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Exclusive: Nightmare January 6 case delivers miracle outcome for Thomas Caldwell
The way Tom Caldwell figures it, his own government wanted him to die.
He said he was tortured during his intake at the Central Virginia Regional Jail after being arrested in a predawn January 2021 SWAT raid on Jan. 6 charges. He was stuck in solitary confinement and said he suffered regular beatings. Jail officials later said they could not substantiate his claims.
Only his strong Christian faith and his wife, Sharon, kept Caldwell going.
“I spent 53 days in there getting brutalized every stinking day. I don’t think it was their desire that I survived it,” said Caldwell, 70, of Berryville, Va. “I mean, think about it. If I had died in there, their version is the only version that ever would’ve come to light. And they could have avoided all these trials by going to everyone else and saying, ‘Blame it on the dead guy.’”
Caldwell’s perseverance led to what he considers a miracle: He was sentenced on Jan. 10 to time served and a $100 fine, more than two years after his trial concluded in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. With a single misdemeanor charge still on the docket, Judge Amit Mehta told Caldwell he had been punished enough and sent him home a free man.
'Of the hundreds of J6ers who are worthy of presidential pardons, Mr. Caldwell is arguably first among equals.'
“I always prayed almost from day one to touch the judge’s heart and help him to really truly be able to discern between the truth and the lies to see what the real situation is here and to do the right thing,” Sharon Caldwell told Blaze News.
Tom Caldwell said he was restless the night before his sentencing hearing.
“We weren’t sure which way it was going to go,” Tom Caldwell said. "We knew that we had truth on our side. But up until that time, the truth was not enough to set us free, not in a system which appears to make everybody guilty until they’re proved innocent.”
Caldwell started his Jan. 6 nightmare standing in his underwear on his front porch, lit up by the laser sights of the FBI SWAT team that raided his farm on Jan. 19, 2021. He was handcuffed, dragged across the lawn, and thrown on the hood of a government sedan. Caldwell said an agent drove his knee into the small of his back, where metal hardware from a U.S. Navy service injury held his spine in place.
Thomas Caldwell enters the U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., on September 28, 2022, for his trial on Jan. 6 charges.Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
He looked back and saw Sharon in her nightgown on the porch, arms outstretched, with FBI M4 carbines pointed at her.
He recalls thinking, “Abba, Father! Please don’t let them murder my wife!”
Agents brought Caldwell back into his home to grill him about Jan. 6. He was eventually told he was accused of trespassing, entering into the U.S. Capitol.
“Are you out of your mind? You come here and point guns in my wife’s face for trespassing?” Caldwell said in exasperation. The agent said, "You went into the Capitol."
That was the government’s first mistake of many in its prosecution of Caldwell, who despite not being an Oath Keeper was later accused of leading the Oath Keepers in a conspiracy to prevent the ceremonial counting of Electoral College votes by a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.
Defense attorney David Fischer said virtually nothing from the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Caldwell stood up across four years of prosecution.
'They knew we were entirely peaceful. Yet that’s not what they told the jury.'
“In January 2021, the government accused Tom Caldwell of being the mastermind behind a plot to forcibly overtake the U.S. Capitol via a D-Day-style boat landing from Virginia across the Potomac River,” Fischer told Blaze News.
“Fours year later, after a jury acquitted him of seditious conspiracy and all other counts, Mr. Caldwell received a punishment of a $100 fine for deleting one thread on Facebook,” said Fischer, who unsuccessfully asked Judge Mehta to acquit Caldwell on the one evidence-tampering charge.
‘Got it wrong’
Fischer saw a strong message in Mehta’s sentence that allowed his client to go free.
“When a progressive D.C. jury, through its verdict, and a widely respected Obama-appointed federal judge, through his ultralight sentence, say the government got it wrong, the government definitely got it wrong,” Fischer said. “Of the hundreds of J6ers who are worthy of presidential pardons, Mr. Caldwell is arguably first among equals.”
On Nov. 29, 2022, a jury found Caldwell not guilty of felony seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy to prevent members of Congress from discharging their duties.
He was found guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge eventually dropped after a landmark 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. So he was left facing a charge of tampering with documents for deleting a thread of Jan. 6 photos on Facebook.
Prosecutors sought a 14-year prison term for Caldwell in advance of his original sentencing date in May 2023. Even after it was clear that the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding would fall away, the DOJ sought a four-year prison sentence as Caldwell’s Jan. 10, 2025, hearing approached.
