Jerod Hughes, one of the first rioters into the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack, turned himself in to authorities and pleaded guilty to obstruction of an official proceeding, but still feels what he and others did that day was patriotic. 

Hughes believes that the 2020 election was stolen. He drove 2,000 miles to Washington, D.C.  Hughes was not accused of violence, but kicked out a door during the 2021 riot, enabling others to enter the Capitol. 

“No matter how I look at it, I share some of the responsibility for everything that happened that day, letting people in, being a part of that mob,” he said. 

Hughes’ obstruction charge was later struck down by the Supreme Court in another related case. But if Hughes appeals, he would face other charges that the prosecution had dropped in his case. So after 20 months in custody, including prison, Hughes has decided to wrap up his last days of home detention. 

Looking back on Jan. 6

Hughes is one of more than 1,000 defendants who’ve been convicted so far in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. About 350 trials are still pending and the FBI is still searching for suspects. 

Evidence from the trials in the years since the insurrection shows organized militias came with a plan to stop the electoral vote count in Congress that would declare Joe Biden the winner. 

On January 6, President Donald Trump enflamed a multitude of people with false claims of a stolen election. 

Hughes, a 39-year-old construction worker from Montana, supported President Trump. 

“The way this country’s headed, my paycheck — you know, my wife’s disabled, and it’s been hell for us to try to, you know, try to make it with the tens of thousands of dollars of medical bills,” he said. “And a lot of us see Donald Trump, the outsider, coming in and trying to — and trying to help us out, trying to help the little guy out against the big government.”

While Hughes helped kick out  a door, others did much worse. 

Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, who spoke with 60 Minutes in his “personal capacity and not on behalf of my employer or the city,” was pinned, punched and beaten during the Jan. 6 attack. Hodges said he feels pardoning Capitol rioters would be the wrong move. 

“If these defendants are pardoned, then so much of what they believe or believed on that day will be justified in their heads,” Hodges said. “That they,  if they do it again, that they’ll be protected. And it would be just incredibly destructive for the fabric of the country.”

Defending democracy or being duped?

Hughes said he felt his actions on Jan. 6 were patriotic. He’d followed Fox News reports, read information online and listened to Trump saying the election had been stolen. 

Fox eventually paid $787 million to settle a suit that claimed the network repeatedly and knowingly promoted lies about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. 

Trump himself is a Jan. 6 defendant in a separate prosecution led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. by a grand jury for allegedly conspiring to overturn the election with lies he knew were false — the same myths that stoked rage in Hughes.

A group of prominent conservatives, including retired federal Judge Thomas Griffith, spent a year investigating claims the 2020 election was stolen. Griffith was appointed by former President George W. Bush to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He retired in 2020 after spending years working with most of the 29 judges who’ve heard Jan. 6 cases. 

In the report he co-authored, “Lost, Not Stolen,” Griffith and other prominent conservatives said they found no evidence that fraud had changed the election’s outcome anywhere in the country. 

“And all of the evidence — not the speculation, not the conspiracy theories — all the evidence points in one direction,” Griffith said. “And that is that President Biden won, and President Trump lost.”

Jan. 6 protesters, Griffith said, were duped. But Hughes still believes the 2020 election was stolen. 

“If I come to find out that I was dead wrong on this, that the election was actually legit and Joe Biden got the most votes in presidential history, I would be extremely embarrassed. I would hold my hand up and say, ‘I was wrong, and I was an idiot.’ I don’t believe that though,” Hughes said. “And whether I was right or wrong, I believe what we did was patriotic, because we truly believed that the election was stolen, for a number of reasons. We really believed that.”