FREEDOM CORNER — This patch of sidewalk in Southeast Washington, D.C., between the razorwire edifice of the D.C. jail and the rows of headstones in Congressional Cemetery, is a symbol of the Republican Party’s possible future.
Every night inside the jail, Donald Trump supporters locked up for attacking the U.S. Capitol sing the national anthem. And every night at Freedom Corner, a small group of activists holding a vigil sings with them.
On several recent evenings, an inmate named Jeffrey Sabol, who pleaded guilty on Friday to attacking police during the riot, led the singing. Calling from inside the jail, Sabol’s disembodied voice was audible through a smartphone speaker held up to a mic, drowning everyone else out. Except for the line “our flag was STILL THERE,” which everybody yells because the inmates are still there, and so are their supporters, out on the sidewalk every night.
They’ve been doing this vigil for a year, livestreaming every moment, united by false beliefs about the 2020 election and what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. And even though they’ve got regular antagonists and face complaints from neighbors, it looks like they’re never going away, and the martyrdom of insurrectionists seems to be taking root as prescribed history for elected Republicans.
“We’ll be here as long as we can,” the group’s leader, Micki Witthoeft, told JS during Tuesday night’s vigil. “We made a commitment.”
Witthoeft is the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to climb through a barricaded door during the siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Witthoeft and her Freedom Corner regulars wear T-shirts with Babbitt’s image that proclaim she was murdered.
Trump has championed Witthoeft’s cause, collaborating with the prisoners on a song, helping the gang raise money from online donors and even calling in to the vigil itself.
“We love Ashli, and it was so horrible what happened to her,” Trump said through Witthoeft’s phone during a vigil in September. “We cannot allow this to happen to our country.”
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When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives this year, Rep. Majorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) gave Witthoeft a shout-out during the first meeting of the House Oversight Committee, saying Babbitt was murdered and likening her death to the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop by police in Memphis, Tennessee.
“I believe that there are many people that came into the Capitol on Jan. 6, whose civil rights and liberties are being violated heavily,” Greene said from the dais during her first appearance as a committee member in January.
That week, I asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) if he agreed that Babbitt had been murdered or if he thought the police officer had done his job. Investigations by the Justice Department and the Capitol Police had cleared the officer of wrongdoing.
“I think the police officer did his job,” McCarthy said.
It was one of the rare instances in which McCarthy strayed from Trump, and the former president immediately rebuked the speaker in a statement, calling the officer a “thug” and saying he “was not just ‘doing his job’ when he shot and killed Great Patriot Ashli Babbitt at point blank range.”
In an apparent effort to smooth things over, McCarthy received Witthoeft for a meeting in his office a few weeks later at her request. She said afterward that he had been “delightful.”
Witthoeft said this week that she’s met with a “fair share” of other House Republicans, though she declined to describe the meetings other than to say some members were supportive, some not. One of her Freedom Corner colleagues told JS she’s had sit-down meetings with more than two dozen lawmakers and more casual hallway encounters with perhaps another two dozen. A video posted last month shows Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) greeting Witthoeft and remembering she had previously been in his office.
“Thank you for what you’re doing,” Loudermilk said. “We’re going to keep going until we get the truth.”
Loudermilk has been leading a Republican counter-probe into the bipartisan special committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, recently complaining that it failed to preserve all of its records and didn’t investigate the Capitol’s security failure that day. (A bipartisan Senate report concluded in 2021 that federal intelligence agencies failed to share warnings and that the Capitol Police were unprepared.)
Several Republicans during a recent hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray insinuated that undercover agents or confidential informants bore responsibility for the Capitol riot. Even more Republicans have wrapped themselves around Trump as he faces a criminal trial for trying to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, including by inciting the riot.
Michael A. McCoy for Huffpost
Greene led a small contingent of lawmakers to the jail in March, where they received a tour and then decried the conditions inside. (Democrats who joined the tour said the J6 inmates, who are housed together, apart from the jail’s general population, appeared to have a better setup than other inmates.) The visit was part of an investigation into the supposed mistreatment of the J6ers, but the committee has since given no indication that an investigation is still underway.
Witthoeft and her compatriots don’t appear to be losing any steam. The vigil celebrated its first anniversary at the beginning of the month, and I told Witthoeft I had heard that she and a few others recently rented a house in Northeast D.C.
“We do have a team at the Eagle’s Nest,” Witthoeft said.
“Eagle’s Nest,” I said, making sure I heard her correctly.
“Which some would say was Hitler’s hideout, but we’re American citizens and we won that war and we’re taking back the name,” she said. “That is absolutely not an ode to Hitler.”
Previously, they’d been staying at shorter-term Airbnb rentals, but they’ve been able to move in thanks to online donations from livestream viewers and other supporters. Various websites affiliated with the cause solicit donations for commissary funds for inmates and also for living expenses for Witthoeft and her team.
“We’re D.C. residents now,” said Tommy Tatum, a 47-year-old Mississippi native who was at the Capitol during the riot and now resides at the Eagle’s Nest.
Tatum said he managed radio stations in the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, at which point he said he quit so he could blog about local Black Lives Matter protests and local crime. A friend asked if he wanted to see Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, so he threw in $50 for gas and they arrived in Washington early that morning. He made his way to the Capitol after the speech and arrived on the West Front Plaza, which he said looked like a war zone. He said he yelled at police but didn’t assault them. Video from his perspective, memorialized on Twitter by one of his many online haters, suggests he was very much in the fray, yelling at police and encouraging other rioters to “take their helmets,” though the footage doesn’t show him throwing any punches.
