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About 1,500 people have been charged for their actions on January 6. Some brought weapons to the Capitol. Some committed acts of violence that were caught on camera. Some belonged to militias. And then there is a different category of defendant: someone with no criminal record who showed up on that day and went overboard and committed a crime.
The families of January 6 defendants have long argued that the punishments their loved ones received were too severe. (The Supreme Court took up one of their arguments and agreed.) In this episode, we contemplate that enduring complaint in an uncomfortably personal way. Soon after we discovered that our new neighbor was Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, Lauren served as a juror on a January 6 case and emerged queasy about the outcome. We visit the defendant’s wife and talk to the judge in the case.
This is the fourth episode of We Live Here Now, a six-part series about what happened when we found out that our new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: What do you mean you feel bad for him?
Lauren Ober: Oh, I feel so bad. I feel so bad because he believed so many lies to get him to this point. Like, he was suckered in. So he’s going to go to jail for believing Donald Trump and for believing all of the rhetoric. And all of those people who spewed that—all the official people who spewed that—there’s nobody official who’s losing.
Rosin: Now that hundreds of people have been through the courts for crimes related to January 6, we know a lot more details about who they were. Some were Oath Keepers who showed up prepared for battle. Some carried guns or knives and beat up cops with flagpoles.
But there was also another group of just guys—young, curious normies. Or dads who maybe got a little too deep in the MAGA universe and then got a little too wild in the moment—criminal for the day.
We know about them, too, because a lot of them had their own YouTube channels or podcasts or whatever. Like this guy, who made this podcast recording with his friend on January 8, right after he flew home. He’s the guy Lauren feels bad for, the guy at the center of this episode. His name is Taylor Johnatakis.
Taylor Johnatakis: So this is the girl who was murdered. This is Ashli.
Ashli Babbitt: —walking to the Capitol in a mob. There’s an estimated 3 million people—
Johnatakis: We’re walking. I was here in this—I was here in this crowd.
Babbitt: Despite what the media tells you, boots on ground definitely say something different. There is a sea of nothing but red, white, and blue.
Rosin: The podcast host then shows his friend the video that Ashli Babbitt recorded on her phone and posted on Facebook of her walking towards the Capitol with a Trump flag wrapped around her waist.
Johnatakis: That was Ashli. That’s Ashli who got killed.
Guest: Wow. I had no—I had never seen the face to the name.
Johnatakis: Okay. That’s—what?!
Guest: I’m serious.
Johnatakis: You don’t know her?
Guest: No. I’m serious. There’s so much that you just can’t see from the outside.
Johnatakis: Oh my gosh.
Guest: It may have been played on the news, but I have not seen it. There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t seen.
Johnatakis: (Gasps.) I can’t believe it.
Guest: Do we need to take a break?
Johnatakis: I can’t believe you don’t know her name. Dude. She died for us, man. (Voice breaks.)
Guest: Yeah. I don’t—that’s the first time I’ve seen her.
Johnatakis: I didn’t realize you didn’t know her name. (Cries.) I’m sorry.
Rosin: The podcast host, the guy who is losing it, is not a right-wing media star or an influencer. He’d be lucky if a hundred people listened to his podcast. But someone important did listen: the FBI.
So now we are going to take a detour into the more surreal parts of the January 6 aftermath, where a goofy dad of five who had never been accused of a crime in his life gets caught up in an FBI roundup. And we’re doing that because D.C. citizen Lauren Ober was one of the people who had to decide his fate.
[Music]
Ober: I’m D.C. citizen Lauren Ober.
Rosin: And I’m Hanna Rosin. And from The Atlantic, this is We Live Here Now.
Ober: A couple months before I met Micki, I got a notice in the mail. It was a summons for jury duty for the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, Criminal Division. And because I am No. 1 Best Citizen, I didn’t throw the summons in the garbage. I opened it.
Rosin: On the day she was supposed to show up, which happened to be right after we learned who our neighbors were, Lauren said something offhand to me.
