Early in the evening of July 13 in an isolated cell block of the D.C. Jail, about two miles east of the Capitol Building, a dozen detainees charged with some of the most violent crimes committed on January 6, 2021, were participating in a thousand-burpee challenge. The group made up roughly half of the inmates held in the block, a special unit sequestered from the jail’s other prisoners and known to its residents as “the Patriot Wing.” The challenge was in honor of a former resident of the unit, a fitness evangelist, who had recently been transferred out to serve a five-year prison sentence for attacking police officers with a floor lamp, a shoe, a nightstick, and a spiked club made from a broken table leg and nails.
Around the same time, in the Western Pennsylvania town of Butler, Donald Trump was taking a rally stage to the tune of “God Bless America.” Scripps News, the primary channel played in the unit, was carrying the event live, and a few inmates were watching in the TV room, where residents kicked their feet up on the rows of couches. Somewhere around the 400th burpee, the pop of gunfire came through the TV speakers, and Trump, onscreen, grabbed his right ear and ducked below the podium. The inmates watching shouted that Trump had been shot, and others rushed into the room. Prisoners began screaming, sobbing, and clutching on to one another; they ran through the unit. Some attempted to flip over tables, though these were bolted to the floor. They checked their electronic tablets — allocated by the jail — and saw that they’d been taken offline. The block’s bank of phones also seemed to be disconnected.
David Dempsey, a 37-year-old man from Van Nuys, California, who in January pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers using a dangerous weapon, told me that he was in his cell reading when he heard the shouts. Outside his door, on a television posted high in the hallway, the news replayed the moment Trump went to the ground, and Dempsey thought he was dead. “I was fucking devastated,” he told me. “I started having a panic attack. I was crying, screaming, yelling.” He “flipped out on the guards,” he said. “I demanded that they turn on our phones, saying, ‘This is fucking bullshit. I think that they just killed the fucking president — you want to tell me to calm down?’”
By this time, most of the inmates had seen the footage of Trump being pulled to his feet by the Secret Service, lifting his head — a line of blood spattered along the right side of his face — and raising his fist, and the atmosphere in the block had turned to manic chaos. Inmates, still screaming, punched holes in walls and smashed overhead fluorescent lights. (The D.C. Jail denies this as well as inmate claims that tablets and phones were disconnected.)
Dempsey, who had missed the news that Trump was alive for long enough to call his brother, hysterical, was still shocked and disgusted when we talked four days later. “What the fuck — this is America,” he said. “We don’t do this kind of shit.” He couldn’t stand Biden, he said. “But I have faith we could beat that motherfucker at the ballot box on Election Day.” If Dempsey was aware of any irony in saying this as a member of the January 6 mob, he didn’t show it.
Trump is the unconditional hero of the Patriot Wing, but it wasn’t just adoration that sent panic through the cell block. Dominic Box, a 34-year-old inmate of the wing and former car salesman from Savannah, Georgia, charged with felony civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding, told me a couple days after the shooting, “We love President Trump and what he stands for, but a lot of these guys in here are looking at some significant prison time.” Box himself was facing up to 14 years. “In my honest opinion,” he said, “I think that they felt like, at that moment, their potential for a pardon was wiped off the map.”
For years, Trump had tied the fate of these prisoners to his own, first floating the idea of pardons for January 6 offenders (“full pardons with an apology to many”) in early 2022. Starting in the spring of 2023, he repeatedly claimed they should be “let go” and “freed,” and in March of this year, he promised that if reelected, he would release the rioters — whom he now called “hostages.”
When I asked Box how he thought the inmates would have reacted if Trump had been killed instead of grazed in the ear, he paused. After a moment he said, “I’m really not comfortable answering that over the phone.”
More than 1,400 people have been charged with federal crimes for their actions at the Capitol on January 6, and the majority of that day’s violent offenders have passed through this unit, where they are often held until trial and sentencing. The four rioters convicted of seditious conspiracy — leaders of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, and Zachary Rehl — were each detained in the wing, as was Julian Khater, who attacked police with pepper spray and was convicted of assaulting Officer Brian Sicknick, who died the next day. Lonnie Coffman, a Vietnam vet from Alabama who parked his van blocks from the Capitol loaded with firearms, hundreds of rounds of ammo, Molotov cocktails, a crossbow, machetes, and other weapons, is also an alumnus of the facility.
Some stay in the wing only a matter of weeks; others, like David Dempsey, who first arrived in late September 2021, live there for years, quarantined with like-minded radicals. And though MAGA leaders have sometimes pointed to the segregation of these inmates as evidence that the rioters are mistreated political prisoners, the residents of the wing live under what seem to be conditions of remarkable liberty.
I began speaking with Dempsey in October 2023, his third fall in the wing. I’d heard of him years before when reporting on political violence in Greater Los Angeles in the months before and after January 6. He had a reputation as a far-right brawler with ties to the Proud Boys, and left-wing activists told me they were relieved when he was arrested. In June 2019, according to U.S. prosecutors, he smashed his skateboard over the head of a counterprotester at a right-wing rally. A few months later, he attacked activists with bear spray at a Refuse Fascism demonstration near the Santa Monica Pier, and he was arrested and sentenced to 200 days in prison. In August 2020, he allegedly assaulted an anti-fascist with his skateboard once again.
Dempsey and I talked often in the first couple of months, about once a week. He typically called at around four o’clock in the afternoon, and our conversations were capped by the jail at 15 minutes; if Dempsey wanted to talk more, he’d need to wait out a mandatory 15-minute break and then call again. He seemed fascinated by the prospect of establishing common ground with a journalist, and he would often quiz me on environmental issues. “Plant the trees, smoke the weed, save the bees,” he said. He regularly brought up the idea that it might be unwise for him to speak with me. “You know, talking with you,” he said, “people get on my shit about it.”
I learned quickly that Dempsey had a tendency to grandstand, making pronouncements about himself and expounding on subjects where he could emphasize the distance between him and Establishment shills: free speech (an absolutist), the Iraq War (“a mistake”), Monsanto (not a fan), the prison-industrial complex. He repeated a quote often misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Seniority in the wing seemed to be bestowed upon those who have been incarcerated before or in the block for an extended period. Dempsey, who has a deep criminal record, commanded respect within both the jail and the broader J6 movement. I suspected from early on that he liked living in the wing, outside of not being able to see his 6-year-old daughter. He often prepared meals for the other inmates, and he described cooking with ingredients I hadn’t imagined being accessible in jail — anchovies, clams, chicken breasts — all made possible by the donations of the Patriot Wing network: institutions and individuals across the country that regularly fill residents’ commissary accounts.
Countless outfits have sprung up in the name of the rioters: Stand in the Gap funds their legal battles and offers reentry services. The Patriot Mail Project coordinates letter-writing campaigns and distributes cash and gifts. Many groups are run by former inmates or rioters’ family members. Amnesty National, which also doles out money to the prisoners, is operated by Daniel Goodwyn, a Proud Boy, convicted rioter, and web designer from San Francisco, who was recently found by a judge to have violated his supervised release by engaging with extremists online and spreading misinformation. The Hughes Advocacy Foundation, also known as the Patriot Freedom Project, has raised millions for the inmates and is run by a relative of wing resident Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who previously trimmed his mustache to resemble Adolf Hitler’s.
Most of the Patriot Wingers are funded by individuals, too, often through GiveSendGo, a site that bills itself as the Christian alternative to GoFundMe. A recent $50 donor to Dempsey’s account wrote, “This administration is pure evil to do this to upstanding citizens such as yourself. Hang in there. Keep your head up and God willing president Trump will win and pardon all of you.” (She signed off with “WWG1WGA,” a popular QAnon tag — an abbreviation for “Where we go one, we go all.” The line seems to come from the 1996 sailing survival movie White Squall, with Jeff Bridges, though Q followers attribute it to JFK.)
The scale of support the rioters have on the outside, according to Michael Jensen, the research director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), is unique among incarcerated groups, including gangs. The only historical parallel he could think of was that of the imprisoned members of the Irish Republican Army. This network of believers is maintained in part through one of the wing’s key rituals. Every night for the past three years at nine, the inmates have joined a type of conference call, usually through their state-supplied tablets, and spoken to a vigil of supporter-activists outside the jail and an audience of thousands listening live across the country. (Tablets are now common in some correctional facilities, non-existent in others.) They talk about their cases, their persecution, the stolen election. Every night, they sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Around 20 wing residents collaborated with Trump on a song, “Justice for All”: Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance, and the inmates, in the form of the J6 Prison Choir, sing the national anthem. In March of last year, the track debuted at No. 1 on a Billboard chart.
