posts that unsettled friends like Linda Strawbridge, who had bonded with Ms. Powell over gardening, hiking and kayaking.

“I disconnected from Rachel,” Ms. Strawbridge recalled. “I had some sympathy, but there was also a worldwide pandemic.”

Mr. Biden’s victory intensified Ms. Powell’s radicalization. Distrusting how mail-in ballots had affected election results in Pennsylvania, she bought into Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lies and heeded his call to come to Washington on Jan. 6 for a “wild” protest of the election certification.

But Ms. Powell did more than protest. She was an “aggressor,” according to federal prosecutors, often at the front of the violence, encouraging others through her bullhorn to break into the building. Most famously, she used an ice ax and a makeshift battering ram to break a Capitol window as overwhelmed officers tried to hold back the mob.

Ms. Powell’s image soon appeared on wanted posters. She surrendered to criminal charges and was placed in home detention, allowed to leave only for work, religious services and medical appointments. She quit her job at the bookstore — she and the owners were being harassed, she said — sold her farmhouse to cover legal fees and moved with her four youngest children to the wooded outskirts of Grove City, into a cabin owned by her then-boyfriend, who hired her to help manage his consulting businesses.

It was a bumpy home confinement. She was eventually required to wear an ankle monitor and restricted for several months to the cabin, forbidden even to walk around the garden.

Found guilty of nine felony and misdemeanor charges, Ms. Powell traveled back to federal court in Washington to be sentenced. Struggling with her composure, she apologized, saying she was “deeply ashamed” of her behavior. “I broke a window,” she said. “I pushed on police barricades. I encouraged others to enter the building. My conduct was disgraceful.”

But Ms. Powell’s words conflicted with her social media assertions that she was a victim, the police were the aggressors and her window-breaking amounted to a misdemeanor that did not warrant prison time — a contention she had made just the day before on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” program.

Judge Royce C. Lamberth was sympathetic — to a point. “You have skated along for a long time now,” he said, before sentencing her to 57 months in prison.

On a sleety day in January 2024, Ms. Powell hugged Nikolaus and Tessa at the Hazelton federal penitentiary in Bruceton Mills, W.Va., before impatient guards led her away. “It’s like ripping your heart out,” she recalled, her voice breaking. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Ms. Powell adapted to the rhythms and indignities of incarceration. She had several bunk mates, the most considerate of whom, she said, was a woman known as the Jack-in-the-Box Killer. But she was closest to two other Jan. 6 rioters: Shelly Stallings, serving two years for crimes that included assaulting police officers with pepper spray, and Riley June Williams, serving three years for helping lead a mob to the office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

With a makeshift ink gun cobbled together from a pen, a 9-volt battery and the motor of a CD player, they memorialized their bond with “J6” tattoos on Ms. Powell’s biceps, Ms. Stallings’s forearm and Ms. Williams’s rib cage.

“My J6 sisters,” Ms. Powell said.

A Muted Return

After her pardon, Ms. Powell returned to her corner of western Pennsylvania: solid MAGA country. This is where Mr. Trump was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet during a rally last summer, and where he carried about two-thirds of the vote in the November election.

A change in her relationship with her boyfriend meant another relocation. With financial assistance from the Patriot Freedom Project, a J6-support organization co-founded by Ms. Hughes, she put many belongings into storage and prepared to move to a small house in disrepair on property owned by her ex-husband, Rick Powell, who reasoned that she and their children had suffered enough.

For the first two weeks, Ms. Powell mostly stayed in the cabin loft, trying to repair the damage and return to some normality. At a delayed Christmas gathering, the gifts she received included books, healthy snacks and a black leather concealed-carry purse.

She needed to earn an income but gave herself three months to come up with a plan. In the meantime, she had her daily to-do lists.

One day: lunch with a friend at the TimberCreek restaurant in Mercer, applying for the gun permit in Franklin and an on-camera interview with a right-wing media outlet in which she again minimized her role on Jan. 6. (“I did break a window that day in the Capitol. But that’s a misdemeanor charge.”)

The next day: at-home music lessons for Nikolaus and Tessa, a haircut at a salon in Grove City and then gutting the small house she’d soon be moving into.

Dozens of communities like hers have grappled with how to receive Jan. 6 prisoners returning home. Are they rioters who tried to thwart the country’s sacred transfer of power? Or patriots, as Mr. Trump and many Republicans contend, spurred to action by a righteous cause?

On a recent Sunday, a church congregation in Temecula, Calif., made its answer clear with a standing ovation for the just-released Derek Kinnison, who had marched with other members of the Three Percenters militia, overturning police barricades and helping rioters scale the walls of the Capitol.

Ms. Powell has received a more muted welcome, as if there were communal agreement to look past why she had all but disappeared for four years.