Ober: “I bet it’s a January 6 case.”
Rosin: We both laughed at this idea. Like, how wild would it be—just weeks after learning that some of your neighbors were very prominent Justice for J6ers—to get onto a January 6 jury? It would just be too weird.
Ober: Now, of course you know where this is going. I walked into Courtroom 15 and sat down with other potential jurors, and then the judge told us the trial we were being considered for was a January 6 case, which maybe shouldn’t have been surprising.
[Music]
Ober: January 6 is the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. And most of these cases have been adjudicated in D.C. So I guess I had a pretty high chance of ending up on a January 6 jury. Fun fact: You can see a lovely tableau of the U.S. Capitol from the building. I mean, how many courthouses have a view of the crime scene?
The defendant, Taylor Johnatakis, was charged with three felonies: obstruction of an official proceeding; civil disorder’ and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers—also, a handful of misdemeanors. In my jury notebook, I wrote: “Looks like a regular guy. Short brown hair, a brown beard, and rectangular glasses.” One thing that stood out was how much Johnatakis smiled and made eye contact with the jury. It seemed like he was—I don’t know—happy to be there or something. It was creepy.
Johnatakis: Trump speech is over. It was awesome.
Ober: The prosecutor told us in her opening statement that we’d be seeing a lot of video evidence from January 6 because a lot of these guys made videos and recordings of themselves, like the video podcast that you heard earlier, where the host cries about Ashli. That was Johnatakis. He made and posted a lot of videos the prosecution played us at trial, like this:
Johnatakis: We’re walking over to the Capitol right now, and—I don’t know—maybe we’ll break down the doors.
Ober: And this—
Johnatakis: I was on the front line. I was on the gate. I organized a push up to the Capitol because I felt like that is exactly what we needed.
Ober: And also this—
Johnatakis: We had a right to be there. We were supposed to be there. I was there, okay?
Ober: As the case continued, over about three days, there was more and more video evidence. Even in the horde of people swarming the Capitol, Johnatakis was easy to pick out. He was wearing a red MAGA hat and had a megaphone strapped to his back, so the jury could follow his movements as he made his way closer and closer to the doors of the Capitol.
As Johnatakis climbed the many sets of stairs that led to the various entrances of the Capitol, he shouted into his megaphone to no one in particular for, like, a solid 10 minutes about oligarchs and censorship and how Mike Pence apparently abused children.
Johnatakis: I never, never, never considered the fact that our vice president is a child molester!
I never considered the fact that our vice president is in business with the Chinese Communist Party.
Ober: When Johnatakis reached the top of the stairs, he was blocked from going any further by a bunch of metal barricades and lines of cops. This is the moment where the prosecution offered evidence that the defendant was not just one of the guys milling around but actually a riot leader, because he was yelling into his megaphone, directing people what to do.
Johnatakis: Don’t throw any shit up here. Don’t throw any shit up here. They don’t need that. They don’t need that. And I don’t need to push it back when we come to that. Push it out of here. We’re just using our bodies—
Ober: Although no one seemed to be listening to a word he was saying, until he said this.
Johnatakis: One, two, three—go! One foot!
[Cheers and clanging]
Ober: This is where the action started. Johnatakis motions to the people around him to put their hands on the barricade. When they do, he shouts, One, two, three, and starts pushing the barricade into the cops. The cops on the barricade push back, while another line of cops behind them shoots pepper spray at the rioters and tries to hit them with nightsticks. The defendant retreats, and the cops restore their line. The whole thing lasts about a minute.
When the jury catches up with Johnatakis again, it’s in a video he made as he’s walking away from the Capitol.
Johnatakis: They’re that afraid of us. They’re that afraid of us. They had to usher the congressmen and senators out of the House in shame with black bags. I got gassed. I got hit pretty dang hard a couple times with a nightstick. It’s not funny. It hurt. We’re done. I’m walking away from the Capitol. I’ve shed some tears. I’m very sad about what I have watched firsthand unfold.
