The Jan. 6 riot included Marines. The military is wrestling with the consequences

For more reporting about Josh Abate and extremism in the military, listen to the new series ‘A Good Guy’ from NPR’s Embedded podcast.

“Have you ever tried to overthrow the U.S. government?”

If you’re trying to get top secret security clearance for a government job, that’s a standard question for the required polygraph exam. And the answer, obviously, should be no.

But Josh Abate couldn’t say no if he wanted to pass the test.

“It depends,” he said, when he took the exam in early 2022 for an internship.

The polygrapher paused and asked him to elaborate.

“Well, on January 6th, I went into the Capitol building.”

That was the first time Abate, a 24-year-old sergeant in the Marines, had talked openly about what he did that day.

At that point, he was doing well in the Marines. He made sergeant early, got a Navy commendation medal and was selected for this coveted internship with the National Security Agency.

“If you get the internship, you can basically ride that out until retirement if you wanted to,” he said. “It exponentially grows your career.”

Abate has always wanted to be a Marine. “There’s nothing else I wanted to do. There was no plan B,” he said. “It was Marine Corps.”

Abate is tall and muscular, with short brown hair and a bit of a baby face. One of his forearms is covered in a large and colorful tattoo depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It’s from Revelations 6, he says.

He grew up in rural Virginia, about 30 miles west of Washington, D.C., and met his wife, Ashley, when they were both in high school taking part in Junior ROTC. Abate is the son of a former Marine who became a cop. He tells us his dad is a Republican and his mom, a nurse, is a Democrat. Abate recalls that they would often argue about politics.

But for Josh and Ashley, there was one politician for them: Donald Trump.

Ashley is blond and petite, and the day NPR interviewed her, she held their infant daughter as she spoke to us.

She called Trump a moral man and said they share the same values.

“You know, I come from a household where religion, manners, work ethic, that kind of thing, is very important,” she said.

And Josh? He said he likes the fact that Trump is supportive of a strong military.

Josh said he gets most of his news from Fox and conservative websites. When asked, he said he hasn’t seen headlines like when Trump called fallen soldiers “losers” and questioned John Kelly, his former chief of staff, saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” at a 2017 Memorial Day event in Arlington National Cemetery, where Kelly’s Marine son, Robert Kelly, is buried. He was killed in Afghanistan in 2010.

A text invite

In the months before Jan. 6, 2021, Abate was at Marine Base Quantico, about an hour south of Washington. Fox News was playing on several base TVs most of the time. The pandemic was raging. Tens of thousands of Americans had died from COVID-19 at that point and most public spaces like bars and restaurants had been shut down. Abate and his fellow Marines were stuck in the barracks, day after day, staring at screens. The Marines even canceled a training trip to Norway.

Abate found that annoying.

“We were just cooped up in our rooms,” he recalled. “You didn’t join the Marine Corps to stay in your bedroom and work for a couple of hours a day and play video games.”

After the elections that November, the main message being spread by Fox anchors, reporters and guests was the same: Joe Biden had “stolen” a victory from President Donald Trump. Abate was buying into it.

So were two of his friends, Sgt. Dodge Hellonen and Cpl. Micah Coomer. They were planning to drive out to Washington, D.C., for the now infamous “Stop the Steal” rally. And they texted Abate, asking him if he wanted to come along. He said he accepted because he wanted to listen to Trump’s speech.

“I actually wanted to see him speak in person, like, the last time as sitting president,” Abate said.

The two Marines picked up Abate at his home and drove north to Washington. But he said the traffic getting into D.C. slowed them down, so they missed the speech on the Ellipse, near the White House, which ended with Trump telling the crowd that they had to fight for their country. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol,” Trump said.

Abate said they all noticed a crowd heading that way and joined in, crossing the wide lawn toward the iconic building.

Something ugly

They entered through the Senate wing doors about seven minutes after the crowd broke through. This was the first entrance to be breached that day, so Abate and his friends were among the first people to actually go into the Capitol.

“We walked right in,” he said. “We didn’t see any signs that, you know, said ‘do not enter’ or ‘no trespassing.’ And as soon as we walked through the door of the Capitol building, there were two police officers standing right across from the door. I figured if we weren’t supposed to be there, they would have told us to get out. Nobody was trying to be, like, rambunctious.”

He told us he was inside the Capitol for about an hour and saw or heard no yelling, breaking glass, or violence.

But we were outside the Capitol at the exact same time and we experienced something very different — something ugly — and reported on that extensively. While getting crushed by a crowd of angry Trump supporters, we met rioters who spoke proudly into NPR microphones about plans to hang politicians from gallows before storming up the marble steps and surging through doors and windows. The overwhelming evidence is of one of the most violent and shocking days in American history.

