President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons for Jan. 6 defendants continue to generate litigation over how broadly they apply. The latest example comes from alleged Jan. 6 pipe bomb planter Brian Cole, who said the clemency “unequivocally applies” to him.
But there’s a simple reason for the courts to find that it doesn’t.
To understand why, let’s first look at the Jan. 20, 2025, proclamation’s text, which grants relief to three categories of people. First, it commutes sentences to time served for a list of people named in the order (Cole isn’t one of them). Second, it pardons “all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” And third, it directs the attorney general to drop “all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
So, before getting to the allegations against Cole, who has maintained his innocence, he faces a threshold issue: He doesn’t fit into any of those categories. He was charged in December 2025, long after Trump’s January order, and he hasn’t been convicted. Therefore, he was neither charged nor convicted at the time that Trump granted the pardon.
The president had the power to issue preemptive pardons for people who hadn’t been charged at that point. But again, the text of his order plainly applies to people who had already been convicted or charged. Cole was neither.
Nonetheless, he argued in a motion to dismiss this week that his prosecution, which Trump’s Justice Department brought after Trump issued the sweeping clemency, “is exactly the kind of case” that the Jan. 6 pardon was made for.
Quoting part of the pardon’s text, he said there’s “no serious dispute that the government itself, and the political branches more broadly, have consistently treated the alleged conduct here as part of the ‘events . . . at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.’”
Cole cited several data points to back his position, including the DOJ’s claims that he drove to Washington “to attend a protest concerning the outcome of the 2020 election” to support Trump, and that he chose to plant “bombmaking components … at the headquarters of the nation’s two major political parties in downtown Washington, D.C., on the eve of the January 6 certification of the electoral vote.”
To be sure, had Cole been charged or convicted by the time Trump issued his proclamation, it wouldn’t have been ridiculous to argue that it covered him, even if that argument were not as airtight as his dismissal motion suggested.
But in any event, the timing is important enough that courts could rule against him on that threshold matter alone — that is, without deciding whether his alleged conduct qualifies as related enough to Jan. 6. Courts like not having to decide things they don’t have to when they don’t want to.
And though the government’s position on the pardon’s scope doesn’t dictate how the courts decide that scope, that the Trump DOJ brought this case shows that it doesn’t think Cole qualifies.
Of course, if the courts reject Cole’s motion to dismiss, Trump will be free to issue him a fresh pardon if he wants to. In fact, the president doesn’t have to wait for the courts to weigh in. He could do it today.
