Behind Trump’s musical tribute to some of the most violent Jan. 6 rioters

Most nights at 9 p.m., defendants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol flicker the lights in their D.C. jail cells to signal to supporters outside that it’s time to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” together. The recital has become a sacred ritual for a subset of Donald Trump’s movement devoted to heroizing the accused rioters.

The former president is now embracing their cause, lending his voice to a recording of the “J6 Prison Choir” and playing it to start the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign. The song, “Justice for All,” features Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance mixed with a rendition of the national anthem.

“Our people love those people,” Trump went on to say at the rally, speaking of those who were jailed. “What’s happening in that prison, it’s a hellhole. ... These are people that shouldn’t have been there.”

The nightly singing inside the jail was captured in a video that Trump allies have shared online in the past two months. The D.C. Department of Corrections confirmed that the video was taken in one of the jail’s housing units. The agency is now investigating. Spokeswoman Sylvia Lane declined to elaborate on the nature of the probe but said that “any social media use or video-sharing platforms is prohibited” for detainees.

Using physical characteristics and interviews with family members, supporters and attorneys, The Washington Post identified five of the roughly 15 men who are featured in the video. Four of them were charged with assaulting police, using weapons such as a crowbar, sticks and chemical spray, including against Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died the next day.

Julian Khater

Shane Jenkins

Ryan Nichols

William Chrestman

Jonathan Mellis

William

Chrestman

Julian Khater

Shane Jenkins

Jonathan Mellis

Ryan Nichols

Shane Jenkins

Julian Khater

William Chrestman

Jonathan Mellis

Ryan Nichols

The first instance that The Post could find of the video online was in a March 1 tweet by a lawyer for Ryan Nichols, the defendant seen holding the camera in the video. The lawyer, Joseph D. McBride, did not respond to requests for comment. Based on the men who appear in the video, it was filmed sometime before last November, when Nichols was released.

The audio for the single “Justice for All” was recorded in February by congregating the inmates in different areas of the jail with better acoustics, according to Donna Fiducia, a host on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing news network, who said she helped advise the group on making the recording and getting it to editors at the network. Fiducia said she did not know which inmates participated, and the Trump allies who produced “Justice for All” — Kash Patel, a former White House aide and current Trump adviser, and Ed Henry, another Real America’s Voice host — declined to identify the choir members.

Trump recorded himself saying the Pledge of Allegiance after he heard about the production and wanted to participate, according to the campaign. The Trump campaign said it did not produce “Justice for All” and does not know the names of the singers. When asked about the origin of the song, the campaign referred The Post to the online video as it appeared on the video-sharing website Rumble.

The finished track premiered on March 3, and it quickly hit No. 1 in the Apple iTunes music store and made the Billboard chart. Trump immediately began promoting the song on social media, leading up to playing it at his March rally. “It was very much an honor,” Trump told reporters on his plane after the rally, explaining that playing the song there had been his idea. “Those people were treated very badly. ... I think it’s a disgrace.”

[Trump takes support for Jan. 6 rioters to new level, collaborates on a song]

Kenneth Sicknick, the brother of the deceased officer, told The Post he was “disgusted” by Trump’s glorification of the prisoners. “The rallying cry is that no police officer died on Jan. 6, and they leave out inconvenient things like my brother’s first stroke happened on Jan. 6, and he was put on life support and died the following day,” he said. “And they do that over and over and over again.”

The former president leads early polls for the 2024 Republican nomination as he faces growing legal peril and continues to promote false claims about the 2020 election. He has previously floated pardoning Jan. 6 rioters if he returns to the White House, and at a campaign stop recently, he embraced a woman convicted of defying police orders on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. He has often praised Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot trying to enter the House chamber by Capitol Police, and also called in to a vigil outside the jail that typically features Babbitt’s mother, Micki Witthoeft, and other supporters of the inmates.

In the video from inside the jail, Nichols begins by referencing Witthoeft and the vigil. “Everybody’s outside right now,” Nichols says to the camera. As Nichols moves the camera to show a wider view of the full group, several of the men say, “We love you, Micki,” referring to Babbitt’s mother.

Nichols faces multiple charges, including assault on a federal officer with a weapon. Footage from Jan. 6 shows him using some kind of chemical spray, according to prosecutors. Nichols is awaiting trial after pleading not guilty to all counts and was released in November. Nichols’s wife declined to comment.

“We are going to do what we do every night at 9 o’clock,” Nichols says: “Sing the national anthem.”

Shane Jenkins, wearing a white T-shirt and standard orange pants, leans forward, puts his hand on Nichols’s shoulder and gestures a thumbs-up to the camera. Jenkins is bald with a full, distinctive beard and small tattoo under his right eye. He then ducks behind another inmate, reviews something on a piece of paper and joins in the singing.

Jenkins was found guilty of all charges at trial on March 29 for his role in the brutal, hours-long fight between rioters and police on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace. He threw multiple objects at police, including a desk drawer and a flagpole, and he tried to break a window of the Capitol building with a metal ax, according to court records. He has a criminal history that includes convictions for evading or resisting arrest.

