Dear President Trump:

Shortly after being inaugurated, you pardoned virtually all January 6 defendants (J6ers), ordered that the Department of Justice (DOJ) dismiss other pending cases, and commuted the sentences of 14 higher profile defendants including my client, Retired Navy Lt. Commander Thomas E. Caldwell. Thank you for taking such bold and decisive action on this issue. While I understand that you are now working non-stop to clean up Joe Biden’s mess, I respectfully request that you take a few minutes to consider granting Tom Caldwell a full and unconditional pardon. Let me explain.

Tom is a 100% disabled veteran who was wounded by communist insurgents in the Philippines in 1974 while stationed at Subic Bay. The shrapnel that pierced Tom’s body eventually led to debilitating back and neck fusion surgeries and a plethora of other health issues. Now 70 years old, Tom lives in pain every single day of his life resulting from service to his country. This patriot’s treatment by a partisan DOJ over the last four years is an outrage that needs to be corrected.

On January 6, 2021 Tom and his wife, Sharon, left their hotel to attend your speech, but arrived too late to secure seats, so they watched the speech on jumbotrons on the National Mall. Like countless others, after your speech the Caldwells marched to the U.S. Capitol, where they rested at the Peace Monument on the Capitol’s west side for nearly an hour.

They subsequently walked up a public sidewalk towards the Capitol, climbed a flight of stairs, and eventually “escaped the crowd” by exiting on to a temporary balcony, where they stayed for 4 minutes before exiting the stage and the Capitol grounds. Multiple security videos proved that all “no trespassing” signs and barricades had been removed from the Caldwells’ path by protestors 20 minutes before they arrived at the Peace Monument. Notably, Congress had already evacuated Capitol Hill before they even stepped on Capitol grounds. Tom provably broke no laws, committed no acts of violence, and wasn’t even on Capitol grounds when Congress was ordered to evacuate the Capitol Building.

The FBI’s rush to judgment

Despite provably breaking no laws, two weeks later the FBI executed a Waco-style raid on the Caldwells’ farm in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Approximately 20 agents armed with machine guns, a battering ram, and a tank surrounded the house. Tom witnessed seeing laser dots on Sharon’s forehead as she was ordered out of the house in her nightgown. While interrogating Tom, FBI agents accused him of leading a group of Oath Keeper members into the Capitol in a military-style attack. Why? In ferreting through Tom’s Facebook Messenger account, the FBI noted that his contacts, some of whom were Oath Keeper members he had recently befriended, referred to him as “Commander Tom.”

The FBI, however, was unaware that Tom is a retired Navy “Commander” and had never been a member of the Oath Keepers organization.

At Tom’s trial, the lead FBI agent admitted on the witness stand that he mistakenly believed: 1) that Tom was a Commander in the Oath Keepers organization; 2) that Tom commanded a group of Oath Keepers into the Capitol; and, 3) that Tom and his wife entered the Capitol Building. Comically, the FBI’s “proof” that Tom entered the Capitol was a photo of Tom and Sharon inside a temporary construction tunnel located underneath outside scaffolding. The lead FBI agent further admitted that, in hindsight, the FBI lacked predication to even open up a case up on Tom Caldwell, as he was not an Oath Keepers member and he provably did not enter the Capitol on January 6.

The Progressives at the DOJ take over

For several weeks post-January 6, left-wing commentators speculated that the “protest gone wild” at the Capitol was actually a seditious conspiracy, i.e., a pre-planned plot by right-wing militias to “attack the Capitol.” When FBI and DOJ sources anonymously leaked to the media in the summer of 2021 that there was no evidence to support “seditious conspiracy” charges against any J6ers, Progressives across the country wigged-out. In response, the DOJ and FBI literally launched a second investigation to find evidence—any evidence—to support the political narrative of a seditious conspiracy that involved right-wing militias pre-planning an attack on “our Democracy.”

The conspiracy that never was.

Under political pressure, the DOJ filed seditious conspiracy and related charges against a dozen Oath Keepers and Caldwell in January 2022, alleging an 8-week, post-election plot to forcibly stop the certification of Joe Biden as President of the United States.

What the DOJ actually did was reverse engineer a conspiracy by selectively editing political hyperbole contained in social media messages and tying it to the fact that Congress was forced to evacuate the Capitol. For example, the oft-stated “We need to take our country back” was, according to the Progressive prosecutors, code for “Let’s attack Congress.” On my cross-examination, the FBI’s lead agent admitted that of the hundreds of witnesses that had been interviewed who were familiar with Caldwell and the Oath Keepers, not one person was aware of any pre-planned plot to disrupt Congress on January 6, let alone an armed attack on Capitol Hill. The “seditious conspiracy” was not based upon solid evidence, but rather the hypothesis of a group of progressive millennial DOJ prosecutors who were virulently anti-Trump.

Had Caldwell and his Oath Keeper defendants been tried in Indiana or Utah, the jury would have recognized the political nature of the case and laughed it out of court. Unfortunately, they were tried in Washington, D.C. At the time of Tom’s trial, D.C. juries, notorious for being the defense-friendliest juries in America, had convicted seven January 6 defendants in seven separate trials of every count in every case—65 guilty findings, 0 acquittals.

Despite these odds, however, the jury in Tom’s case acquitted him of the three major conspiracy counts lodged against him (a fourth count was dismissed by the Court), but found him guilty of evidence tampering for deleting his January 6 “selfies” contained in one Facebook thread two weeks after January 6. At the time of his arrest, however, Tom still possessed on his phone and on a separate hard drive the originals and copies of the same photos that were contained in the deleted Facebook thread.

Tom Caldwell’s verdict and sentence suggest that a pardon is appropriate

Tom was sentenced on January 10, 2025 to 53 days of time he had already served after his arrest in 2021, a special assessment of $100, and no probation. Accordingly, Tom was not only cleared by a progressive D.C. jury of the most serious charges against him, but an Obama-appointed federal judge handed down a punishment more lenient than that meted out against the typical speeder in traffic court. When it comes to individuals who deserve pardons, Tom Caldwell is first among equals.

President Trump, please end this four-year American nightmare. Tom and Sharon are your biggest supporters. Instead of enjoying a well-earned retirement, Tom was used as pawns in a DOJ public relations strategy that pushed the myth that January 6 was an orchestrated “insurrection” to take over Capitol Hill. Like you, Tom was not only singled out for prosecution for political reasons, but he also is facing two civil suits filed by Soros-backed law firms. Thank you for your consideration. And thank you for doing your best to make America great again.

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Mr. Fischer is a Maryland-based attorney who has represented more than 5,000 defendants in his career, including several defendants charged in relation to January 6.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr