A Marathon man who admitted to assaulting law enforcement officers during the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riots was among those to walk free when President Donald Trump issued more than 1,500 pardons to rioters on his first day in office.
Originally arrested in August 2023, Bryan Bishop pleaded guilty in April 2024 to a felony charge of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers after video footage from the Jan. 6 riots captured him spraying a Metropolitan Police Department officer in the face with a chemical irritant before entering the Capitol.
On Sept. 3, Bishop was sentenced to 45 months in prison, along with three years of supervised release and a $2,000 restitution payment by U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly. Following Trump’s pardons, he served less than five months of that sentence.
A month before Bryan’s plea, his wife Tonya Bishop also pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges after entering the Capitol during the riots. She was later sentenced to 24 months of probation and $500 in restitution.
A search of the Federal Bureau of Prisons database confirmed Bryan Bishop’s release. Multiple sources confirmed to the Weekly that the Bishops had returned to their boat in Boot Key Harbor, and the couple hold an active mooring reservation with the city of Marathon.
Trump’s day-one pardons were paired with commuted sentences of 14 defendants associated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, previously convicted of seditious conspiracy.
“This is a big one,” Trump said of the “full, complete and unconditional” pardons that drew condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and even a few Republicans.
Calling them a “truly unthinkable attempt to erase the facts of that day,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray introduced a resolution requesting unanimous consent to condemn the pardons, but that resolution was blocked by Senate Republicans on Jan. 28.
“It is a betrayal of the law enforcement that protected all of us that day and a dangerous endorsement of political violence, telling criminals that you can beat cops within an inch of their lives as long as it’s in service to Donald Trump,” Murray said.
Though Trump had for months promised to grant clemency to many Jan. 6 defendants, some still questioned prior to Inauguration Day whether the pardons would include violent offenders during the riots.
In a Jan. 12 interview with Fox News, Vice President JD Vance stated that those who committed violence on Jan. 6 “obviously shouldn’t be pardoned,” causing backlash from right-wing supporters. Vance quickly walked back his position in a second interview on Jan. 26, seeking to separate the actions of violent rioters from what he called “denied constitutional protections in the prosecutions” for defendants under former Attorney General Merrick Garland.
