In the first hours of his second administration, President Trump sought to wipe away all trace of the attack on the Capitol by granting amnesty to nearly 1,600 people implicated in the riot stoked by his lies about a stolen election.
They answered with a collective cry of gratitude. And why not?
The pardon proclamation saved them, opening prison doors and ending all of the criminal prosecutions related to the Capitol attack. Even more, it gave a presidential stamp of approval to their inverted vision of Jan. 6, 2021: that those who assaulted the police and vandalized the historic building that day were victims, and those who spent the next four years using the criminal justice system to hold them accountable were villains.
But nearly a year after Mr. Trump’s sweeping proclamation asserted that he had cleared the way for “a process of national reconciliation,” many recipients of his clemency remain consumed by conspiracy theories, angry at the Trump administration for not validating their insistence that the Capitol attack was a deep-state setup, and haunted by problems from both before and after the riot.
“Being pardoned doesn’t make these families whole,” Cynthia Hughes, a prominent advocate for the Jan. 6 defendants, wrote on social media recently. “Many are barely holding on mentally, emotionally, and financially. To pretend otherwise is a lie.”
In the five years since the Capitol was stormed, no new facts have emerged to undermine the basic findings of congressional and Justice Department investigators that many of the rioters acted in the misguided belief, pushed relentlessly by Mr. Trump, that he had been robbed of victory in 2020 — and that in attacking the Capitol they not only injured about 140 police officers but also struck at a cornerstone of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Even so, Mr. Trump has long maintained that the rioters endured horrible, even illegal, mistreatment during their prosecutions.
And yet if that is true, some pardoned rioters are now asking, then why haven’t their persecutors been thrown in jail? And if the rioters are martyrs to a righteous cause, as the president and his allies have often said, then why haven’t they been made whole through financial reparations?
While this disillusionment is not universal, some so-called J6ers have even begun to ask why, after nearly a year in power, Mr. Trump’s law enforcement agencies have yet to provide any proof of the conspiracy theory they promoted to help him reclaim the presidency: that deep-state agents lured Trump supporters into storming the Capitol to derail the MAGA movement and justify political reprisals.
What J6ers rarely seem to acknowledge is the possibility that Mr. Trump’s government has failed to reveal the hidden truth about Jan. 6 because there is no hidden truth, no deep-state conspiracy, and therefore no legal reason to bring further charges related to the riot.
Still, their questions have nurtured new conspiracy theories from the old, focused not on the Biden administration, but on those in power now, Trump loyalists like the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The theories have intensified as the fifth anniversary of Jan. 6 has arrived — a milestone that many rioters believe marks the final chance to punish the shadowy government agents who supposedly entrapped them in what they have come to call the “fedsurrection.”
“If the true perpetrators of Jan. 6 aren’t held accountable before the statute of limitations expires on Jan. 6, 2026, count me OUT of the midterms,” Shane Jenkins, whose several felony convictions for Jan. 6 included assaulting law enforcement, wrote last month. “I’ll be running AGAINST the GOP.”
By feeding a steady diet of unfounded conspiracy theories not only to the J6ers but also to others in their base, Mr. Trump and his allies have spawned what some experts have likened to a zombie army of followers. And now, by failing to follow these theories to their logical conclusions, they are seeing that army begin to turn on them.
“When you’re told day after day that you’re a victim — when you’re told that for four years straight — it sinks in,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “They’ve become conspiratorial-minded people looking for the next thing to mobilize for.”
“There’s this zombie specter of Jan. 6 defendants who are just looking for that red meat,” Mr. Lewis added.
Another Conspiracy Theory Takes Hold
All of this was on display at the end of the year, when many pardoned rioters reacted in fury as competing solutions were offered to an enduring mystery arising from the Capitol attack: Who planted pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic Party headquarters on the night before Jan. 6?
