The J6 Rioter Now Working at the Pentagon

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On January 6, 2021, 19-year-old Elias Irizarry was among the members of a violent mob that broke into the U.S. Capitol and attempted to overturn the recent presidential election. He was convicted of trespassing on government grounds, and videos from that day show him entering through a window with a metal pole in his hand. Now he may have access to sensitive national-security information as an employee of the Department of Defense.

As part of his deal with then-President Biden’s Justice Department, Irizarry pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, and was sentenced to 14 days in jail. But as with almost all of the other January 6ers, he was fully pardoned on Donald Trump’s return to office last year. The Washington Post reported this week that Irizarry, now 25, works at the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office. He’s been tasked with guarding the country against terrorist threats—but he himself participated in an attack on the U.S. government just over five years ago. His trajectory aligns with Trump’s ongoing effort to reframe the January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots” acting in support of a righteous cause, and reflects the White House’s tendency to reward illegal actions performed in the service of the president and his agenda.

At the time of the riot, Irizarry was a freshman at the Citadel, a public military college in South Carolina. He was suspended from school after his guilty plea; after he apologized for his involvement in the riot at his 2023 sentencing, he reapplied and was accepted. The judge even wrote him a recommendation letter. Irizarry ran for Congress in 2024, and his campaign website explained that he’d “truly seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of America.” (He lost in the Republican primary, although he did capture 28 percent of the vote.) But does the fact that Irizarry apologized, and that a DOD spokesperson says that he believes Irizarry is qualified, mean that he should have access to the nation’s most closely guarded secrets?

Part of the reason government jobs are so coveted is that many careers in public service are rewarded with stability, pensions, and other benefits. These positions can come with immense responsibility—and although it’s unclear what Irizarry’s motivations are for taking this particular role, his hiring is part of a concerning trend. He isn’t the first January 6 defendant to hold a position in the Trump administration: Jared Wise, who was caught on tape encouraging insurrectionists to “kill” Capitol Police officers, was until recently an employee of the Department of Justice. He resigned because he believed that he couldn’t “fully expose the abuses by the FBI and DOJ against J6 defendants” from within the federal government. A former FBI agent himself, Wise was hired specifically for the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, which was formed to investigate supposed abuses of prosecutorial power during the Biden administration. (My colleague Quinta Jurecic has argued that the project has unintentionally thrown light on the Trump administration’s own abuses.)

One major concern over Irizarry’s job: his security clearance. All positions in the Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office require top-secret clearance, according to The Washington Post, which is typically granted only after a rigorous vetting process. (The Pentagon did not respond to my questions about the specifics of Irizarry’s role.) In part because Americans with security clearances can be targets for foreign agents, they’re routinely advised to watch for “insider threats”—red flags among co-workers who could potentially mishandle classified information, voluntarily or under duress. One of those tells, as my colleague Tom Nichols has written, is hostility to the U.S. government. Prosecutors alleged that, in the months after January 6, Irizarry sent texts to another rioter about potentially joining Russia’s military if America’s wouldn’t accept him.

The Trump administration is still trying to paper over the history of January 6. In November of last year, Trump also announced mostly symbolic pardons for the election deniers who plotted to keep him in office. A month later, Trump pardoned Tina Peters, the Colorado county clerk who was convicted of election interference in 2024. The order didn’t carry legal signifiance—convicted only at the state level, Peters was technically beyond the president’s reach—but eventually, Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, did what Trump couldn’t, commuting Peters’s prison sentence. Immediately following her release, she went on Steve Bannon’s podcast and suggested that she was jailed for exposing a Democratic plot to steal the election.

The decision to pardon those involved in January 6, and to give some of the insurrectionists jobs in government, sends the message that crimes can be forgiven as long as they serve the aims of those in power. Government agencies cultivate public trust in part by demonstrating that they’re hiring the right people; not so long ago, Irizarry would have been an active security risk. In this administration, loyalty is the qualification that matters most.

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