2 Californians on FBI’s Most Wanted List Among Capitol Rioters Pardoned by Trump

More than 100 Californians who traveled to Washington to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, had their records wiped clean Monday after President Donald Trump issued pardons for insurrectionists.

Experts in the Bay Area say the sweeping action, coupled with controversial last-minute pardons by the Biden administration, indicates how the power reserved for the president has evolved politically.

“It’s not unusual, and it’s not wrong for there to be a political motive behind clemency,” Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg said. “But this has just been a wild eruption of politically or personally motivated pardoning.”

Shortly after being inaugurated, Trump followed through on a campaign promise and pardoned more than 1,500 people who took part in the insurrection. He also commuted the sentences of 14 members of far-right groups who were convicted for the riot and ordered the Justice Department to drop related pending indictments.

Nine people from the Bay Area were among those cleared of charges, including two who had remained on the FBI’s most wanted list until Monday. Among them is Evan Neumann of Mill Valley, who fled to Belarus and was granted political asylum there in 2022.

Neumann, who has two teenage children in California, faced several charges, including assaulting law enforcement officers. Video footage cited in his indictment shows him calling police “little b—s” who “kneel to antifa” inside the Capitol.

In January 2024, he told The Press Democrat that he was not confident the charges would be dropped and was setting down roots in Belarus, where he planned to open a restaurant.

Also pardoned was Daniel Goodwyn, a San Francisco resident and self-proclaimed Proud Boys member who entered the Capitol before being instructed by police to leave. In November, he was elected president of a new San Francisco chapter of the California Republican Assembly, a right-wing faction of the city’s Republican Party. After the local Republican County Central Committee elected a slate of 17 moderate GOP leaders, the group appears to have formed in an effort to push the local GOP farther right.

Goodwyn, who was charged with knowingly entering restricted grounds and disorderly conduct, attended Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. He posted a photo on Instagram of himself wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat in the Capital One Arena, captioned, “I’m just praying for pardons for all J6ers — no man left behind!”

David Dempsey, a Proud Boys member, and four men linked to a Southern California chapter of the Three Percenters, a far-right anti-government militia, were among the Californians pardoned.

Weisberg said that the pardons send an emboldening message to members of militias.

“They could well read this as a signal, not necessarily that they will be pardoned for certain acts that could be called political violence, but that they won’t be prosecuted in the first place under this administration,” he told KQED.

Dempsey had previously received one of the longest prison sentences among Jan. 6 defendants — 20 years for assaulting multiple police officers and another rioter. Outside the Capitol, he called for the hanging of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama.

While the pardons are legal, Weisberg said they show a shift in the way the power reserved for the president is used.

“The concern is, of course, that pardoning has now become a kind of aider and abettor of political divisiveness,” he said.

University of San Francisco politics professor James Taylor compared Trump’s handling of the cases to how Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford treated the five men charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone communications after the Watergate scandal.

“In the past, this would never happen. It would be too embarrassing,” he said. “Nixon or Ford, for example, pardoning the weathermen who broke into the Watergate Hotel would be a shame for generations of Republican politicians.”

Taylor said that Biden’s preemptive pardons for members of the Jan. 6 Select Committee and other high-profile critics of Trump are also a reflection of the current president.

“It’s consistent with the general lawlessness of Donald Trump that Biden, his predecessor, has to protect people from him,” he told KQED.

However, Weisberg doubts that the people Biden granted preemptive clemency to, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Gen. Mark Milley, would have become targets.

“What they have in common, though, is that the pardoning process now has been entirely tied up in divisive politics,” he said.