WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardon of participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot does not extend to the separate crimes of one rioter who plotted to murder the law enforcement agents who investigated him, U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan ruled Monday.
Edward Kelley, who was convicted on Jan. 6 charges after the government presented extensive evidence showing he was the fourth rioter to breach the Capitol after assaulting law enforcement, was pardoned by Trump along with more than 1,500 other convicted rioters. But Kelley had separately been charged with plotting to murder law enforcement officers involved in the investigation in a separate case. Kelley was convicted on those charges by a federal jury in Tennessee in November, and he is set to be sentenced on May 7.
The Justice Department has flip-flopped on the extent of Trump’s Jan. 6 pardon in other cases involving guns found in the homes of Capitol rioters, arguing that the president’s action should also give defendants a clean slate on other crimes or charges discovered in the course of Jan. 6 investigations.
But the Justice Department has consistently maintained that Trump did not intend to pardon Kelley for his plot to murder FBI special agents and other members of law enforcement.
Varlan, who was appointed to the bench in the Eastern District of Tennessee by former President George W. Bush, ruled Monday that Trump’s Jan. 6 pardon “does not apply to defendant’s convictions for conspiracy to murder employees of the United States (Count 1), solicitation to commit a crime of violence (Count 2), and influencing a federal official by threat (Count 3).” He wrote that the pardon “does not encompass defendant’s Tennessee Case because this case involved separate offense conduct that was physically, temporally, and otherwise unrelated to defendant’s conduct in the D.C. Case and/or events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Kelley’s conduct in the murder plot “was separated from the defendant’s conduct in the D.C. Case by years and miles” and could not reasonably be expected to be covered by the language of Trump’s mass pardon, the judge ruled.
“Trial evidence established that defendant took independent, volitional action to prepare for a violent attack against federal officials in Knoxville — actions that are causally attenuated from the events of January 6, 2021,” Varlan wrote. “His acquisition of firearms, ammunition, and explosive materials, coordination with Austin Carter and Christopher Roddy to train for combat, and his distribution of a list of targeted victims are all intervening actions taken without direct or proximate relation to January 6, 2021, though perhaps in relation to the investigation of conduct occurring on January 6, 2021 — a form of relation that is, as mentioned before, notably absent from the text of the pardon.”
Late last month, a federal judge in Washington grilled an assistant U.S. attorney about the new contention that Trump’s pardon covered charges related to guns that were found when federal agents searched Jan. 6 defendant Dan Wilson’s home in 2023. U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, a Trump appointee, has yet to rule in that case, but the judge said in court that pardons “have to have a fixed meaning” and that Trump’s intent when he issued the pardons on Jan. 20, 2025, “cannot evolve over time as new cases are brought to his attention.”
“I don’t think you can just have an open pardon,” Friedrich said. “It can’t be ‘we know it when we see it.'”