Ober: Now, the prosecution was selling a pretty good story here. In tape after tape, Johnatakis declares, It’s me. I’m here. I’m ready to go. He sounds pretty unhinged, and he uses his megaphone to get a bunch of people to go after the cops.
Then it was the defense’s turn, which in this case meant the defendant himself. Despite the judge’s warning against it, Johnatakis decided to represent himself, and the result was bizarre.
After the witnesses testified, Johnatakis apologized to them and asked them questions like, Is there anything I can do to make amends for my actions on that day? At some point, he told the jury, I’m sorry for my sins, and I repent. He did argue that a lot of what he’d said was, quote, “hyperbolic rhetoric”—that he had a podcast, and he sometimes used overblown language. That was, at least, a relevant argument. But the videos had shown Johnatakis doing more than just talking.
Then both sides made their closing statements. One sounded like a professional court argument, and the other lectured the judge about a legal term and then recited scripture. Then the judge sent us, the members of the jury, off to deliberate.
While we deliberated, this is the thing I kept coming back to: Compared to other J6ers I’d read about, this guy wasn’t a member of a militia. He didn’t carry a weapon or beat up a cop. On the other hand, it was pretty clear that Johnatakis had done what he was accused of. We weren’t judging his actions in comparison to others; we were judging based on what we saw on video and witness testimony.
Everyone on the jury took it seriously, and the verdict was unanimous: guilty. The clerk read the verdict out loud, and I kept my head down so I wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact with the defendant.
A couple of days after the trial, Hanna and I left for a Thanksgiving vacation. I should have been having fun, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Taylor Johnatakis. While we were enjoying our trip, he was sitting in a cell at the D.C. jail, where he would spend the next five months before learning his fate.
It didn’t feel like some miscarriage of justice, but I didn’t feel great about it. Almost a year later, I still don’t.
Rosin: We explore why that is, after the break.
[Break]
Rosin: In the days after Lauren’s jury duty, I noticed she had an uncharacteristic heaviness about her, so we sat down and talked about it.
Rosin: So did anybody else feel sorry for him?
Ober: I mean, I would say that, like, half the people in the room felt bad for him.
Rosin: Why? The feeling bad is—I mean, I almost get it. I don’t 100 percent get it, because it sounds like, you know, the thing you described him doing at the top of the steps with those barriers is edging on a kind of violence. There are victims, who are those cops—
Ober: It’s not edging on a kind of violence. It actually is an act of physical violence, technically, according to the law. That is what we were asked to determine, and the government proved that.
Rosin: And there were people there—police officers, you know, they’re people. Some of them were traumatized. So the violence didn’t just happen against property. You guys fulfilled your duty. He is guilty. And yet something feels not right to you about the outcome.
Ober: Because he seems like a guy who was lost. His whole argument was hyperbolic rhetoric. And he was suggesting that he got caught up in the spirit of, like—for the Trump people, they felt like they were part of something: They’re a part of a thing that is so much bigger than themselves. They are a part of a movement. They’re a part of history. They matter, right? They matter. And—
Rosin: But all crimes and genocides are caused by people who have a hole in their life, and then they want to be part of a thing, and so they get swept up in a thing and then—
Ober: No. That’s not true. That’s not true at all, because most crimes—most violent crimes—are crimes of passion or crimes of opportunity.
Rosin: All mass crimes—all mass, cultural crimes are generally someone in power preying on people who want to matter and belong.
Ober: Yes, and I feel bad about that. That is sad to me. That is sad that all of these people who—they did that to themselves. I understand that. I was on a jury, and I found him guilty. I didn’t say he didn’t do this.
