WASHINGTON – For the hundreds of January 6 prisoners pardoned by President Donald Trump – surveilled, hunted down and terrorized by the FBI and designated as insurrectionists and criminals under the Biden administration, incarcerated for years in pretrial detention alongside murderers and terrorists, sentenced to decades in prison by federal judges for crimes that would normally amount to misdemeanor offenses if anything – many are not going “silently into the night” after being released.
In fact, many pardoned political prisoners are now working tirelessly to seek justice and expose to the American people exactly how the U.S. government operated as a criminal organization, conspiring to entrap good Americans at the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
Upon his release from prison, Chris Quaglin, 39, who spent two of his four years in pretrial detention in solitary confinement, has nothing left.
His son was 2 months old on April 7, 2021, when Chris walked outside his New Jersey home to an FBI SWAT team deploying flashbang grenades and hauling him off to jail for what turned out to be four years.
If not for Trump’s pardon, he would still be serving a 12-year prison sentence.
As an electrician, Quaglin earned a good living. However, returning to the life he once knew after enduring hell on earth is not an option for him.
For the foreseeable future, Quaglin is on a mission to raise awareness about what goes on behind the cinderblock walls of correctional facilities nationwide and exposing how “the government unprecedentedly entrapped Americans on January 6” – and to ensure that it “never happens again.”
Within days of walking out of the Wisconsin prison FCI Oxford as a free man, and with just a truck and an American flag to his name, Quaglin joined forces with Veterans for Trump and the Stop Hate Awareness Program, an organization that led forensic investigations of the Capitol riot to launch the J6 Freedom Tour.
“I am so hell-bent on prison reform. I can’t just go back to work and be an electrician,” Quaglin told WorldNetDaily in an exclusive interview. “This has been going on for 50 years. January 6 just exposed it. J6ers have a voice that other inmates don’t have. This is not just a January 6 problem.”
The “persecution for wrongthink” has taken a mental and physical toll on him, the pardoned Quaglin explained.
“I absolutely have PTSD,” he confided. “There’s always something hanging over you. I feel nervous. I feel upset. I am upset at the government. I’m upset at what they did to me for four years,” he told WND. “I have night terrors, nightmares. I don’t sleep anymore. I maybe get four or five hours of sleep. That’s it. I can forget about getting eight hours. And there’s a lot of demons running around my head.”
“This sort of government overreach – this persecution of Americans,” he said, “can never be done again. We are demanding prison reform because what they’re doing in these prisons is absolutely disgusting, and it’s un-American.”
“People don’t understand that the Capitol building was stormed twice after January 6 by all the pro-Hamas protesters. They all got $50 fines. As a first-time offender, I got 12 years in prison. It’s absolutely insane. The goal of this tour is to usher in prison reform across the country, actually doing something about it, and showcase to the world how J6 was the biggest setup in American history.”
Quaglin kicked off the tour with a trip to Northern Neck Regional Jail, the Warsaw, Virginia, correctional facility notorious for beating prisoners unconscious, where he almost starved to death.
In a speech to the NNJR board, Quaglin recounted his harrowing experience at the jail – being denied soap, water and proper medical care, getting punished for lawyer calls and being locked down in solitary confinement 24/7 for nearly the entire year he was incarcerated there.
“From rats and mice to roaches and food, to guards beating on inmates, to a superintendent and a captain who think they make up their own rules and there are no such things as prisoner rights or human rights,” he told the board Feb. 14, “I have been treated like a guinea pig by medical personnel who don’t know what they’re doing.”
WATCH Chris Quaglin’s presentation to the Northern Neck Regional Jail board.
By the time Quaglin was transferred from NNRJ to the Washington, D.C. Central Detention Facility, widely referred to in recent years as the “D.C. gulag,” he was skin and bones and hadn’t seen sunlight or eaten a real meal for months.
Days following his speech at NNRJ, a bill mandating that sheriffs investigate abuse among correctional officers in Virginia and hold the government employees accountable for subjecting inmates to torture, was expedited by the state lawmakers to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk.
Under §53.1-116.2:1 of HB 2105, sheriffs and jail superintendents must “designate local law-enforcement agency to investigate acts of violence occurring within local correctional facilities.”
“The legislation is awaiting signature from the governor as we speak. HB 2105 states, in a nutshell, if there’s any abuses that happen inside of the jail, whether it’s inmate-on-inmate or staff-on-inmate, the sheriffs must investigate,” Quaglin said. “After I gave that speech, the bill immediately got put in front of the House and Senate of Virginia on hyper drive.”
SUPPORT PARDONED J6 PRISONER CHRIS QUAGLIN AND THE J6 FREEDOM TOUR HERE.