Thomas E. Caldwell and his wife, Sharon, join the massive crowd at the Peace Fountain in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.Photo courtesy of Sharon Caldwell
“From the very moment that they made me the top banana in their attack on American citizens, it was clear that they did no investigation upon me at all before arresting me,” Caldwell said. “If you look at the original arrest warrant, it was false predication. Everything was incorrect. And what they did in the succeeding months is they tried to dig up over the next 20-something months, something to prove their fallacy.”
Prosecutors made hay of Caldwell’s often-colorful language in private, encrypted message chats with Oath Keepers, some of whom stayed at his farm for a Washington, D.C., rally after the November 2020 presidential election.
'He organized an unprecedented threat to the District and to the electoral process.'
“I believe we will have to get violent to stop this,” Caldwell told Jessica Watkins in a text on Nov. 23, 2020, “especially the Antifa maggots who are sure to come out en masse even if we get the Prez for 4 more years. Stay sharp and we will meet again. You are my kind of person and we may have to fight next time.”
Prosecutors accused Caldwell of lying on the stand. They said he helped organize a “quick-reaction force” of Oath Keepers in Virginia who could swoop in with long guns on a moment’s notice to prevent Congress from recognizing Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. Caldwell was said to have come up with the idea to load weapons into duck skiffs and cross the Potomac River.
“He organized an unprecedented threat to the District and to the electoral process: an armed Quick Reaction Force staged outside of D.C., stocked with rifles, ammunition, and co-conspirators prepared to ferry those weapons to boots on the ground,” prosecutors wrote in May 2023.
‘Pure fantasy’
Fischer, writing in a May 2023 sentencing memo, said all of that “turned out to be pure fantasy.”
The Caldwells spent much of their Jan. 6 time at the Peace Fountain. They eventually walked up the steps to the Lower West Terrace for “about five minutes,” Sharon Caldwell said.
“Everything we do is entirely peaceful. It's all caught on video. It's all caught on their CCTV video,” Sharon Caldwell said. “So they knew neither of us did anything violent. They knew we were entirely peaceful. Yet that's not what they told the jury.”
Caldwell said because “we did not know which way it was going to go,” he and Sharon prayed constantly during the Jan. 10 sentencing hearing.
“While we’re listening to all this twaddle from the other table, we were praying, we’re just praying to the Lord and saying, ‘Lord, you know what the truth is. We believe in you. We have faith in you,’” Caldwell said. “And like Sharon says, ‘Please allow the judge to see and to have the courage in this politically energized environment to do the right thing.”
In happier times before the nightmare that became Jan. 6, Thomas and Sharon Caldwell enjoy a concert on the green.Photo courtesy of Sharon Caldwell
While the DOJ “spewed all kinds of bile,” attorney Fischer “kept it very straight and very direct, and he reminded the judge how many times the prosecution got it wrong,” Caldwell said. “There’s a three-letter word for that that’s more direct, but I won’t use it. But they got it wrong again and again and again. He simply reminded him of that, and he said, ‘Hey, Judge, come on. Enough.’”
Caldwell said the experience has strengthened their faith and made them closer in their marriage, even though he “didn’t make it easy” on her.
"Sharon [was] dealing with her own problems; she was foundational just like Jesus was,” Caldwell said. “And Dave was holding me up from the other side. And personally, I’m just speaking personally, I would not have been able to endure all of this, I probably would’ve died in jail, if not for Sharon, if not for Dave, and if not for Jesus Christ. And I will stand by that forever and a day.”
'That makes this an incredible blessing.'
Caldwell has a 100% service disability from a progressively deteriorating back injury caused by a mortar round while he was on a classified mission in the Philippines. He was an intelligence officer in the Navy. During the long Jan. 6 case, he had a total hip replacement and a spinal fusion.
Through all of that, support from strangers around the country in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, South Carolina, and many other locations kept the Caldwells going.
“They kept us afloat and they bolstered our resolve,” Tom Caldwell said. “Frankly, they are directly responsible for helping us hold on to the last possession that the Biden DOJ has not been able to steal from us yet. And that’s this tiny farm I grew up on.”
Even though the Caldwells had to sell their farm equipment and animals to finance his defense, and for a time they lost his Veterans Administration health benefits, Tom and Sharon Caldwell said they are not bitter and do not want vengeance.
“It might sound weird to some people, but given what we’ve suffered, Sharon and I are not interested in payback or any of that,” Caldwell said. “But if the deceit and the horrible actions of the DOJ and whoever is pulling the strings of them could be exposed, that would be a good thing.”
Caldwell said he is keenly aware of how rare it is for a judge to hand down a time-served sentence, something he said was confirmed by attorney Fischer.
“He said that he, in all of his more than two decades in the federal system, could only remember a small handful of situations where the judge would say, ‘Yes, time served.’ That makes this an incredible blessing.”
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