Meanwhile, Abate said he calmly and quietly strolled the halls for about an hour, helped put a MAGA hat on a statue, and then finally left with his friends when police ordered everyone out.

Then he said they drove south, back toward Quantico, before joining Ashley at a restaurant called Fatty’s.

“Holy crap”

While they were eating, every TV screen in the restaurant showed images of a raging mob at the Capitol, surging into the building and punching cops, smashing some with flagpoles and their own shields.

“We were all just looking at it like, holy crap,” Ashley said.

She said she turned to her husband, wide-eyed. “Did you see any of the stuff they’re talking about?” she said she asked him that night.

He said no. But all three Marines looked at each other. “Like, we should probably not talk about this,” Abate remembered. He told us he took out his phone and started deleting all pictures and videos from the day.

“I knew that if word broke that Marines were in the Capitol it would reflect badly on the Marine Corps,” Abate told us. “And I knew that even though I didn’t do anything bad — I didn’t cause any violence, I didn’t perpetrate any sedition or treason and things like that — I knew that I would just be grouped into everything.”

The three never talked about Jan. 6 with each other again. And before long, Coomer was transferred to another assignment at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Hellonen was off to Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Over a year later, Abate passed that polygraph test — the one where he admitted being in the Capitol on Jan. 6. He was sent to a special signals intelligence school in Florida. Josh and his wife returned to the Washington, D.C., area at the end of 2023, ready to start that prized internship and set up a home with Ashley, who had just found out she was pregnant.

“Just be truthful”

Just two weeks before Abate was about to start his NSA job at Fort Meade in Maryland, he got a text. His sergeant wanted to meet for a cup of coffee. “Change into civilian clothes,” he told Abate, who figured the meeting was about his internship. But after passing the building where Abate was supposed to work, they pulled into the parking lot of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

“So NCIS just wants to ask you a few questions,” the sergeant told him. “Nothing to worry about. Just be truthful.”

Abate said he got a sinking feeling.

A half dozen agents came from both sides of the building and surrounded him, telling him he was under arrest for Jan. 6. They clasped on handcuffs and escorted him to an interrogation room.

“I was like, s***, this is happening,” Abate said.

They showed him pictures of himself inside the Capitol, along with Hellonen and Coomer. Then they put Abate in the back seat of a government car and drove him south to Washington, where he was booked. He spent the night in jail, sleeping on a metal bench with a bright light shining from the ceiling.

What he didn’t know yet was that not all of his Marine friends were able to keep that vow of silence about being inside the Capitol.

According to the FBI, just three weeks after Jan. 6, Coomer sent a private message to a friend. An FBI search warrant found that he was talking about the extremist movements present in the Capitol that day, including guys in Hawaiian shirts who often call themselves the Boogaloo Bois. Coomer said to his friend, “I’m waiting for a Boogaloo.”

His friend wrote back asking, “What’s that?”

Coomer simply replied: “Civil War 2.”

Both Coomer and Hellonen declined our requests for comment.

The charm offensive

All three Marines were charged with the same crimes in early 2023. Federal prosecutors had them on four charges, including entering a restricted building and disorderly conduct.

Over the next few months, Abate was placed on administrative duty at work. And as he and Ashley waited at home for the legal case to run its course, the grim reality set in. “You think all the typical things,” she said. “Like, what are we going to do when he loses his job?”

Abate and his lawyer, Dave Dischley, a family friend in Warrenton, Va., were eventually able to work out a deal with prosecutors. They were willing to drop most charges in exchange for a guilty plea on just one misdemeanor. And the recommendation was a reduced sentence of 21 days in jail.

Abate appeared before U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee. She was assigned to Hellonen and Coomer, as well. She declined a request for an interview.

But what we know about Judge Reyes is that, going into the sentencing, she was openly stunned that a Marine would participate in the insurrection. “It’s scary to think that our active duty military were part of the insurrection,” Reyes told Abate, according to a transcript of the hearing. Reyes said she was inclined to give Abate six months behind bars.

Abate told the court in a written statement that he was wrong about the election being stolen, about what Trump was telling the country. “Each of the lies circulated by President Trump were incredibly harmful to our democracy and our unity as a nation.”

And then came the letters. More than 50 of them from family members, friends and fellow Marines. Judge Reyes said she read them all beforehand. Twice.

One was from a Gold Star mom whose son was killed in 2011. “I have met many Marines that are truly good Marines and good people,” she wrote. “Josh is one of those Marines.”

