Joseph Fischer, center, lost his job as a patrolman for the North Cornwall Township Police Department after being charged with three felonies and four misdemeanors for his actions at the Capitol. He was awaiting trial when President Donald Trump dismissed his case.
Courtesy of the FBI
Courtesy of the FBI
Joseph Fischer, center, lost his job as a patrolman for the North Cornwall Township Police Department after being charged with three felonies and four misdemeanors for his actions at the Capitol. He was awaiting trial when President Donald Trump dismissed his case.
Lebanon County resident Joseph Fischer believes he was among those chosen by God to suffer so that the corruption of the federal government would be exposed.
“ I believe this is providence,” he said. “I believe God allowed this to happen for a greater purpose, and I think the greater purpose was to expose the sinful nature in our government.”
Fischer is one of the thousands of people who answered Donald Trump’s call to the nation’s capital for a rally to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. And in his view, the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a set-up.
The violence that day was orchestrated by “the establishment” because “they” wanted a riot as an excuse to keep President Donald Trump out of office, Fischer said.
Fischer’s views about the day, though undermined by ample video and photographic evidence, are shared by Trump, now returned to office. In his inaugural address last week, Trump said God supported his 2024 candidacy, and accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Justice Department against himself and his supporters – remarks seized on by Fischer and other January 6 defendants who believe they were unjustly prosecuted.
Trump showed in 2020 that his falsehoods and the power of his political machine were capable of driving thousands to the Capitol, creating the conditions in which people like Fischer, with no criminal background, would collectively commit an act of mass political violence.
What will happen now that Trump has pardoned the rioters and echoed their feelings of persecution is unknown. On the one hand, the public activities of militia groups that peaked at the end of Trump’s first presidency, have decreased steadily since 2021, according to the political violence monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data.
The January 6 prosecutions likely derailed or discouraged organizing by militia and extremist groups. Indeed, leaders of two prominent such groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, were arrested, convicted and put in prison, throwing the national organizations into disarray.
But these groups didn’t stop their activities. Instead, their members and affiliated groups shifted toward building local influence by running for local offices or launching campaigns to pressure local governments on culture war issues like school book bans, according to Grant Tudor, policy advocate at the anti-authoritarian group Protect Democracy, founded in 2016 by former lawyers in President Barack Obama’s administration.
Data shows that threats against local public officials escalated since tracking started in 2022, peaking around the November election, according to the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton. The finding shows a general willingness to use threats and harassment, even by people not affiliated with extremist groups, according to Shannon Hiller, the Initiative’s executive director.
Given that context, Tudor says he is particularly concerned about the roughly 200 Jan. 6 defendants who have ties to extremist or fringe groups. For several years, the Department of Homeland Security has listed domestic violent extremists as the biggest threat to national security.
“ These are not individuals who happened to commit acts of violence that day. They’re individuals who have been trained in violence,” Tudor said. “These are individuals who have ties to militant groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and Three Percenters.”
Hiller agreed with Tudor’s view that Trump’s pardons send a signal that political violence on his behalf is acceptable.
But she said it is too soon to tell what impact the pardons will have on extremist organizing or actions, or the defendants themselves. Local efforts to create political dialogue and resolve conflict will be important over the long term, she said.
Extremism or something else?
A closer look at the Central Pennsylvanians charged for Jan. 6 activities shows few had ties to extremism. Of the 32 charged with crimes related to January 6, just two had such ties, according to NPR reporting.
One is Riley June Williams of Harrisburg, per research by Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based online research and investigative news outlet. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, Bellingcat researchers found online posts by Williams on right wing forums and a video which the researchers said shows Williams giving a Nazi salute while wearing a Nazi baseball cap.
Williams’ federal public defender, Lori Ulrich, pushed back on the notion that her client was associated with extremist groups. She said the posts had nothing to do with why her client was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, insisting that Williams’ actions were taken out of context by the media.