This past June, Patriot Wingers began publishing a video podcast, The DC Gulag, hosted by a rotating cast of prisoners and filmed at a panel-like table set with a picture of Donald Trump, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, an American flag, and select books, including 1984, by George Orwell, and The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump. The eight episodes posted so far begin with a two-minute introduction, riddled with conspiracy theories and January 6 apologias. “The truth,” it tells listeners, is that “American patriots” stormed the Capitol “after a year of Chinese-bioweapons lockdowns, censorship, and an unfair stolen election. Once the cops attacked us, we the people raised our middle finger to the system that has been oppressing our citizens for too long.” Among many other claims, the show has alleged that January 6 defendants were “kidnapped” by the FBI “under threat of pain, torture, and murder.” The D.C. Jail did not answer if it was aware of this podcast or the nightly livestream.
There was no doubt that Dempsey and the other men in the wing experienced many of the standard deprivations of incarceration. But the place often sounded like sleepaway camp. Dempsey told me that residents put on a semi-regular variety show, with costumes and props, called the “Hopium Den.” He described it as the “J6 jail version of SNL.” Performances included political sketches, roasts, songs, and poems. Traditionally, Dempsey said, one person would assume the role of “bridge troll,” a type of chorus to the event, who speaks only in what the inmates consider to be disinformation. “They just say outlandish things that are never true but are like salacious rumors,” Dempsey told me. The only examples he gave were politically neutral and somewhat bland: Trump and Hunter Biden joining forces to put $100 in everyone’s accounts, for instance. He recalled one sketch in which an inmate created a character named “Super Jesus” and delivered zany sermons from atop an ottoman with a broom for a staff. Given the residents’ shared interests, it seemed unlikely that the material was always so benign.
I heard of somber times in the unit — it was in fact a jail — but the inmates were deeply bonded. Box told me that last year, two weeks after Christmas, the wing observed the anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, calling it “Sixthmas.” “It was just kind of solemn,” he said. “Everybody was glued to the television. There was just kind of — not a sadness, but there was a lot of, you know, embraces of each other.” Dempsey told me, “The feeling here is similar to group homes and the military. The way you live amongst each other, you start to gain a profound feeling of solidarity.” When it was time for someone to be transferred out, he said, “you see it in these guys’ faces. They’re happy to go but sad they’re leaving.”
But it was also clear that the wing was infected with conspiratorial paranoia. “This government has a nasty habit of sending us certain people that we don’t necessarily agree with or get along with,” Dempsey told me in November. “They have a bad habit of trying to put informants in here.” But the leaders of the wing could sniff out the rats, and when they decided that someone was a snitch, he said, “we just basically tell the guards to make them leave. Like, ‘We don’t want this person in here. They’re not aligned with us. They’re not an okay person … Please take them somewhere else.’ And then the guards will take them out.”
Michael Curzio, one of the first inhabitants of the wing, who arrived in early February 2021 and is now out, described the process this way: “You’ve got some guy and you want him gone, but you don’t want to physically do it.” Meaning you don’t want to kill him. “So you write an anonymous note saying they need to get out of here or they’re gonna die.”
Some version of this practice — “kiting out” — regularly plays out in prisons with gang populations. Jensen, the researcher at START, told me that guards often allow prisoners to operate gang structures because these create some order: “They do the corrections officers’ work for them in many ways.”
Letting inmates have this type of power in an isolated unit of 24 people would seem to be an especial dereliction of duty, and a representative of the D.C. Jail said that prisoner accounts were “not accurate.” But all of the Patriot Wingers I spoke with — current and former — said the same thing: that the residents have the power to curate the population of their cell block, reserving the space for true believers.