The mother of a childhood friend wrote: “Even though I’m a strong liberal, I would never consider Josh to be a threat. I truly believe he is just fundamentally good.”

Not everyone was willing to write a letter. Abate said a fellow Marine told him basically, “Josh, I like you, but not what you did.”

But there were more than enough to sway Reyes. She went as far as telling Abate that his case had made her a “better judge.” And she gave him a sentence: 279 hours of community service — one hour she said, for each American killed in the American Civil War.

“She mentioned something about how she’s kind of envious of the story that I can tell my daughter and help her learn from my mistakes,” Abate told us. So this federal judge had gone from being openly disgusted with Abate for joining the violent mob at the Capitol, to essentially helping to craft a redemption story for him.

“Maybe this won’t be so bad after all,” Abate remembers thinking.

An unlikely assist

Earlier this year, NPR spent several hours talking with Abate and wanted to learn more about his activities that day. His description of the insurrection — that he meandered in and never really noticed that what he was doing was wrong — just didn’t make sense based on what we saw that day.

We went through a few other direct questions about Abate’s actions that day.

Did you chant?

“No.”

Of the statue he put the MAGA hat on: A statue of what? A specific person?

“I don’t remember,” he said. “It was just a random statue in the Rotunda.”

He really didn’t see anything disturbing or aggressive?

“I think if I had seen any violence, I would have left sooner,” he said.

On Feb. 21, he called us back for a second interview. When we arrived, he was holding a printout from the FBI’s official statement of facts and started reading from it.

“ ‘Abate appears in the crowd and then he walks,’ ” he said. “And it talks about how he walks and walks and walks and walks and walks. And nothing in our summary of our actions is actually, you know, spooky or violent or scary. I thought it was humorous that they, in their summary of me, my time in the Capitol building, that’s all they could really sum it up to was walking.”

But down at the bottom of the printout it said “Page 1 of 45.” So clearly there was a lot more to the story.

Including video.

A few weeks after we talked with Abate, the House Republicans started dropping some 5,000 hours of security camera footage from Jan. 6 on a public video platform, including time stamps. The security footage does not contain any audio.

What we saw was that seven minutes after the doors to the Capitol were breached, Abate walked in with Hellonen and Coomer. They slowly made their way toward the front of a crowd just 20 steps from the House chamber itself. At one point, Abate cupped his hands around his mouth, and the video shows he clearly is chanting “stop the steal” over and over. At one point, Abate is holding a yellow flag with the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” He appears to gesture to his friends to follow him to the front of the crowd toward the chamber doors. Soon, tear gas starts to fill the hallway. They make their way out of the space and back into the Capitol Rotunda.

Way in the back of the Rotunda video, you can make out Abate taking a hat out of someone’s hands and trying to place it on top of a statue. He finally gets it on there by climbing onto the pedestal.

It’s a bust of Martin Luther King Jr.

From there, Abate and his friends became part of a large, rowdy crowd. The front of the crowd is facing off against a line of Capitol Police who are attempting to push everyone out. Abate stands firm amid the crush and scuffles happening around him, not turning around and leaving. Finally, after several minutes and jostling in the crowd around them, the three of them make their way out of the Rotunda and out of frame.

The story that Abate told us — about an almost casual stroll through the Capitol — just didn’t hold up.

We called his lawyer to tell him what we’d just watched and to ask to sit down with him again. Abate declined.

The Marines and Jan. 6

Despite avoiding jail time, Abate’s career with the Marines was still on the line. In December 2023, he had a retention hearing, where a panel of his colleagues would decide whether he stayed or would be kicked out. It was held in a nondescript government building at Quantico. The hearing lasted 4½ hours.

Retention hearings are administrative but structured like a courtroom. There was a Marine officer who argued in Abate’s defense, saying he was remorseful and accepted responsibility for what he did. His defense lawyer, Dave Dischley, was also there.

Ashley and their baby showed up to support him. Dischley made sure to introduce them to the room.

Another officer served as a kind of prosecutor. One of the points he argued is that Abate by his actions violated an agreement he signed when he joined — one that explicitly forbids participation in extremist activities. The officer said Abate should be kicked out with an other-than-honorable discharge, a red flag to all future employers.

Several Marines acted as witnesses, all telling the panel that Abate is a fine Marine.

“I would say that his initiative is top-notch, sir,” one said.

“By far the most outstanding professional Marine I’ve ever encountered,” said another. “Gentlemen, I wouldn’t be here if someone didn’t give me a second chance. If he can pull off what I know he’s capable of, as a man, as a Marine, as a father, he will show that growth can occur, and that he can overcome even something as trivial as this.”