Jenkins’s attorney confirmed that the man in the video was his client but said Jenkins did not participate in the version of the song that was promoted by Trump.

The camera pans toward a pay phone. The majority of the men wave, including a tall man with a long, graying beard and dark framed glasses, whom The Post identified as William Chrestman.

Chrestman is awaiting trial and pleaded not guilty to all counts. He’s accused of leading a Kansas City-area group of Proud Boys and telling a Capitol Police officer, “You shoot, and I’ll take your f---ing ass out!” as well as using an ax handle to keep police from closing building gates. A lawyer for Chrestman declined to comment.

“We’re doing our own little photo shoot,” Jonathan Mellis, identifiable by his distinctive glasses and bushy, shoulder-length, dark curly hair, says as he holds up the pay phone receiver.

“When I heard that, knowing my son’s voice was there, it’s become very meaningful,” Mellis’s mother, Donna, said through tears, recalling when she first heard “Justice for All.” “Every time I hear it, I get chills and goose bumps because it means so much to us.” She said Mellis declined to comment directly. Mellis, who was captured on video repeatedly hitting police officers with a giant stick in the same tunnel battle as Jenkins, was set to plead guilty Friday, but his hearing was rescheduled to later this month.

Julian Khater, whom Mellis identifies by name in the video, gives a thumbs-up and recites a prayer written on a piece of paper into the phone. His identity was also confirmed by his brother Michael.

Khater pleaded guilty to using chemical spray on Sicknick, the officer who died the day after the insurrection. (The D.C. medical examiner concluded that Sicknick died of natural causes after two strokes, but that “all that transpired on that day played a role in his condition.”) Khater was recently sentenced to 80 months in prison. He was transferred out of the D.C. jail and committed to a medium-security federal prison in early March.

All inmates share access to tablets that allow texting and phone calls from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, according to the D.C. Department of Corrections, which oversees the jail. They each additionally have an individual tablet during the same time span where they are able to do legal research, process grievances, attend religious services and educational classes, and message their attorneys.

The inmates and their supporters on right-wing media have circulated complaints about the conditions in the jail and allegations of constitutional violations. There is no evidence of anyone being held without charges. The people being held in the jail are there while they are being processed, awaiting sentencing or awaiting trial after a judge deemed them too dangerous or too much of a flight risk to release.

On a recent congressional tour of the facility, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) alleged the prisoners told her “stories of being denied medical treatment, stories of assault, stories of being threatened with rape.” Two Democrats on the visit accused her of misleading the public and said the conditions were unremarkable. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.), a former public defender and civil rights attorney in the Dallas area, said she’d seen far worse jails in Texas and Arkansas.

One inmate, Donald Hazard, who recently moved to the D.C. jail, called it an improvement over the facility where he was being held before, mostly on account of being around fellow Jan. 6 defendants.

“It’s a lot better to be around a bunch of hardcore patriots rather than hardcore dopers and criminals,” Hazard, who pleaded guilty to assaulting police, said in a call to the vigil outside. “When I get out of here, I’m back in the fight. They’ll have to kill me to stop me.”

At the nightly vigils, which have gone on since August, supporters bring pizza, doughnuts and coffee, and even tents to brave bad weather. Some people who live in the area drive for hours to come several nights a week, while others from around the country pass through for several days at a time. Prisoners often call in to show appreciation for and solidarity with the demonstrators.

Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy, was convicted of bringing a gun to the riot, said Trump’s use of the recording boosted the prisoners’ morale, but she also expressed some discomfort with how he was using them for his own political purposes.

“Even though Trump did get involved in that — and I’m thankful because it did get them attention — I think he only played it because he’s involved,” she told The Post during a recent vigil. “Trump is about himself, and ‘Make America Great [Again]’ is about America, and those are two different things.”

Trump, who frequently focuses on measures of popularity such as crowd sizes and ratings, has also taken pride in the single’s sales. “I feel like Elvis,” he said in a recent interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “It was Number 1, and you know what, that is a tribute to the fact that people feel the J6 people have been very unfairly treated.”

Proceeds from the song would benefit the prisoners and their families, according to Patel, the Trump adviser who helped produce the track. ITunes and digital streaming platforms typically pay music royalties around three months later, which would set the first revenue from the track to arrive in approximately June.

Trump’s musical selections have provoked controversy before, such as his use last year of a stock instrumental soundtrack that was embraced by followers of the radicalized ideology known as QAnon. Trump continued using the anthem to close his rallies after the connection was widely publicized.

Now, his prominently aligning himself with the Jan. 6 prisoners coincides with his deepening entanglement with the criminal justice system, as he fights charges of falsifying business records in New York and faces three additional criminal probes by a Georgia district attorney and a U.S. Justice Department special counsel. He and his allies are trying to portray the investigations as politicized, alongside other conservatives who they claim are being persecuted for their views.

When Trump returned to his Mar-a-Lago estate on April 4 after his arraignment in New York, he addressed supporters in the ballroom, then ate dinner and DJed for a small group of aides and guests until around 2 a.m. One of the songs he picked on his iPad to pipe into the club’s speakers was “Justice for All,” the recording of him with the “prison choir.” The former president led his guests in standing with his hand over his heart while the song played.