Inmates are vetted as soon as they set foot in the wing. Box told me that when he first arrived in November 2023, he and two other newcomers were approached by five prisoners led by Kansas Proud Boy William “Billy” Chrestman and Ronald McAbee, a former sheriff’s deputy from Tennessee. The new arrivals were separated for questioning; Box says he was grilled on the specifics of his case and his politics. “I passed,” he said, “so I was shown to my cell.” There, he was given a welcome package of various hygiene items not provided by the jail and was invited to enjoy refreshments with the other initiates: offerings from the Patriot Wing community in the form of hot coffee, turkey sausages, and cereal. “It was very cool,” he said. “We got to take whatever we wanted. That’s a tradition that continues today.” Box claims that as of this past summer, Patriot Wing supporters outside the prison often conduct this vetting process for the inmates over the phone.
Box was handling this intake when Charles Donohoe, a former head of a North Carolina chapter of the Proud Boys, landed in the wing. Donohoe had become a key witness in the government’s case against high-ranking members of the Proud Boys, and during his vetting, he gave his name only as Chuck. The other inmates soon caught on. “He was told in pretty clear terms,” he said. “‘You stay in your room. We’re not going to attack you. But be seen, not heard.’”
Box told me that he’d never seen anyone jumped or assaulted “for who they were, what they may have been involved with” when they first arrived. What happened later in their stays was a different story. Taylor Taranto, a 38-year-old from Washington, showed up in the wing in July 2023. He had been wanted on misdemeanor charges in connection with January 6 when he was arrested with a van full of guns and ammo, casing the area around former president Barack Obama’s home in D.C. He was initially welcomed into the block, but inmates soon learned that he was spreading a conspiracy theory about the death of Ashli Babbitt, calling it “staged.” Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran, had been shot dead by police on January 6 while climbing through a broken window into the Speaker’s Lobby. She was a true martyr to the cause, and Taranto’s behavior was seen as stepping over an uncrossable line. Box told me that Taranto was written out — removed via a note passed to a guard — and placed in solitary confinement before being transferred to another facility. Multiple former inmates and other sources say that Taranto was first badly beaten. I was told of another prisoner who was so brutally attacked his blood was left “plastered on the wall.”
That January 6 offenders are even held together in the same unit can seem outrageous — never mind their extraordinary freedom to communicate with the outside world and the guards’ seeming negligence. But decisions of how to house members of a radical group are never simple. According to Bennett Clifford, a former senior researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, there are three options. First, they can be separated and dispersed throughout general inmate populations, but this exposes other prisoners to their views and well-known offenders can become targets of violence. Second, they can be placed in solitary confinement, although solitary itself might be a radicalizing force. Third, they can be quarantined in one place. But this can foment grievances and allow the group to organize.
Clifford writes that the U.S. typically uses a patchwork approach, combining the three and making group placements based on risk. But exactly how it was decided that violent January 6 defendants would be isolated in a block of the D.C. Jail is unclear. Equally unclear is why the situation has been allowed to continue and who is responsible. The U.S. Marshals, the agency tasked with managing inmates facing federal charges, told me only that housing decisions are usually based on the preferences of the jail. Despite repeated requests, the D.C. Jail would not provide answers to these questions.
It also seemed strange that relatively low-level officials would determine how to manage actors in a domestic attack on the U.S. Capitol, one that has already led to the largest criminal investigation and prosecution in the country’s history, which has been helmed by multiple federal agencies, including the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for information, and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office directed me back to the U.S. Marshals and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The BOP did not answer any questions and directed me back to the D.C. Jail.
In the meantime, some radicalization experts are worried that the Patriot Wing may be functioning as an incubator for extremist ideology and that its inmates might re-enter society more primed to take violent action than they were before the Capitol riot. Jon Lewis, an extremism expert at George Washington University who studies anti-government movements and federal responses in the U.S., described the residents of the wing as displaying “insular, almost cultlike behaviors” and told me that their post-release conditions present a “massive question mark.” He compared the sentencing of the rioters to those of international terrorists: “It’s one thing to prevent a convicted ISIS supporter from communicating with known members of a designated foreign terrorist group. How would probation offices even begin to enforce similar conditions on convicted January 6-ers?”