But this guy is just getting used. He has a nice family, beautiful children. He has a nice wife. He goes to, you know, his church. Like, he has a nice, respectable job. He made his own business. Like, that’s a fine life. That’s a fine life, but in some way, he was led to believe that’s not good enough. You have to fight for this thing. You have to save America because America’s going down the tubes, even though he had probably a really nice life. I don’t know what his life was like, but from all that I can tell, it was, like, nice people.
Rosin: Okay, a last thing: Is there anything else that you feel you really want to know? Anything you still have a kind of burning flame of curiosity about?
Ober: Yeah. I mean, I would love to understand: What is your family gonna do now? And, you know, Now you’re forever, like, a January 6er. And you’re branded with that now. Maybe that’s a proud brand to have. I don’t know. I am really curious about where you go from here.
[Music]
Rosin: Lauren, of course, is not trying to say that he shouldn’t be punished at all. She voted to convict, after all. So what is her queasy feeling? Is it a “zoom in, zoom out” thing, like a lot of us would feel bad for a defendant if we were on their jury and got to know them better? Or are the January 6 prosecutions just a really unusual set of circumstances that we don’t have a box for yet?
What I took away was: There is something about the ratio of crime to punishment that wasn’t sitting well with Lauren. Of course, we now know she wasn’t the only one. The Supreme Court justices ruled seven months later that some of the January 6 defendants had been improperly charged with a felony of “obstructing an official proceeding.” Both Johnatakis and Nicole Reffitt’s husband, Guy, were charged with that felony. The government is reviewing their cases, along with the cases of the hundreds of defendants who were impacted by the ruling.
At the vigil, by the way, Micki and company celebrated that Supreme Court ruling with champagne and cake.
The defendant in Lauren’s case, Taylor Johnatakis, went straight to the D.C. jail. And then five months later, he appeared at his sentencing hearing. It seemed weird for Lauren Ober, Juror No. 3, to go, so I went instead.
The defendant’s wife, Marie, sat in the row in front of me, surrounded by three of her five children. She looked tiny. People can get dwarfed by official proceedings. Plus, it had been raining hard that morning, so everyone seemed extra wilted. Micki sat a few rows behind, barely taking her eyes off Marie and the kids.
After the prosecution and the defense made their cases, it was the judge’s turn to announce the sentence. But before doing that, he made an unusually long speech. His name is Judge Royce Lamberth. He’s a Reagan appointee who’s handled dozens of J6 cases. He described this defendant as always courteous and respectful. He said the defendant was not an “inherently bad person.”
He mentioned that he’d gotten 20 letters from family members about Johnatakis’s good character and that he’d read all of them. Some sample compliments from those letters, quote: “He is faithful to his wife and children. He’s faithful to God. He loves his brothers and sisters. We love him more than words can express.” And: “Never had a legal issue, outside a speeding ticket.”
The judge said he’d even called one of the family members who’d written an especially good letter, which is wild. Can you imagine getting a phone call from a judge in D.C., out of the blue, who says, Hey, I’m about to send your relative to prison. I just wanted to talk to you about it? It was like this judge had a bit of that same queasy feeling that Lauren had had, because he went to such great lengths to explain his reasoning.
And then the sentence. Counts one and two: 60 months. The defendant’s wife put her arm over her youngest son’s shoulder. Count three: 12 months. The son, who was just old enough to do math, started to cry. Plus 15 more months. Now Marie started to cry. 87 months total—more than seven years. That little son of theirs might be taller than his dad the next time they were home together.
Okay, remember Lauren’s questions to me?
Ober: What is your family gonna do now? And, you know, Now you’re forever, like, a January 6er. And you’re branded with that now. Maybe that’s a proud brand to have. I don’t know.
Rosin: Seeing Marie and her family in court made me want to know too.
[Music]
Rosin: Hi. Should I take my shoes off?
Marie Johnatakis: Come in.
Rosin: A couple of months after the sentencing, I visited Marie Johnatakis, the defendant’s wife—the one who’d cried in the courtroom—at their family home in Washington State. When I was planning the trip, my editor reminded me of the usual travel-danger precautions: Be careful. Make sure someone always knows where you are, which, when I got there, was pretty funny.
The vibe in this house was so powerfully “mom’s in charge.” Like, the thing of note was how all the toys and kid things were so neatly put away and organized in baskets.
Rosin: Why is it so neat? You have five children.
Marie Johnatakis: Yes. So these are our things, but there’s a lot—
Rosin: This house, an oversized actual log cabin set back on a woodsy road, where they had raised and homeschooled those five children, felt so far away from January 6 and jail and D.C. courtrooms that it made me want to know what her reality was on the day that her husband was standing in front of the Capitol with that bullhorn.
Rosin: Did you guys watch it on TV? Like, did the kids know what was going on?
Marie Johnatakis: We did not watch it on TV. We were doing other stuff. I’m trying to even remember the weather for that day, but probably would have been kids playing Legos, big kids probably hanging out with other big kids.
Rosin: And what are you doing?
Marie Johnatakis: I’m just taking care of all the kids, cooking dinner, cooking lunch. (Laughs.)
Rosin: The feminist thought did occur to me at this moment that one way to see some of these J6 cases is that the men were out enacting their 1776 fantasy while the women were home putting away the Legos. And there was plenty of evidence of that in this case. Remember how Lauren and I went away for Thanksgiving right after the trial?
Well, that meant that Taylor, the husband and father, was in D.C. at his trial just before Thanksgiving. And his wife, Marie, was home with their five kids, planning the holiday dinner, which she just assumed her husband would be home for—because she somehow thought that even if he did get convicted, he would be able to wait for his sentencing at home.
Marie Johnatakis: It was really surprising that they took him into custody then. And I just remember thinking, like, He’s not a danger. He’s been out this whole time. Can you please just let us? You know, we just need a little more help. [Cries.]
But anyways, so when he didn’t fly back home, it was one of those things that it’s like, Okay. It’s me.
Rosin: And then to cap it off, on the morning of Christmas Eve, the family walked downstairs to discover that their dog had died. He’d stopped eating when dad left.
Rosin: Oh, come on. I mean, My dog died on Christmas Eve is, like—
Marie Johnatakis: It’s the worst country song you’ve ever heard. The worst one. [Laughs.] My husband’s in jail, and my dog is dead.
Rosin: And it’s Christmas Eve—
Marie Johnatakis: And it’s Christmas Eve.
Rosin: Yeah.
Marie Johnatakis: Oh. [Sighs.] So yeah—it is pretty pitiful. [Laughs.]
Rosin: Yeah. That’s almost so bad that you have to laugh.
Marie Johnatakis: You have to laugh. You have to laugh.
Rosin: Yeah. Exactly.
Rosin: So here she was: no husband, no dog, no steady paycheck, and not enough savings, which likely meant they would have to sell this beautiful house. That’s why the toys were extra neatly arranged when we came over—they were staging the house for potential buyers.
Taylor didn’t explicitly choose his ideals over his family, but that was kind of the end result. Like, he could have pled guilty, which would have probably cut his sentence in half. Or he could have gotten a lawyer, instead of representing himself. But he took none of those roads, and now she had seven years of: Okay. It’s just me.
Rosin: Was there a moment where you were ever mad at him?
Marie Johnatakis: I don’t think so. I think that, you know, I’ve known Taylor for a really long time, because we’ve been married 19 years. And he has a really, really good heart. And he’s motivated by things that I think are noble.
And so I know this is going to be kind of hard to understand, but if you can imagine, like, a place where, let’s say, you were really convinced that, you know, the election was—like, there were problems with it, and maybe it was enough to stand up for it. And I don’t know if this is skewed as far as, like, my idea on this, but there’s a lot of times that people stood up for things, and it cost them dearly. And while it almost sounds bombastic to think that this could be something like that—like, he said enough times, I wish I hadn’t have gone.