When the music teacher, Marlyn Jensen, the image of small-town propriety in her glasses and Norwegian sweater, arrived at the cabin loft, she seemed thrilled to see her old client, fresh from prison. Soon the two women were catching up, while a cellphone beeped with messages from Jan. 6 participants and Tessa, at an electric keyboard, pecked out “This Land Is Your Land.”

“It’s been a long time since I saw you making music with my kids,” Ms. Powell said. “It’s nice.”

At lesson’s end, Ms. Jensen presented Ms. Powell with Christmas gifts that included maple candy, gourmet salt and a card featuring an image of a palm tree. “The righteous will flourish like a palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon,” the teacher said, echoing the 92nd Psalm.

“I’m just so glad you’re home,” she added.

Running late and with her two youngest children in tow, Ms. Powell drove her small Ford SUV the 20 minutes to the Static salon in downtown Grove City, while mentally adding another item to her list. The Sheriff’s Office had just called, her application for a carry permit had been denied and now she had to file an appeal to find out why.

Though the rejection bothered her — didn’t a pardon mean the immediate restoration of her rights? — it came as no surprise. “The last four years have been hell,” she said, with everything that could go wrong doing just that.

At least there was the restorative joy of a haircut. As Ms. Powell leaned back into a black chair for a wash, she confided to the young stylist that the last time she cut her hair, “it was with mustache scissors over a toilet.” She went on to recall a few other prison-beauty tips, including how to thread eyebrows with a tampon string.

“I feel like you should make a TikTok page of all the things you learned,” said the stylist, Samantha Hajave.

The scissors flashed and the women chatted — home schooling, book recommendations, the strains of motherhood — before Ms. Powell suddenly asked: “So are you a Trump fan?”

Ms. Hajave took a beat before saying, “My husband is.”

“Well, I want to share my new favorite word with you,” the customer said. “This haircut is MAGA-nificent.”

‘We’ve Been Through Hell Together’

Within hours, Ms. Powell’s fresh-cut hair was under a hat as she, her ex-husband and several of their children worked like a seasoned construction crew to gut the modest home that she hoped to occupy by the end of the month. A one-story storefront just outside Franklin that had once been a pet-grooming shop, it was a step down from the farmhouse she used to own.

Her old friend, Ms. Strawbridge — who had written a letter of support for Ms. Powell before her sentencing — said she felt sad whenever she drove past that farmhouse and recalled the sprawling backyard, the lush garden and the home schooling that had taken place there.

“To give all that up for Donald Trump,” Ms. Strawbridge said. “What a terrible, sad civics lesson. She got so much right, but she got that wrong.”

If her change in circumstances bothered Ms. Powell, she did not show it. She seemed excited, in fact, because one of her “J6 sisters,” Ms. Williams, was coming for a visit.

The slender, bespectacled Ms. Williams, 26, has a presence so unassuming that the federal judge who sentenced her had felt the need to remind everyone that this “petite protester” had acted “like a coxswain on a crew team” in directing a mob into the fray.

In prison, Ms. Powell and Ms. Williams gravitated toward each other. Both were back-to-basics women from Pennsylvania who enjoyed working out. They cheered and reassured each other while walking the jailhouse track.

“Rachel made me feel normal again,” Ms. Williams said.

Their relationship reflects the Jan. 6-centric world that Ms. Powell now inhabits. She promotes J6 ideology on social media. Her cellphone often pings with an alert from some J6 group chat, or rings with a call from a J6 comrade seeking support or needing to vent. Her social calendar includes serving as a bridesmaid — along with her other J6 sister, Ms. Stallings — at Ms. Williams’s upcoming wedding.

“No one else is ever going to understand our experience,” Ms. Powell said. “We’ve been through hell together.”

The night after the haircut, she and Ms. Williams relaxed in the cozy cabin in Grove City, sharing stories and sipping gin cocktails. The complicated Jan. 6 swirl of emotions — of trauma and grievance, of stubborn pride and pardon-provided validation — informed the mood and conversation.

No matter the incriminating videos, and no matter the apologies made in court, they saw themselves as victims, not aggressors, whose actions had been misrepresented in the media.

“We went there innocently to a protest,” Ms. Powell said. “And we were sucked in by violence that was directed at us — when we didn’t go there intending to be violent. And then we were thrown in prison.”

“We’re the people who love our country,” she added. “We know that America is the best country in the world, and we need to save our country.”

A storm the day before had encased western Pennsylvania in snow and ice. But the two women inside this cabin enjoyed the warmth to be found from a wood stove, sips of gin and presidential pardons that reassured them they were in the right, after all. They were in the right.

Meridith Kohut contributed reporting.