Multiple attorneys representing the accused rioters have also expressed concern about the wing. “How can any such inmate,” one asked, “question the assumptions that led him to any criminal action on January 6, 2021, when continuously surrounded by those refusing to acknowledge any wrongdoing?” Another lawyer said that “pressure to conform to certain ideologies” within the unit, as well as inmates’ ongoing “whispers of conspiracy and ‘traitors,’” were preventing his client from “meaningfully contributing” to his own defense.
Patriot Wingers tell me that many are in fact leaving the block more committed to the January 6 cause than ever. In August, I spoke with Brandon Fellows, 29, who during the attack had smoked a joint with his feet on the desk of Oregon senator Jeff Merkley. He’d been held in the wing for two years, and he was now living in a luxury apartment building in D.C., paid for in part by American Patriot Relief, one of the many organizations that bankroll the rioters. “The election was stolen,” he said, “and now, looking back, we had a right to overthrow the government. We still do, at this moment. And I wish it would happen, truthfully.” When I talked to Fellows again in early September — he’d just returned from a skydiving trip — he said, “I definitely am so much more for overthrowing the government after what they did to me. I’m totally down. Especially if Trump doesn’t get in. I want it to happen. I wasn’t onboard before, but now — fuck these guys.”
Edward “Jake” Lang attacked Capitol police with a stolen shield and a baseball bat and spent three years in the wing. Once transferred out, he attempted to start a renegade national army from inside a Brooklyn detention center. He called it “North American Patriot and Liberty Militia”: NAPALM.
At some point in the winter, I asked Dempsey if he was aware that people worried about the influence of the wing — on its residents and beyond. He was. “They think,” he said, “that we’re going to help people who they don’t believe deserve any help.”
After some time, over the course of our disjointed 15-minute phone calls, Dempsey started telling me the story of his life. He portrayed it as a classic American tragedy: weak social systems and institutional failures resulting in nearly unavoidable self-destruction. I filled in a final step myself, that Donald Trump had captured this broken person, promising to turn it all around in exchange for absolute loyalty.
Before Dempsey was old enough to talk, he said, he and his brother Daniel were removed from their home by Child Protective Services. His father was in prison, and his mother was deemed unfit. The two brothers spent the majority of their childhoods in group homes around Los Angeles County. In one of these facilities, Dempsey told me, beginning at the age of 5, he was repeatedly raped by a staff member. He recounted running away and finding himself in Glendale, where he approached a police officer and told him what was happening. Dempsey said the officer told him he was lying and returned him to the group home.
As a teenager, he went to live in Colorado Springs with his grandfather, who taught him masonry and, he said, “about morals” — this seemed to mostly mean the value of hard work. Dempsey regretted never telling him about the abuse he’d suffered. “I didn’t want to be a little asshole, I didn’t want to be a rebellious fuck,” he said, “but I found myself being like that. And I believe it’s a direct result of what I went through as a kid but never explained to any of the adults that I loved.” He told me he now struggled with anxiety and panic attacks and that he had signed up for talk therapy in the jail. He said that the book he’d been reading when Trump was shot was the self-help title Managing Negative Emotions.
Dempsey’s criminal behavior started in his teen years, and he quickly racked up a litany of charges: vandalism, burglary, and assault with a deadly weapon, all by the age of 20. From the age of 17 until a few months before his most recent arrest — for his crimes on January 6 — Dempsey was homeless or on the streets. When he was on the streets, he slept in McDonald’s play areas, in vacant office buildings, and curled up by hot-air vents outside dry cleaners.
In his 20s and 30s, he was arrested multiple times. In 2015, he was in prison for robbery when he saw Trump announce his presidential bid on TV. In Trump, he saw a reflection of his grandfather, who had been tall and blond — a strong man who could do anything. When Dempsey got out of prison in 2019, he threw himself into the ugly clashes between Trump supporters and anti-fascists in the L.A. area. By the time he arrived at the Capitol on January 6, he was on probation for the bear-spray incident in Santa Monica and living out of his car.
