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When FBI agents investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol searched the Florida property of Jeremy Brown, they found a small arsenal. An AR-15-style rifle and a sawed-off shotgun, both unregistered, and two fragmentation grenades turned up in the search, prosecutors said. The Justice Department later alleged that Brown—an Army special forces veteran and member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia—had driven to Washington with those grenades and other weapons as part of the Oath Keepers’ preparations for violence aimed at helping Donald Trump retain power.
In 2023, a federal judge in Florida sentenced Brown to more than seven years in prison on weapons charges. He also faced charges in Washington, DC, for disorderly conduct and entering a restricted building.
Trump’s grant of clemency Monday to every single person “convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” wiped away Brown’s DC charges, along with those of about 1,600 other people allegedly involved in the January 6 attack.
But Trump’s broadly worded pardon might also affect the sentences of Brown and other alleged extremists facing separate charges that arose in part from the investigations into their January 6 conduct.
Carolyn Stewart, an attorney who represents Brown, said in an interview Tuesday that she is preparing to argue that Brown’s Florida conviction is covered by Trump’s pardon because the search that turned up Brown’s weapons resulted from the January 6 probe. That is, Stewart contends that his conviction was, in the words of Trump’s pardon declaration, “related” to the events of January 6.
“It should relate,” Stewart said, “because everything was the fruit of the poisonous tree.” Stewart said she is unsure how that argument will fare in court, and she noted that she is also hoping Trump will issue an additional pardon specifically clearing Brown, who remains imprisoned, in the Florida matter.
A spokesperson for US Attorney’s office in Tampa, which prosecuted Brown, declined to comment on whether the office believes Trump’s pardon applies to Brown’s Florida case, and the Justice Department in Washington, DC, did not answer questions about the case.
Trump’s sweeping and almost entirely indiscriminate clemency announcement freed hundreds of people convicted of using or plotting violence in an effort to help Trump seize the power that voters had denied him in 2020. Trump, whose November 2024 election victory helped him avoid his own trial on January 6-related charges, pardoned people who used bear spray, metal barricades, flag poles, an American flag, police shields, tasers, fists, and other weapons to attack police officers defending the Capitol. Trump freed Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, along with other members of their groups who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a crime that entails conspiring to overthrow the US government.
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