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This week marked the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, demanding that then-Vice President Pence overturn the will of the people. Efforts to impose accountability for those responsible and those involved have largely ended — except in Wisconsin. This means that Wisconsin has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to re-assert the rule of law, to ensure justice, and to bolster the foundations on which American democracy has been built over the past 250 years.

As we assess the state of our democracy in light of this somber anniversary, let’s start with the bad news: 

• The U.S. Supreme Court derailed efforts by states to enforce the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against insurrectionists serving in federal office, and then it invented an ahistorical and jaw-droppingly broad doctrine of presidential immunity to derail criminal prosecutions of Trump in state and federal courts alike. 
• Federal prosecutions of the violent mob in the Capitol were upended by Trump’s Department of Justice, and Trump issued sweeping federal pardons to every individual connected with Jan. 6, effectively encouraging them to keep it up. 
• State prosecutions of the fraudulent electors — those who executed an unprecedented effort to overturn the 2020 election by submitting to Congress (and other officials) paperwork that falsely declared Trump to have won seven key states that he in fact lost and thereby laying the groundwork for the Jan. 6 rioters to violently demand Pence validate their efforts — have faltered, often for reasons unrelated to the merits of those actions. 

But here in Wisconsin there are still grounds for hope. Hope that bad actors who deliberately took aim at our democracy will be held accountable. Hope that our institutions will stand up and protect our democracy from further meddling by those most directly responsible. And hope that those institutions will act promptly to prevent further damage. Every Wisconsinite should be watching the following accountability efforts — and urging our elected officials to use their authority to advance the rule of law and protect our democracy. 

First, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will soon determine the appropriate sanction for Michael Gableman’s ethical transgressions as he spearheaded a sham “investigation” of the 2020 election. Gableman, who once served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, accepted this job despite his own assessment that he did not understand how elections work in Wisconsin. He wasted taxpayer funds, undermined government transparency laws, dealt dishonestly with his clients and the public, lied to and insulted courts, and tried to jail the elected mayors of Green Bay and Madison. In March 2023, Law Forward filed an omnibus ethics grievance, documenting Gableman’s myriad breaches of the ethics rules that bind all Wisconsin attorneys. Last summer, Gableman stipulated that he had no viable defense of his conduct and agreed with the Office of Lawyer Regulation to jointly recommend his law license be suspended for three years. (He is now trying to wriggle out of accountability by serially pushing justice after justice to recuse.) 

Wisconsin precedent is clear that, where a lawyer is charged with multiple ethical breaches, the proper sanction is determined by adding the sanctions for each breach together. The Court should apply established law, which demands revoking Gableman’s law license. Then the Office of Lawyer Regulation and the Court should act on our requests to hold Andrew Hitt (chairman of the Wisconsin fraudulent electors) and Jim Troupis (chief Wisconsin counsel to Trump’s 2020 campaign and ringleader of the fraudulent-elector scheme) accountable as well.

Second, the primary architects of the fraudulent-elector scheme, detailed in records  obtained through Law Forward’s groundbreaking civil suit, are also facing criminal prosecution in Dane County. Attorney General Josh Kaul’s case is narrowly focused only on three lawyers — two who were based here in Wisconsin, and one working for the Trump campaign in DC — who conceived and designed the scheme to overturn Wisconsin’s results and then convinced six other states to follow suit. Troupis, who himself was appointed to the Wisconsin bench by former-Gov. Scott Walker as a reward for his key role in the 2011 partisan gerrymander, has gone to great lengths to slow down this prosecution, which Kaul initiated in June 2024. He filed nine separate motions to dismiss the case. He accused the judge hearing preliminary motions of misconduct and insisted that the entire Dane County bench should be recused. And now he has appealed the denial of his misconduct allegations. This case, since assigned to a different Dane County judge, will proceed, and it is the best hope anywhere in the country to achieve accountability for the fraudulent-elector scheme. 

Third, on behalf of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and two individual voters, Law Forward is suing Elon Musk and two advocacy organizations he controls for their brazen scheme of million-dollar giveaways to influence the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election. This case is about ensuring that Wisconsin elections are decided by Wisconsin voters, not by out-of-state efforts to buy the results they want for us. We’re waiting for the trial court to decide preliminary motions, but, with another Wisconsin Supreme Court election imminently approaching, there is urgency to clarify that Wisconsin law forbids the shenanigans we saw last year, which contributed to the most expensive judicial race in American history. 

Beginning in 2011, Wisconsin became the country’s primary testing ground for the most radical anti-democratic ideas. From Act 10 to one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country, from subverting the separation of powers and steamrolling local control over local issues to hobbling the regulatory state and starving our public schools, Wisconsin’s gerrymandered Legislature adopted idea after idea hostile to democracy. With the end of the nation’s most extreme and durable partisan gerrymander in 2023 and a change in the makeup of the state Supreme Court, however, the tide in Wisconsin has ebbed somewhat. 

Now, improbably, Wisconsin is the place that democracy can best hold the line. We can create accountability for those who have abused power, have undermined elections, and have diminished the ideals and institutions of our self-government. That, in conjunction with Law Forward’s broad docket of work to defend free elections and to strengthen our democracy, sustains my hope.

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A small crowd of far-right activists marched on the U.S. Capitol Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026 in a nonviolent protest. They followed the path of the march five years ago, when rioters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden's presidential election win. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — Five years after a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the struggle to define the event and assign blame carried on in events across the city Tuesday that remained nonviolent, though still disturbing.

A crowd of no more than a few hundred of President Donald Trump’s supporters commemorated the deadly attack with a somewhat subdued march from the Ellipse to the Capitol that was in stark contrast to the riot five years ago.