Dempsey knew that the things he said to me could end up affecting his case, and he was careful not to say much of anything about what he did on January 6. But I knew he’d arrived in D.C. wearing a tactical vest, a helmet, sunglasses, and an American-flag gaiter covering his neck, mouth, and nose. Prior to his arrest, he was known to online sleuths as #Flag-GaiterCopHater. He had stood in front of the gallows erected by rioters on the Capitol lawn and called for Nancy Pelosi, James Comey, Barack Obama, and others to be hanged — whether from that scaffold or “the tree lines, the rafters, the rooftops, the statues.” “I don’t care where they go,” he had said. “String ’em up, and string ’em up high.”
At some point, Dempsey joined the front lines of the rioters in an hourslong battle with police at the entrance to a tunnel on the lower west terrace of the Capitol, the grand marble veranda facing the National Mall. In surveillance footage, about an hour into the fight, Dempsey can be seen hoisting himself above the crowd, stepping on the backs and shoulders of other rioters, and wielding a metal pole and stolen police shield. He grabs onto grooves in the brickwork around the tunnel, propels himself forward, and begins kicking police in the head.
Dempsey pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting officers: for attacking a Metropolitan Police Department detective with pepper spray and striking a sergeant repeatedly with a metal crutch, hard enough to crack the shield of his gas mask. But this was not the extent of his violence. For over an hour, Dempsey blasted pepper spray and bludgeoned officers with an array of improvised weapons: the crutch, a long metal flagpole, broken pieces of furniture, and other unidentified objects. As government prosecutors later wrote in his sentencing memo, he launched “a prolonged attack, fighting with his hands, feet … and anything else he could get his hands on.” At one point, the memo noted, he attacked a fellow rioter who had attempted to disarm him.
Partly because of the disembodied nature of my relationship with Dempsey, I would sometimes briefly forget this: the ultimate reason for our calls. I was reporting at the Capitol on January 6. I never told Dempsey. I remember the sharp pops of flash-bang grenades, the choking sensation of tear gas, and the crowd as a viciously churning sea.
Two weeks after Trump was shot in July, I took the train from Penn Station to D.C. and headed to “Freedom Corner,” the vigil on the pavement just outside the jail and a few hundred feet from the Congressional Cemetery.
It was hot and the mosquitoes were vicious, and the number of attendees, previously in the dozens, had dwindled to a core group of 15 loyalists. The vigil was led in its usual proceedings — speeches, prayers, and phone calls with the wing’s inmates — by Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was wearing flared jeans and a T-shirt printed with a picture of her daughter’s face. She took occasional leave of the group to light a blue American Spirit and observe the scene from a distance.
Witthoeft was assisted that night by Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy, was serving more than seven years for his crimes at the Capitol: He’d entered the building suited in body armor, carrying zip-ties and a handgun, and directed rioters through a megaphone. At around 8 p.m., Box called in to the vigil. A type of standoff was taking place in the jail, he said. That day, the residents of the wing had been told that the jail was considering opening their unit to people not involved with January 6, and the inmates were furious.
“Today, July 25,” Box said, “for the very first time in over three and a half years, your J6 patriots were told that there was no longer a J6 unit in the D.C. DOC.” He was speaking directly to the national network of supporters. “We’re separated from the general population,” he reminded them. “It’s all January 6-ers. It’s the people you hear from every day. It’s all the people that you’re writing letters to.”
“They have said that,” he reiterated, “again, there is no longer a J6 unit. And that not today, not tomorrow, but that they will be filling this unit with non-J6 inmates. I don’t have to tell you guys what that means.” It meant, he told them, that not every resident would be “in here for standing up for the 2020 election, not in here for supporting President Trump. There are murderers, there are carjackers, there are kidnappers, there are rapists. There are real-deal hardened criminals, and that’s who the D.C. DOC is threatening to move into our unit.”
Box told the listeners that the residents of the wing had had a “solidarity meeting” — he didn’t want to call it a protest. “We all stood together and said, ‘We need to speak with a white shirt’” — a higher-level correctional officer. Some lieutenants and captains were eventually brought in, and Box claimed that they arrived with reinforcements: about 20 staff members, including the emergency-response team and the tactical-response unit. It was Box and Dempsey who spoke for the group, telling the officers, “There are individuals in here who have never even had a parking ticket, who probably never had a library book that was overdue. We have protection in this unit amongst ourselves.” They made plain to the officials, Box said, that if non–January 6 offenders were brought into the wing, “problems will occur.”
