“We didn’t eat like this,” my cousin Patrick jokes, cutting his steak at a homecoming dinner with family to celebrate his release from prison.
President Trump pardoned Patrick on Day One of his White House return. My cousin had been serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence at the Elkton federal correctional institution in Ohio for his actions Jan. 6, 2021.
Patrick is one of the “violent” J6ers Democrats and even some right-wing commentators and congressional Republicans say Trump shouldn’t have pardoned. But like many of these cases, Patrick’s has — to use the words of Vice President J.D. Vance — “gray areas.”
Patrick McCaughey III was 23 years old when he drove to Washington, DC, with his father to protest what he saw as election manipulation. “I went down there expecting we would probably listen to a couple speeches and protest visibly, stand in location and make our voices heard,” he tells me. “It was my first real political event, protest, rally.”
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