“So I grabbed up my American flag and said let’s take the damn capitol… I said lets storm the place and hang the traitors.”
Meet MAGAt and J6 insurrectionist Thomas Caldwell, a retired Navy intelligence officer and former FBI section chief who threw away a top-secret security clearance to play coordinator for a far-right extremist militia group. Despite his defense team’s desperate attempts to portray him as an elderly, infirm bystander who never actually set foot inside the U.S. Capitol building, federal prosecutors exposed him as an enthusiastic participant in the chaos leading up to the January 6 insurrection.
Caldwell tightly aligned himself with Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, embedded in encrypted chats where he actively plotted to overturn the 2020 election results. His primary contribution to the assault on democracy was coordinating a “Quick Reaction Force” (QRF). In text messages retrieved by federal investigators, Caldwell actively searched for someone with a boat to ferry a stockpile of heavy weapons across the Potomac River from a Virginia hotel directly into the hands of waiting extremists in Washington, D.C..
When his violent rhetoric caught up with him, Caldwell was arrested by federal agents at his Virginia home on January 19, 2021. He was slapped with severe federal charges, including seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and tampering with documents. Facing damning evidence on the witness stand, Caldwell tried to laugh off his explicit texts about “mowing down masses” of citizens and executing traitors as mere “creative writing,” screenplays, or casual references to the video game Call of Duty.
The jury didn’t buy the fiction, convicting him of obstruction of justice for tampering with evidence by deleting his post-riot messages. While he was ultimately acquitted of the seditious conspiracy charge, a federal judge sentenced him to time served for his role, explicitly noting that his failure to distance himself from the militia group is exactly what landed him in a federal courtroom. He ultimately avoided real prison time through a sweeping presidential commutation and a subsequent full pardon.
