US Marshals' Efforts Around Trump's January 6 Pardons Were "Highly Unusual

As the US Marshals Service prepared for Donald Trump’s expected pardon of January 6 defendants, officials went to unusual lengths to facilitate the defendants’ travel home from the DC jail, newly obtained records show.

The records, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by the ethics watchdog CREW, are yet another window into the unprecedented nature of Trump’s decision to pardon some 1,500 people who participated in the 2021 Capitol siege. They detail how the Marshals Service, the law enforcement arm of the federal judiciary, which had custody of January 6 defendants before and during their trials, was trying to navigate the situation.

Of particular note, the records show that Ronald Carter, the US marshal for DC, sent an email on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, asking federal judges to issue an order that would allow the government to pay for pardoned defendants’ transportation home.

It’s normally up to defense attorneys to make such a request—not the Marshals Service, which is also tasked with providing security to judges and is generally deferential to them. Carter’s email is “highly unusual,” Robert Cindrich, a retired US district judge in Pennsylvania, told me.

Carter then visited the chambers of at least four federal judges the following day to ask about the status of January 6 releases, after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) complained they were happening too slowly. “We’ve never seen anything like this before—pressuring the court to issue a decision by a [certain] time,” one judge told the Washington Post, which broke the news of Carter’s visit to the judicial chambers.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/us-marshals-service-trump-january-6-pardons/