Jay Matthew Kenyon, 47, of Harrisonburg, was sentenced earlier this month to 15 months in prison for brandishing a knife at police during the Jan. 6, 2021, putsch that Kenyon and thousands of fellow self-styled citizen-patriots led on behalf of Donald Trump, in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Kenyon, and 1,500 other Jan. 6 criminals, are now free, courtesy of Trump, who, despite the mountain of evidence showing that he had systematically tried to keep himself in power after losing the 2020 election, was not only able to avoid being prosecuted for crimes related to that effort, but actually won the Republican presidential nomination, and then the 2024 presidential election.
Yeah, what a country.
Trump, after being inaugurated as president on Monday, issued blanket pardons freeing the 1,500, and also directed the Justice Department to dismiss “all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Regarding the jailed J6ers: “We hope they come out tonight, frankly. They’re expecting it,” said Trump, in an on-camera Oval Office event Monday night in which he announced the execution action for the Jan. 6 criminals that he described as “hostages.”
In the case of this Kenyon guy, according to court documents, he had been preparing for Jan. 6 for “months,” writing in a Facebook post dated Nov. 15, 2020, that he had “been hitting the gym for months now,” writing in another post on Dec. 21, 2020, that he was “FULL ON PATRIOT” and “RADICALIZED,” and then, after the coup, he wrote that he had “no fear because I know what I did. I know what happened, and I will accept my consequences,” and that he would “welcome the FBI to my house.”
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Holding this guy accountable somehow made him a “hostage,” to Trump.
It got more Orwellian.
This was what the White House issued as an official statement accompanying the Trump actions regarding the J6ers:
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
Holding criminals accountable for their criminal actions is a “grave injustice.”
Good to know.
Another “hostage” of this “grave injustice” was a guy named Darl McDorman, a Waynesboro man who, according to court documents, kicked a Capitol Police officer, picked up what appeared to be a blue-colored folding lawn chair in a storage bag and threw the chair toward police, striking one officer; threw multiple objects at law enforcement in the tunnel, including what appeared to be a short silver pipe and a separate long brown metal pipe; and picked up a wooden flagpole and used it to repeatedly strike officers.
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Then there’s James Russel Davis, a King George man who, according to court documents, was carrying a long wooden stick at the front of the crowd of rioters that attempted to breach the defensive perimeter guarding the staircase to the lower west terrace, and personally engaged with at least three different officers while attempting to breach the police line.
In a message posted to Telegram, Davis admitted that he “did hit a few cops on the head with the BIG STICK, but unfortunately lost that beautiful weapon.”
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McDorman and Davis, like Kenyon, were, in Trump’s thinking, “hostages,” victims of a “grave injustice,” but we know why he thinks that way.
Those guys, among the 1,500, were just doing what they were led to believe Trump wanted them to do; he had told them, in a speech moments before the Jan. 6 putsch, that the 2020 election had been “stollen,” and that they needed to “fight like hell,” and that if they didn’t “fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
That’s what sent them off to the Capitol; they just did as directed, fighting like hell to save their country, which didn’t need saving, but anyway.
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Now, to the part of the story where it doesn’t seem that anybody official wants to say anything, yeah, I’ve scanned the interwebs for comment on this from Virginia pols, and, it’s crickets, by and large.
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., offered the pithy “sending the dangerous message that violence has no consequences” on his socials.
Gerry Connolly, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, offered a little more:
“This is a complete affront to our system of justice and an insult to the officers who came under attack during Donald Trump’s insurrection. A shameful beginning to a shameful man’s presidency,” Connolly offered on Bluesky.
And … that’s it.
Not even victory laps from our full-out MAGA congressmen Ben Cline and John McGuire, who perhaps recognize that more than half of Republicans opposed blanket pardons for the J6ers, so, the base, even, thinks Trump went too far.
And maybe he did, but then, he was just repaying a debt to people who had done for him what he had asked them to do.
Thick as thieves, as the saying goes.
Video: Trump pardons J6 criminals to repay a debt
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Chris Graham
