What crime were January 6th protestors charged with?
Executive summary
The people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 were charged with a broad array of federal and local crimes that range from misdemeanors like trespass to felonies—including obstruction of an official congressional proceeding, assaults on police, weapons offenses, theft and destruction of government property, and in some high-profile cases, seditious-conspiracy charges [1] [2] [3]. More than 1,500 individuals were charged in the largest criminal prosecution in Justice Department history, and the mix of charges and outcomes—guilty pleas, convictions, sentences, and later pardons—has shaped competing political narratives about the event [2] [4] [5].
1. The legal landscape: a broad spectrum of charges
Prosecutors filed a spectrum of offenses to match a wide range of conduct that day—simple unlawful entry and trespassing for some, and multiple felony counts for others—so that the dataset of charges reflects both nonviolent participants and those who engaged in violence or planned coordination [1] [6]. The Justice Department’s docket in the District of Columbia lists hundreds of federal defendants and enumerates the many statutory pathways available to federal prosecutors for conduct at the Capitol [6].
2. The most prominent felony charge: obstruction of an official proceeding
One of the central federal charges that many defendants faced was obstruction of an official proceeding—an offense tied directly to the interruption of Congress’s certification of the Electoral College—and it became a linchpin in dozens of felony prosecutions and guilty pleas [7] [3]. Courts have treated obstructing the certification as a serious federal crime because it targets the functioning of the legislative branch, and that charge underpinned many of the lengthier sentences imposed before later political interventions [7] [3].
3. Violent and property crimes: assault, weapons, theft and destruction
Dozens of defendants were charged with assaulting police officers and related violent-offense statutes after video and bodycam footage documented physical attacks on law-enforcement personnel; prosecutors also brought charges for entering restricted areas while armed, possession of weapons, theft of government property, and destruction of federal property—some 91 charged with destroying property and 68 with stealing it, according to reporting that aggregates case filings [8] [3] [7].
4. Conspiracy and the high-end criminal cases
At the top end of the docket, prosecutors pursued conspiracy theories ranging from coordinated obstruction to seditious conspiracy against members of extremist groups accused of planning and coordinating the breach; those seditious-conspiracy cases have been the most serious, drawing long sentences and intense public debate [1] [3]. While seditious-conspiracy indictments were relatively rare compared with the total number of defendants, they represented the government’s effort to treat organized planning and violent coordination as distinct and elevated crimes [3].
5. Scale, outcomes, and the evolving legal picture
By the fourth anniversary more than 1,500 people had been federally charged and prosecutors had secured hundreds of convictions and guilty pleas—roughly a third of pleas to felony counts among those who pleaded guilty—before a later presidential action that issued clemency or pardons to large numbers of those defendants, complicating the criminal outcomes and public memory of the prosecutions [2] [3] [4]. Independent trackers and reporting also document that a subset of pardoned defendants faced new unrelated charges afterward, underscoring continuing law-enforcement activity even after political clemency [9].
6. Why narratives diverge: law, politics and competing frames
The legal record and the politics have diverged: DOJ and many mainstream outlets treat the prosecutions as a large-scale effort to hold accountable a violent effort to disrupt democracy, while some political actors and White House messaging have recast many participants as peaceful protestors or victims of politicized prosecutions—an effort to rewrite the historical and legal framing that has influenced public understanding and the eventual use of pardons [2] [10] [11]. Reporting and official lists document the charges and convictions; political actors’ claims about fairness, entrapment, or selective enforcement exist alongside that documentation and have real consequences for prosecutions and public debate [5] [12].