The first answer was put forward in early November, when Steve Baker, one of the rioters, published an article in the right-wing news outlet The Blaze, saying he had found a “forensic match” between the hooded suspect caught on video prowling Capitol Hill that night and a former Capitol Police officer who had fought the mob on Jan. 6 and then went to work for the C.I.A. Mr. Baker’s report fit neatly into the “fedsurrection” narrative, linking the bombs to a former law enforcement official with ties to the country’s premier intelligence agency.
But The Blaze scoop fell flat. Federal officials, including Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the F.B.I. at the time, dismissed it as untrue, and the former officer’s lawyers said that when the suspect was supposedly setting the bombs, their client was home, playing with her dogs.
A couple of weeks later, Mr. Bongino, Mr. Patel, and Ms. Bondi stood side by side at the Justice Department to announce their own break in the case — one that contradicted Mr. Baker’s. Federal agents, they said, had just arrested Brian Cole Jr., a Virginia man who would later tell the F.B.I. he had planted the bombs because he wanted to “speak up” for those who believed the 2020 election had been stolen.
When we imagine a planet, we think of one like ours, orbiting a star. But some have a far lonelier existence, drifting through interstellar space without a sun to call their own. Known as “rogue” or “free-floating” planets, these worlds are often challenging to study. With no known star and no orbit from which to estimate their size, they’ve generally flown under the radar—until now.
In a new study published in Science on Thursday, scientists show how they measured the mass of one such rogue planet for the first time—a breakthrough that could enable further studies of these strange, lonely worlds.
Instead of looking at the planet’s orbit, the research team, led by Subo Dong of Peking University, instead analyzed how the planet’s gravity bent the light from a distant star, in a so-called microlensing event, from two separate vantage points: Earth and the now-retired Gaia space observatory.
The technique resembles how our eyes’ depth perception works, Dong says: the microlensing event was seen by Gaia about two hours later than by scientists on Earth. That difference in time allowed the researchers to measure the planet’s distance and estimate its mass.
“What’s really great about this work, and really noteworthy, is that it’s the first time we’ve got a mass for these objects,” says Gavin Coleman, a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London, who authored a related commentary also published in Science but was not involved in the study. “This was purely because the authors had both ground-based observations and Gaia, looking at observations from two different places.”
What they found is that the planet has about the same mass as Saturn. But the findings also offer a hint about its past: “Knowing [its mass] is the starting point,” Dong says. “We can start to understand, okay, what could be the origin, the history of this planet?”
Dong hopes the study offers a jumping-off point for more research to better understand these mysterious cosmic bodies. That pursuit gets a boost later this year from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch in September, says David Bennet, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA. Able to image the entire sky 1,000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope can, Roman could help identify hundreds of rogue planets. And with this work, researchers will have a way to estimate their masses, too.
“The door is open to study this new emerging population of planets,” Dong says.
Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro says, “I am still president,” as he pleads not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in his first appearance at a New York court
He and his wife Cilia Flores were seized from their Caracas compound on Saturday and flown to the US as part of a special forces operation – here’s what happened
Today’s hearing ended with a tense exchange between a member of the public and Maduro, who said he was a “prisoner of war”, our reporter in court says
Outside, protesters have been gathering, with some brandishing placards – one reads “USA Hands-off Venezuela”, while another says “Thank You President Trump.”
Earlier, dramatic images showed the pair being transferred to the courthouse in handcuffs, surrounded by armed officers
Meanwhile, Delcy Rodríguez, while being sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president, has praised Maduro and his wife as “heroes”. You can read BBC Mundo’s live Spanish coverage here.
At the rainy border between Colombia and Venezuela, I’ve been speaking to more Venezuelans about their feelings about what’s happening.
Glendys Quiroz, 28, tells me she crosses the border regularly to pick up groceries, noting that it feels quieter than usual today.
“We know Maduro has been captured, but we don’t know what’s going on or what’s going to happen,” she says.
She says she supports the US action and wants Maduro and his government to “pay for [what] they’ve done”, adding that there is a “long list of people” who should also face action.
She adds that she wants opposition leader María Corina Machado to run the country.