The attack on the Capitol, Tatum said, only interrupted the official challenge to the election that was underway in the House and Senate ― one he insists could have ended with Trump rightfully winning the election.
“I believe it was instigated by some pro-Marxist demonstrators along with some government actors,” he said. “It was about specifically stopping the process that would allow Donald Trump to attain the presidency, per the Constitution.”
Michael A. McCoy for Huffpost
The vigil’s closest neighbor is Congressional Cemetery, a privately operated historical site that hosts events and where neighbors pay for the privilege of running their dogs on the grounds.
Vigil-goers have often set food and candles on the cemetery’s northeast wall, and their music and noise carry onto the grounds, prompting neighbors to complain to the cemetery. One of the J6 regulars admitted in a video in April that he and others had made a habit out of peeing in the cemetery at night, though he said they no longer did so; another video from April shows the activists jawing with a dog walker.
“We’re on the phone with people constantly, and nothing gets done, and it’s beyond frustrating for us because we are de facto their background whenever they film, whenever they do anything, and so everybody associates our cemetery with them,” Jackie Spainhour, the cemetery’s president, said in an interview.
The most serious offense was probably the pirate flag a vigil attendee attached to the cemetery wall with a noose attached to the flag. Spainhour has pleaded with D.C. police for help dealing with the group, but it appears that law enforcement has no desire to shut the protest down.
“We’re still trying to figure out where their First Amendment rights end and our rights as private property owners begin, and it’s just becoming extremely frustrating,” Spainhour said.
On Aug. 1, the vigil celebrated its first anniversary with a “block party” that drew counterprotesters — a common-enough occurrence that D.C. police have installed barriers to keep the two groups on opposite sides of the street. A highlight reel posted online by one of the anti-vigil activists shows some of the nasty heckling and physical confrontations that went down before the barricades went up. Officers arrested Witthoeft in May following a scuffle, but no charges resulted.
On recent evenings, there have been a half-dozen police cars parked with their lights on during the evening livestreams, with the officers remaining in their vehicles and driving away after the stream wraps up.
“The Metropolitan Police Department respects everyone’s First Amendment right to demonstrate and peacefully protest,” an MPD spokesman said in an email.
On a typical night, it’s just the J6ers. They unfold a table, fire up a generator, and pipe music and commentary through a loudspeaker. Some nights there’s pizza or fried chicken, and if it’s raining, they’ll unfold a party tent. At 9 p.m., they get a D.C. jail inmate on the phone, put him on speaker, and join in singing the national anthem. Then they chat for a few more minutes, essentially turning Freedom Corner into an open-air talk radio program. The vigil wraps up each night with the gang swaying arm-in-arm to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”
Michael A. McCoy for Huffpost
On the day Trump was indicted for his efforts to overturn the election, the group seemed glad that the former president had finally joined the club he started. On another evening, the still-imprisoned Sabol sounded thrilled that Trump had recently shared and praised an interview with a woman espousing a QAnon conspiracy theory claiming Biden is only president of a bankrupt corporation and that the U.S. Space Force, founded under Trump, had evidence of election fraud, and that Trump had only withheld it because the country wasn’t ready for the civil war that would ensue.
“The big punch is that Trump is saying, ‘Hey, I praised this woman for what she’s saying in this interview, which is obviously an endorsement,’” Sabol said to the group from inside the jail. “It adds such a tremendous stamp of, ‘This isn’t B.S.’”
How long can this go on? Well, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, there are 39 Capitol rioters detained by the city, of whom four are being held post-sentencing, 15 are awaiting trial and 20 have been convicted and are awaiting sentencing. Some of their trial dates are set for next year. So Freedom Corner will have a reason to continue at least until those defendants are tried, sentenced and sent off to a federal prison somewhere else.
Some vigil regulars live out of their vehicles. Steve Jericho, a 60-year-old from Pennsylvania present at the vigil on weeknights, said he sleeps in a van that he parks around the city. He said he makes enough money working on houses two months per year to pay for the van lifestyle the rest. He regrets that he wasn’t in the city on Jan. 6 itself, he said.
Michael A. McCoy for JS
On weekends, Jericho posts up outside a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where some J6ers are serving time.
“Everywhere they put a J6er, there’s going to be a vigil,” Jericho said.
Another van-dweller and Freedom Corner regular named Taylor Taranto was arrested in June near former President Barack Obama’s home in Northwest D.C. Police found guns and ammo in Taranto’s van after he made what prosecutors called “concerning statements” about attacking the government.
Jericho and Tatum said they had noticed Taranto behaving erratically in the weeks before his arrest, and Tatum said he had asked Taranto to leave partly because he had heard Taranto say he didn’t even believe Babbitt had died at the Capitol ― that her death was a hoax.
“He started acting like a weirdo in our group,” Jericho said. “And that was not cool.”
When I’d arrived at Freedom Corner on Tuesday evening, Witthoeft had been walking alone along the sidewalk, yelling back at three people who’d been taunting her from inside the cemetery. A counterprotester across the street later speculated through a bullhorn that she had scoliosis and needed to see a chiropractor because she appeared to be leaning to one side. (One of the weird things about the vigil is that the J6ers and their antagonists often seem very familiar with each other; it doesn’t diminish the hostility at all.)
Amid all the conspiracy theorizing and the general craziness of the vigil, and the alternate reality for which it stands, Witthoeft made a statement that evening about her dead daughter that was plaintive and self-aware.
“Whatever you think she was guilty of that day, she was an American citizen. She was a veteran. She was deployed four times to the Middle East,” she said. “She was an unarmed American citizen gunned down by her government, and she has a right to justice and the truth.”
It was a useful reminder that above all else, this whole thing is sad.