The sun had set, and the vigil attendees turned on LED candles, illuminating posters propped against metal barricades that honored those who had died on January 6. There was Babbitt but also Rosanne Boyland, a 34-year-old from Georgia who was ruled to have died from acute amphetamine intoxication after being trampled by the mob, as well as Kevin Greeson, 55, who died of a heart attack, and Benjamin Philips, 50, who died of a stroke. One of the laminated signs pictured Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer assaulted by former wing resident Julian Khater — Sicknick, who had fought the rioters in hand-to-hand combat for over an hour and had died the next day after suffering two strokes. His placard read MURDERED BY CAPITOL POLICE.
It was approaching 9 p.m., and it would soon be time to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the prisoners inside, which would be livestreamed as usual on the Prisoners Record, a Telegram channel with almost 11,000 subscribers. But first came the roll call, another nightly ritual, listing the incarcerated January 6 rioters. Following each name, one man, who goes by Trooper and who had been at the vigil every night for two years, sleeping in a tent nearby, quietly said “hero.”
When it was time to reconnect with the wing residents for the anthem, Witthoeft and Reffitt were unable to accept the call. The two huddled around a phone as a loudspeaker played “America Will Survive,” by Hank Williams Jr. After a few minutes, the inmates skipped to the next step of the routine and began to flicker the lights in their unit on and off — the tall slit windows on the far corner of the jail block flashing. Those at the vigil beamed flashlights back toward the prison. Then, blasting over the PA system, came the national anthem of the USSR. It played for about ten seconds before Witthoeft and Reffitt realized it was the wrong track. Reffitt yelled “Stop, stop!” and then accidentally restarted it. “It’s the Communist national anthem,” she said, laughing. Then they located the American anthem, and the group solemnly sang along.
In early August, I returned to the D.C. Jail to meet Dempsey and Box in person. The visitation room was spare and loud. Box had an easy demeanor, but his skin was sallow and there were dark circles under his eyes. He looked ten years older than the images I’d seen of him from January 6. That day, he’d climbed the scaffolding erected for Biden’s inauguration and entered the Capitol through the Senate wing door on the northwest side. He was photographed strolling through the rotunda waving his middle finger. Inside the crypt — a vaulted room a level down, built to serve as the entryway to George Washington’s tomb — an officer had urged the crowd to be peaceful, saying, “We don’t need any more violence right now, all right? Calm down. We can stand right here and talk it out.” Box ran up to the officer and shouted in his face, “There’s no talking! There’s no fucking talking!” The mob in the crypt soon overwhelmed the police.
Box’s candor surprised me, as it had on the phone. “I haven’t met a single person here who regrets January 6,” he said. “Or who doesn’t think that it was a noble cause.” He told me that two inmates, one a former member of the White Knights, a white-supremacist prison gang, had for a time asserted themselves as leaders of the wing and taken up the role of outside liaisons, controlling the inflow of cash and other resources. But following a handful of violent altercations, both had been transferred, and Box said that Dempsey and a rioter named Jonathan Pollock — who was caught on-camera repeatedly punching Capitol police officers — were now running the show. It was “utopian,” Box said.
Box wasn’t concerned about the coming election. Trump would win, he told me; Kamala Harris’s support was “not legitimate” — it was “being Astroturfed.” Residents of the wing had started to talk more about Trump’s return to power — it was feeling closer — and they believed that he would get them “reparations,” which they’d dubbed “Trump bucks.”
Toward the end of our allotted time, Box looked around the room and lowered his voice: “You’d asked what would have happened if Trump was killed.” He was referring to our call just after the shooting in Butler. “I think it would have been like Attica,” he said. The bloody prison uprising that left 33 inmates and ten guards dead in 1971. “People would have tried to get out of here. That’s what I think.”
I met with Dempsey an hour later. I took in his weathered, thin face, his crow’s-feet and scraggly beard, and tried to match it to the voice I’d listened to for so many hours. The words ULTRA MAGA were inked in large letters covering most of his forearm, next to a Punisher skull topped with an unmistakably Trumpian coif. All his MAGA tattoos, he said, had been done in the wing. I asked about a laurel wreath on his right wrist; it was similar to one used by the Proud Boys. He said it wasn’t related to them and that he’d never joined. He added that they were good guys, but he didn’t want to be part of an organization with a lot of rules. For the first time, I told Dempsey that I’d heard of him years ago and mentioned the Santa Monica bear-spray incident. I told him that he had a pretty bad reputation around L.A., and he railed a bit about antifa and the “black bloc.”