But some of me thinks, like—I mean, who does stand up for it? Who does say, Hey. There’s a problem here? And at some point, there are casualties. I don’t know, all the woulda, shoulda, couldas. I’m like, I wish they would have—because he had a bullhorn, I’m like, Tell the guy in the bullhorn to shut up. [Laughs.] He would have listened.
[Music]
Rosin: And this was the beautiful, terrible exchange that brought me to human empathy and then deposited me at a dead end—because the couple had doubled down on their doubts about the election watching Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules, a garbage film full of conspiracies and lies. And that had prompted them to think everything involving the government was rigged, including his trial, which is why he went about it in the weird, self-defeating way he did.
And yet she had explained her position to me with such gentleness and humility—with humor, for God’s sake—even leaving room for my doubts, that I had nowhere left to go. I totally understood her position. And also, I totally didn’t.
I did have one more thing to say, though.
Rosin: Okay. Here is my moment to tell you a difficult thing.
Marie Johnatakis: Okay.
Rosin: Okay. The reason I know about Taylor’s case is because my partner, also my partner on this project, was on the jury.
Marie Johnatakis: Okay.
Rosin: Questions?
Marie Johnatakis: Question? I don’t think so. No. I don’t think so.
Rosin: You sure?
Marie Johnatakis: Yeah. What questions should I ask, Hanna?
Rosin: I wouldn’t want to—I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to meet someone who was close, even if it’s a step removed, to someone who helped put my husband in the position or who participated in that in every way. I think that could be a hard thing to hear.
Marie Johnatakis: Yeah. No. You know, we went to the sentencing, and I watched the judge up there, you know, playing his role and the prosecution doing their role. And it just—I don’t know. I just felt a lot of compassion toward them all, because everybody is playing the part that they have been asked to play, including your partner. And I think that we all just do our best.
Rosin: Before I left, she told me if I had any guilt about it, I should let it go. A couple of weeks after our visit, she wrote about our conversation on her blog: “I remember praying during the trial that someone on the jury would not convict … just one person. I prayed so hard for that. She,” and she means Lauren here, “could have been that one. And yet—I still can’t find it in my heart to be angry—it’s just not there.”
[Music]
Rosin: The J6 judges have found themselves in a tough spot. Lamberth, the judge in Johnatakis’s case, is a Republican appointee, remember. Still, he and his colleagues have taken heat from Republicans.
Since the J6 cases have been going through the courts, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, the House Republican Conference chair, and Republican Congressman Jim Jordan from Ohio have repeatedly filed complaints against the D.C. circuit for “corruption” and “bias.”
[Music]
Rosin: And then, just before Johnatakis’s sentencing hearing, Stefanik took it a little further. She, too, started referring to the January 6 prisoners, many of whom had been sentenced by Lamberth and his colleagues, as “hostages.” Here’s what she said.
Elise Stefanik: I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages. I have concerns. We have a role in Congress of oversight over our treatments of prisoners. And I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump. But we’re seeing it against conservatives. We’re seeing it against Catholics.”
Rosin: I have no proof of this, but maybe that’s what Lamberth had in mind when he was writing that letter he read at the sentencing hearing that he sent to Johnatakis’s family.
He wrote, “Political violence rots republics. Therefore, January 6 must not become a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions. This is not normal.”
Ober: In our next episode: what happened inside the D.C. jail’s “Patriot Pod.” And our tour guide: a young troll or maybe a true radical.
Brandon Fellows: He said, Hey. I’m the guy that they accused of killing Officer Sicknick. I’m like, No way!
Ober: We Live Here Now is a production of The Atlantic. The show was reported, written, and executive produced by me, Lauren Ober, and Hanna Rosin. Our managing producer is Rider Alsop. Our senior producer is Ethan Brooks. Original scoring, sound design, and mix engineering by Brendan Baker.
This series was edited by Scott Stossel and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Art direction by Colin Hunter. Project management by Nancy DeVille.
The Atlantic’s executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s editor in chief.