And then something truly startling happens. The panel includes two officers and a senior sergeant. They all are asked by Abate’s defense attorney about their views on the attack on the Capitol. Are they positive, negative or indifferent?

“Depending on what news source you look at, you get a different narrative, different perception,” Lt. Col. Sean Foley said. “It’s a tale of two cities, and at this point, I mean, to be honest I’m tired of hearing about it three years later.”

Then Master Gunnery Sgt. Steven Glew, who said, “So I wasn’t there. I can’t say I know exactly what happened there. So I’m indifferent to what happened that day.”

And finally, Capt. Spencer Morris: “The video footage I’ve seen of the day, specifically focused on the more violent parts of Jan. 6, it definitely gives me a negative perception of how things transpired.”

In the end, the panel unanimously decided to keep Abate in the Marine Corps. Separate panels for Hellonen and Coomer did the same. But Coomer was kicked out shortly after his hearing by a general at Camp Pendleton; Hellonen ran out his enlistment — his contract with the Marines was up — and he left the Corps.

Glew, who had said he was indifferent to what happened that day, was the only one of the panelists who agreed to talk with us about why he voted to retain Abate.

“I have just seen a lot of him in me,” Glew said. “And then, you know, just seeing his family there, his baby, just made me think, you know about my family and what they would have been going through if I was in Josh’s position.”

Extremism in the ranks?

Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro will be the one who makes the final decision about Abate’s fate in the Marines. Ten months later, he has yet to make the call.

Digging into Abate’s story and the aftermath of Jan. 6, we learned that Abate was by far not the only Marine — active or retired — who went into the Capitol that day. Some one-third of the 200 participants arrested for their role in the Capitol attack were Marines. That’s a disproportionate number, considering the Marines are the smallest of the fighting forces.

“It is shocking when somebody that’s taken an oath to protect the country is doing something to harm it,” said Michael Jensen, who researches domestic terrorism at the University of Maryland. He said the Marines have one of the highest rates of extremist activity going back more than three decades.

“The Army is the largest branch, so you’d expect for it to have the highest numbers,” he said. “But the second highest number comes from the Marine Corps. They are having an outsized impact driving these numbers of cases, yet they are doing the fewest investigations.”

The Jan. 6 attack forced the Pentagon to come up with a definition of prohibited extremist activity. That definition came out at the end of 2021, and it basically says service members can’t get involved in any activities that call for political violence, passing out literature or raising money for extremist groups, liking something on social media, even wearing clothing or having bumper stickers that promote extremist causes.

Each of the services this year put out guidelines and said they would start collecting data on any extremist activities in the ranks. Right now, the military has yet to start collecting data that was called for in the recently released guidelines, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other officials say they think the numbers are small. Still, some say that even a small number of extremists can have an outsized effect on the military force.

We have spent the last six months trying to get officials to talk about the new guidelines, and most have refused. But just a few weeks ago, we were able to ask the Marines’ top officer, Gen. Eric Smith, this question: Do the Marines have an extremism problem?

He said a minuscule percentage of Marines engage in inappropriate behavior.

“What I don’t want to do is hit a fly with a sledgehammer,” he said, “and accuse all Marines of doing something untoward because that’s just not the case.”

But what about the lopsided number of Marines who took part in the Capitol attack?

“No, I don’t worry about that. I think what you see is an anomaly. Those individuals who participated in the Jan. 6 events, those weren’t Marines. They were individuals masquerading as Marines. Our culture didn’t bind to them.”

We’d heard the word “anomaly” before. In Abate’s retention hearing from his defense lawyer Dave Dischley. 

“The odds that another event like January 6th is going to occur in this country, you know, in the next hundred years in this country, I think is very slim,” Dischley said. “I think we can all agree to that. The odds that Sergeant Abate would be a part of that? Less than a fraction of a percent.”

But an Associated Press investigation found that nearly 100 people were killed or injured since 2017 in plots that included U.S. military or veterans, most of them in service of a far-right agenda.

In mid-October — just weeks before the 2024 election — Trump was asked about the Capitol attack at a Univision town hall. His answer was defensive and laced with inaccuracies. He also called it “a day of love.”

As for Abate, he wasn’t ruling out another vote for Trump in 2024.

“I still like Trump,” he said. “There’s no bad taste in my mouth about Trump.” But, he said, he was still deciding.

We called Josh Abate back one more time as we wrapped up reporting, to ask again if he still liked Trump. But through his lawyer, he declined to speak with us again. He was done telling his story.