Welcome to the beat. I'm Ari Melbert. There is a lot going on, but today marks something significant.

Five years since the January 6th attack, later ruled by the courts in a convicted sedition,

which was the biggest thing going on five years ago tonight. I bet you remember where you were

that night,

the days after. It uprooted a long tradition of the peaceful transfer of power in the United States

because Donald Trump had lost the election. President-elect Biden was coming into office,

and the violence perpetrated by the people later convicted who were summoned there by Donald Trump meant we didn't have an actual peaceful transfer.

It took what had been rhetoric and later punished in court as defamatory lies and Trump's big lie and turned it into crime and action.

All because so many people took action, including criminal violence against

police, under the claim or the belief that Trump didn't actually lose the election he lost.

Five years later, much has happened. And we are also approaching the one-year mark of Donald

Trump's second term. And that one-year mark is also

the anniversary of the sweeping pardons he issued, not for some on those days, not for, say, a few people

where you could have looked at their individual case, or even people who didn't actually carry out

violence, although that would be itself controversial given that they stormed the Capitol, committing crimes against the Congress, the United States itself, but he issued the

sweeping pardons for everyone, the violent actors, the people convicted of sedition, people who had

long, long prison terms left to serve, he freed them. And so the split screen moment of our time at

the Capitol tonight is Trump's

supporters actually returning to the scene of the crime. We've all heard about how you shouldn't

return to the scene of the crime. That's why that's a cliched term. But they're doing it because

unlike any other president in modern history, they are backed in their past convicted crimes by the

sitting president. We don't need to raise our voices or have a lot of emotion or rhetoric to

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