Shockingly, according to Quaglin, multiple times daily inmates are nearly beaten to death by guards at Northern Neck.
“It happens all the time and falls under the radar. Countless times, I’ve seen guards beat inmates after they were handcuffed,” he said. “I’ve seen someone who was handcuffed and shackled kicked in the back. He fell forward, bit a metal window ledge. Every single one of his teeth was shattered.
“The guards specifically targeted me because I documented every illegal thing they did by filing grievances. I have 4,000 pages of daily notes that explain everything that happened over a four-year period. The worst part was not eating for weeks at a time. I have Celiac disease; I need a special diet. At one point, while I was incarcerated in that jail, we had about 300 people call up the sheriff’s office saying, ‘This guy is going to die in Northern Neck.’ The sheriffs turned around and said, ‘This isn’t our jurisdiction.’
“This bill makes it their jurisdiction and holds the prison responsible. Now, a guard who beats inmates can get arrested themselves. The point of this is to hold these guards responsible, and not just give them free rein.”
Quaglin intends to make 150 stops on the Freedom Tour over the next six months to educate the public about what January 6ers were subjected to and pressure lawmakers to institute prison reform, as he did in Northern Neck, Va.
“We are going to be going cross country because the prison system must change in America. We are better than what we do here in this country in the prison system. We have more incarcerations than anywhere else in the world. We have to save our country,” he said. “We have meetings with the local Republican clubs and next we are steamrolling into college campuses.”
Quaglin was among protesters who demonstrated on the restricted grounds on the Capitol during the first breach on Jan. 6, 2021, when police began indiscriminately shooting demonstrators in the face with rubber bullets and throwing flashbang grenades into the crowd.
J6…
Joshua Black…Was Hit in the Face with a Rubber Bullet… pic.twitter.com/6NdOdo6C4H— 777DEAN777 (@77HERCULES77) February 23, 2023
After Joshua Black was struck in the cheek with a munition fired by a cop, Quaglin began yelling at police, demanding they cease fire.
As Quaglin confronted the cops for using excessive force against the moderately peaceful crowd, Landon Copeland, a known member of Antifa, is seen in footage repeatedly shoving Quaglin into the police line.
Quaglin was convicted of 12 felonies and two misdemeanors related to his actions at the Capitol riot.
The battle for his freedom has destroyed his family and his life.
“I walked outside to my work truck, and I heard a flash bang go off behind me. Three FBI agents ran up my sidewalk. A fourth FBI agent was beelining from across the street with a firearm pointed at my head. His finger was on the trigger, and if he had pulled it, it would have been game over. That was the last time I saw my wife and son.
“Then I laid on the ground in the middle of the street. They had barricaded my whole block with multiple vehicles, and it was absolutely insane. I mean, I’m an electrician from New Jersey with no criminal record.
“They told me they were outside my house since midnight the day before. I told them, they could have just knocked on my door and said, ‘Hey, you got to come with me.”
Hours after he was arrested, FBI Special Agent Benjamin Fulps made clear to Quaglin during interrogation that the Justice Department was willing to mitigate his prison sentence and potentially drop all of the charges if he agreed to cooperate and corroborate the government’s conspiracy narratives about the riot.
WATCH:
“You’re not the only person [we’re] arresting today. We are arresting more people, Thursday, Friday, over the weekend, you’re like number 350,” agent Fulp told him. “A lot of those people are talking and giving us information, which will be used to arrest other people. I tell you that so that you know that this is kind of a time-sensitive proposal that I’m offering you right now.
“So, I’m here to kind of throw you that raft right now to help you from drowning … because I don’t want you to go away for 40 years and not see your [child] grow up and, of course, your wife.”
Quaglin refused to cooperate.
“Eventually my son is going to be old enough to hear about all of this. I wasn’t going to teach my son that it’s OK to lie if you get in trouble. I wouldn’t take another man away from his family.”
A day before his trial began, Quaglin received divorce papers from his wife. She has since issued a restraining order against him. After doling out approximately $200,000 in attorneys for his criminal case, he must now muster up thousands of dollars more to cover impending legal fees in a custody battle.
“Again, I lost everything. So, I don’t have a house. I don’t have a family right now. I’m going through custody battles. I have to start completely over at 39 years old.”
The most important thing to Chris Quaglin right now is getting his story out. “We can do some good,” he told WND. “Democrats have been talking about fixing the prison system for decades. It’s time we actually do something about it. Just wait, the j6ers’ arrest will be the best thing to happen for jail reform in the past 50 years.”
SUPPORT PARDONED J6 PRISONER CHRIS QUAGLIN AND THE J6 FREEDOM TOUR HERE.