Inside the Capitol, U.S. House Democrats gathered in a small meeting room, apparently unable to secure larger accommodations for an unofficial hearing that largely rehashed the findings of a House committee that spent 2022 investigating the attack.

Trump, meanwhile, addressed House Republicans three miles west at the Kennedy Center. In an hour-plus address, he blamed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the violence on Jan. 6, 2021 and recommended the GOP lawmakers pass laws to make election fraud more difficult. Trump’s claim that his 2020 election loss was due to fraud sparked the 2021 attack.

“Our elections are crooked as hell,” he said, without citing evidence.

House Dems blast pardons 

Inside the Capitol, at a morning event that U.S. House Democrats organized and in which Republicans didn’t take part, lawmakers and experts criticized Trump’s pardons of people involved in the 2021 attack, one of his first acts after returning to office last year.

They also decried his continued recasting of the events of the day.

White House officials launched a webpage Tuesday that blamed the attack on Democrats, again including Pelosi, and restated the lie that initiated the attack: The 2020 election that Trump lost was marred by fraud and should not have been certified.

“Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6,” the page reads. “…In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.” 

Pelosi at the hearing on Tuesday condemned Trump’s version of the attack. 

“Today, that president who incited that insurrection continues to lie about what happened that day,” the California Democrat said.

Other Democrats and their invited witnesses also described the pardons as signaling that the president accepted — and even encouraged — his supporters to pursue illegal means of keeping him in power. 

Brendan Ballou, a former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor who resigned shortly after Trump’s 2025 pardons, told the panel the executive action sent Trump supporters the “clear message” they were above the law.

“The January 6 pardons also fit into a broader narrative of what’s going on with this administration, that if people are sufficiently loyal and willing to support the president, either in words or financially, they will be put beyond the reach of the law,” he added. “It means that quite literally for a certain group of people right now in America, the law does not apply to them.”

Former ‘MAGA granny’ testifies

Homeland Security Committee ranking Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi led the panel discussion, with Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland and several others also sitting in on it.

The first panel of witnesses included Ballou, other experts and Pamela Hemphill, a former Trump supporter from Idaho who traveled to the nation’s capital five years ago to “be part of the mob” in support of the president before becoming an advocate for reckoning with the day’s violence.

An emotional Hemphill, 72 and once known as “MAGA granny,” apologized to U.S. Capitol police officers.

“Once I got away from the MAGA cult and started educating myself about January the 6th, I knew what I did was wrong,” Hemphill told the panel. “I pleaded guilty to my crimes because I did the crime. I received due process and the DOJ was not weaponized against me. 

“Accepting that pardon would be lying about what happened on January the 6th,” she added.

She explained her decision to decline Trump’s blanket pardon of offenders convicted of crimes related to the attack, saying it papered over the misdeeds of people involved in the riot. She implored others not to accept revisions of the narrative about what happened in the attack.

Subsequent panels included current and former House members, including two, Republican Adam Kitzinger of Illinois and Democrat Elaine Luria of Virginia, who sat on the committee tasked with investigating the attack.

Flowers for Ashli Babbitt

The crowd of marchers, which included pardoned Jan. 6 attack participants, gathered in the late morning to retrace their path to the U.S. Capitol five years ago.

Organizers billed the march as a memorial event to honor Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by U.S. Capitol Police during the riot in 2021 as she attempted to break into the House Speaker’s lobby.

Far-right activists celebrating the five-year anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol marched in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026, from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Rioters in 2021 attempted to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election win. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

The crowd of roughly a couple hundred walked from the Ellipse, where Trump spoke to rallygoers in 2021, to just outside the Capitol grounds, where police contained the small crowd on the lawn north of the Reflecting Pool. 

Law enforcement officers permitted Babbitt’s mother, Michelle Witthoeft, and a few others to walk closer to the Capitol to lay flowers at roughly 2:44 p.m. Eastern, the time they say Babbitt died.

A group of counterprotesters briefly approached the demonstration, yelling “traitors.” Police quickly formed two lines between the groups, heading off any clashes.

Proud Boys former leader on-site 

Among the crowd was former Proud Boys national leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. Trump commuted Tarrio’s sentence upon taking office for his second term.

While looking on at marchers, Tarrio told States Newsroom he was “just supporting.”

“It’s not my event. I’m just trying to help them with organizing and marching people down the street, I guess. But we’re here for one purpose, and that’s to honor the lives of Ashli Babbitt and those who passed away that day.”

When asked if marchers were also honoring the police officers who died in the days and months after the attack, Tarrio said he mourned “any loss of life” but added “I heard some suicides happened. I don’t know. I haven’t really looked into that. I’ve been in prison.”

U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick suffered injuries during the riot, according to the Capitol Police. He died the following day from natural causes, according to the District of Columbia Office of the Medical Examiner.

Four responding police officers died by suicide in the following days and months.

As the march continued, a group of Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police officers on bicycles stopped Tarrio and asked him to confirm the march route to avoid any “confusion.”

When counterprotesters began to heckle the Jan. 6 attack supporters, Tarrio waved the marchers forward, “C’mon, c’mon, keep moving.”

Jan. 6 rioter Rasha Abual-Ragheb, 45, of New Jersey, addressed the crowd earlier and thanked “Daddy Trump” for her pardon. Abual-Ragheb, who pleaded guilty to parading, demonstrating and picketing in the U.S. Capitol, showed off a tattoo on her arm reading “MAGA 1776.”

Willie Connors, 57, of Bayonne, New Jersey, stood on the edge of the crowd with a yellow “J6” flag tied around his neck. Connors said he didn’t enter the Capitol during the 2021 attack, but said he was in the district that day to protest the 2020 presidential election, which he falsely claimed was “robbed” from Trump.

“Donald Trump, I’ll take the bullet for that man. He’s my president,” Connors said.