I asked him, for the first time, why he was wearing so much gear on January 6. He replied that he thought he was going to fight radical leftists. He said he often lost his cool around the police — a reaction he connected to his childhood — and claimed, like many of the rioters, that he’d acted out of self-defense.
A week later, on August 9, Dempsey was sentenced to 20 years in prison. It was the second-most-severe penalty for a January 6 offender so far. The longest sentence, 22 years, had been handed to Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was found guilty of plotting and orchestrating the attack.
I spoke with Dempsey a couple of days later. Box placed the call and passed over the phone. I told him, awkwardly, “Sorry about your long sentence.” He laughed. It sounded like a brief recognition of the absurdly bad situation he’d gotten himself into. A week later, a lawyer representing Dempsey and Box claimed that her clients would no longer be participating in this story. (Neither Dempsey nor Box participated in fact-checking.) Dempsey continued to contact me. When we talked for the last time, about a month and a half later, he was at a detention center in Philadelphia, waiting to be transferred to a federal prison where he’d serve out his time.
Sometime after we spoke, I found that Dempsey had called in to the vigil and livestream three times in the four days after his sentencing. In the first minutes of the first call, just a few hours after the decision came down, he sounded strangely jolly and talked about the cake he was making and a package he’d received from a supporter. But Reffitt, who was leading the vigil that night, pressed him to reflect on what had just happened and his mood turned. Owing to a broken elevator at the courthouse, he’d been brought into the hearing through the main doors instead of a back entrance, and he felt he had been paraded through the audience. He’d worn a three-piece suit, handcuffs, and chains around his waist and ankles, which clanked as he walked. “They went out of their way to put on a dog and pony show,” he said.
“I’m not gonna act like I’m innocent, like I’m blemish free, because I admitted as much,” he told the listeners. But he had never turned on the movement, never taken a deal. “I never testified on nobody.” “I sure in the fuck,” he went on, “would never throw our president under the bus to try and lessen something that I already know is a setup to try and make him look bad. To try and save myself when that man has done nothing but try to help this country and everybody that lives in it.” Dempsey told the listeners that he’d been able to keep his composure because he’d been in therapy. But within a few moments, his voice picked up and he launched into a conspiracy-filled tirade of a kind I’d never heard from him.
He described antifa as the FBI’s “armed wing” and claimed that incidents in which far-right activists were shot or stabbed were hits ordered by the government. “Then it goes all the way to Trump,” he said. He was talking now about the shooting in Butler, getting more and more angry. “They know damn well, good and ready, that it was a failed setup. I don’t give a fuck what none of them say. They missed. Bitch, you missed.”
The next night, Dempsey called the vigil again. This time he was seething. He was furious about an article published by Politico, which had described how his daughter, now 7, had “pranced in the hallway” at his sentencing as her mother cried. He was furious that FBI agent Cody Crutchley, one of the men who’d arrested him, had attended the hearing. “To that bitch-ass coward that sat across from me and couldn’t fuckin’ look me in the eyes: You’re one of the weakest forms of human being on this planet, you feeble motherfucker. You and the rest of your brethren — the scum beneath the child molester’s boot.”
Then Dempsey directly addressed “the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a.k.a. the cowards of America,” “the little prosecutors,” and “little antifa and their terroristic buddies”: “Don’t celebrate too hard, man,” he said. “Because that sentence is only gonna last like six months. And then we’re gonna have four years of dragging our nuts across your forehead. Because Donald Trump is gonna fucking win.”
IMAGE GRID: Top row: (From left) Marc Bru, Jonathan Mellis, and David Dempsey record the podcast The DC Gulag. Jeff McKellop. Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. Middle row: James McGrew (left) and Shane Jenkins. Jorden Mink. Bottom row: Peter Schwartz. Ryan Nichols. Guy Reffitt (left) and Peter Schwartz with a letter addressing the government.