“ That’s like a young kid being stupid on social media,” she said of the Nazi salute, which Williams made when she was about 20 years old.
Ulrich said prosecutors overreached in their case against Williams, who became the focus of national attention when she was charged with the theft of a laptop from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Despite Williams’s social media posts boasting that she took the computer, Ulrich said she did not take it and pointed to security footage and the testimony of two witnesses as proof, as well as the fact that law enforcement never found the laptop after Williams’ arrest.
The problem was not the initial charge, given Williams’ posts about taking the laptop, Ulrich said, but the continued pursuit of the charge even after more information emerged was improper. A jury convicted Williams on six of eight charges in 2022 but were undecided on the question of whether she took Pelosi’s laptop.
“She will always be the woman, you know, who took Pelosi’s computer, even though the government knew that that was wrong,” Ulrich said.
Blind to the violence
Ulrich also represented Fischer, who was arrested on Feb. 19, 2021, and charged with three felonies and four misdemeanors.
His attorney was preparing a defense of prosecutorial overreach when Trump announced the Jan. 6 pardons on his first day in office. The time Fischer spent in the Capitol simply did not match the case the Department of Justice brought against him, she said.
“ They were claiming he assaulted the police, but that was simply a mischaracterization of what the evidence actually showed,” Ulrich said.
Fischer said he saw no evidence of violence while at the Capitol and that the day was about free speech, a common statement among January 6 defendants. Yet four Trump supporters died at the Capitol, directly or indirectly caused by the riots, according to a bipartisan Senate report released in June 2021. More than 140 police officers were injured, according to the Select House Committee on January 6. One officer died due to strokes suffered shortly after the attack and four more died by suicide in the days and months that followed.
Fischer said he walked freely up the steps to the entrance of the Capitol. He was with five or six others when “ a large cloud of OC spray, or pepper spray, went over top of the crowd, to my left, in the doorway.”
“ We hurried forward to get away from the OC spray,” he said. “At that point, we fell into the Capitol right through the threshold.”
Courtesy of the FBI
Joseph Fischer said he was with five or six others when a cloud of pepper spray came behind them and forced them through the doors of the Capitol. Images he captured and posted online show otherwise.
This was one of several details from Fischer’s account that conflicted with the government’s evidence. Images from Fischer’s video show dozens of rioters in the camera frame. Body camera footage showed that Fisher and others, including an officer, fell down after what the FBI described as a “minor scuffle” inside the Capitol. A voice, seemingly Fischer’s, was heard telling others to let the officer up.
Along with the video Fischer posted of being at the Capitol, he wrote, “Made it inside … received pepper balls and pepper sprayed. Police line was 4 deep.. I made it to level two…” according to the FBI.
‘Our country can heal’
Hiller said the Jan. 6 defendants should be able to rebuild their lives, as is the case for anybody who is released from prison after completing a sentence or being pardoned. For communities home to people charged in Jan. 6 cases, it is important to engage in dialogue and reconciliation, Hiller said.
“Part of what the pardons demonstrate is that prosecutions alone are often insufficient to address these underlying conflict dynamics in any country, and that includes the United States,” Hiller said.
Ulrich said Williams would not speak to WITF for this story. She is in the process of rebuilding her life, Ulrich said, and the pardon from Trump will help.
“ I’m glad it’s over,” Ulrich said. “I’m very happy for both of my clients.”
As for Fischer, he said he is also in the process of figuring out what is next. He will follow where God leads, he said. As for politics, he will be more attentive than he was before, but he said he does not plan to be politically active.
“ I believe our country can heal from this, but I believe the truth needs to come out. We need to get back on track,” Fischer said. “That’s for somebody like Donald Trump or Congress, if they’re impartial, to figure out. But old politics has to stop.”
A collection of interviews, photos, and music videos, featuring local musicians who have stopped by the WITF performance studio to share a little discussion and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.