With no cameras allowed inside the New York courthouse, we rely on artists to give us a glimpse inside.
Jane Rosenberg’s drawing shows Nicolás Maduro standing, while his wife Cilia Flores sits nearby.
They both wear headphones to listen to a translation of proceedings, and both wear the same blue prison outfits.
We’ve been hearing from people in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, about what life is like there since the US action and what they want for the country.
A 33-year-old masseuse who asks not to be named says she is still waiting at home today to see how things develop. “There’s so much fear in the streets and in our homes,” she says.
She does not support Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, but says “if this is the price we have to pay for a government transition, then I accept it”.
“If it wasn’t this way, then we could have a rebellion, and we can’t forget the armed groups,” she adds.
She says she hopes there will be lasting change for Venezuela. “They gave the people the scraps while keeping the feast for themselves,” she says of Maduro’s regime.
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Venezuela’s seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores attend their arraignment with defense lawyers Barry Pollack and Mark Donnelly
“War,” the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” If there is one line that virtually every Army officer learns from Clausewitz’s posthumously published 1832 book, “On War,” it’s that description of the purpose of armed conflict.
Those words were among the first that popped into my head when I woke up Saturday morning to the news that the American military had attacked Venezuela, seized its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to the United States to face criminal charges.
The reason those words occurred to me was simple: The attack on Venezuela harks back to a different time, before the 19th-century world order unraveled, before two catastrophic world wars, and before the creation of international legal and diplomatic structures designed to stop nations from doing exactly what the United States just did.
One of the most important questions any nation must decide is when — and how — to wage war. It’s a mistake, incidentally, to view Clausewitz as an amoral warmonger. He wasn’t inventing the notion he describes; he was describing the world as it was. His statement is a pithy explanation of how sovereign states have viewed warfare for much of human history.
When a strong state operates under the principle that war is just another extension of policy, it is tempted to operate a bit like a mob boss. Every interaction with a weaker nation is tinged in some way with the threat of force: Nice little country you have there — shame if something happened to it.
This is not fanciful. In a telephone conversation with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, President Trump threatened Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president. “If she doesn’t do what’s right,” Trump said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Diplomacy and economic pressure are almost always still a first resort for powerful nations, but if they fail to achieve the intended results, well, you can watch footage from the American strike in Venezuela to know what can happen next.
But the Clausewitzian view isn’t the only option for nations and their leaders. There is a better model for international affairs, one that acknowledges the existence of evil and the reality of national interests but also draws lines designed to preserve peace and human life.
Carl von Clausewitz, meet Thomas Aquinas.
In the Summa Theologica, written in the 13th century, Aquinas outlined three cardinal requirements of what came to be known as just war theory.
First, war must be waged through the lawful operation of a sovereign and not through the private adventurism of ambitious individuals.
Second, the war must be based on a just cause. National self-defense or collective self-defense are obviously just, for example.
Third, there must be a just purpose, namely the advancement of good and the avoidance of evil.
One way to think about the shifting patterns of warfare is that humanity seesaws between Clausewitz and Aquinas. Strong nations impose their will on the weak and then — eventually — try to impose their will on one another. When catastrophe results, as it invariably does, they turn back to Aquinas.
You can actually see the results of this shifting approach across the sweep of history. An analysis of global deaths in conflict shows that war is always with us, but its intensity waxes and wanes. Periods of extreme suffering and death are followed by periods of relative quiet, followed again by an age of horror.
Consider history since World War I. After the ongoing slaughter of trench warfare, the world attempted to ban aggressive warfare and to establish an international institution — the League of Nations — to keep the peace.
The League failed, in part because the United States refused to join, and after an even more horrible world war, the world tried again, this time under American leadership.
Echoes of Aquinas are all over the U.N. Charter. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter bans aggressive warfare (taking away a key tool in the Clausewitz toolbox), Article 51 permits individual and collective self-defense to keep great powers in check, and Chapter V established a body (the Security Council) that’s designed to keep the peace.
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Kenny Holston/The New York Times
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
James' World 2 