Behind the Story: Grantee Talks About January 6 Rioter’s Life After Pardon

Image

Andrea Kalin is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Spark Media, a production company in Washington, D.C. Her Pulitzer Center-supported documentary Public Defender follows the story of Heather Shaner, a criminal defense lawyer who represented Annie Howell, a painter and mother, and social media influencer Jack Griffith, two of the participants in the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol. Throughout the film, Shaner not only defends her clients, but she also tries to become a positive influence on their lives and uses empathy to bridge political divisions.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump pardoned about 1,500 January 6 defendants. Howell, who spent time in jail, regretted her actions, but after much deliberation she accepted the pardon. 

Pulitzer Center Intern Morgan Varnado had the opportunity to speak with Kalin. They discussed Howell’s decision, the process of creating a documentary, and Kalin’s perspective on the broader implications of the Trump pardons. (Coming soon: Howell speaks with Varnado about life after January 6.)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Morgan Varnado: Throughout the documentary, Annie Howell used knowledge as a means of rehabilitation, spending a lot of time in the library and even showing interest in prison reform. How has she been since the end of the documentary? Where is she now?

Andrea Kalin: Not static, that’s what I would say. Her life has been really fluid.

She just told me that her boyfriend was sentenced to 18-24 months in jail.  She was absolutely enraged. She feels that the system is so twisted and contorted. She felt her boyfriend was a complete victim of the injustice of the criminal justice system and how it's skewed against people of color.

 She keeps feeling like she’s bang[ing] up against something that just doesn't budge in a way that affirms a sense that there's equity and fairness and accountability in our system. So where's Annie and why did she take the pardon?

I think Annie just wants to move forward. She is sick and tired of being the poster child in her community for January 6. She is still alienated and very isolated from people whom she hung with and was connected with before January 6.  

She gets enraged on these incidents where it kind of pulls her back to where she was before—"before" meaning isolated. Who is my friend? Who's my foe? How do I navigate this world? It's as if the rug from underneath me was pulled out and everything I thought I believed, I don't believe anymore.

She said her family really pressured her [to take the pardon]. They wanted her to have this erased from her background and her record. In some respects, it may do that, but who she is as a person has not been erased and how she changed and was changed by this has not been erased— nor will it be [even with] what Trump is trying to do right now, rewriting January 6.

Annie understands back then and still today that when you're afforded representation from someone like Heather [Shaner], good representation from someone who sees you for who you are and not just how you can be used as in a political ploy, your life can change. She wants her life to change.

 She grew so much from January 6. She got her first library card [because] Heather suggest[ed] to her, “Hey, you want to do something with your kid? Go to the library, get a library card.”

When she says in the film, "I learned more in this past year than I did in my life," she did. When she was in jail, she devoured books. She read maybe a book, sometimes two books, a day. She would say it would open worlds to her.

 So she took the pardon, but not from a political perspective.  

 [Annie’s] still fighting in the family court for custody of her kid. She doesn't want anything out there to be used against her in trying to finally gain joint custody of her son.

She still works with a group that helps formerly incarcerated women. She does some community service with them. She donated her books when she left jail to the jail library. I've seen her [be] more open minded in terms of [being] less quick to jump to an assumption or a stereotype until she really allows something to play out. She comes to her own conclusions.

She is a very ambitious young woman, but has a lot on her shoulders. She's still trying to keep up with child support payments. Even if she doesn't have custody, she's a mother, so she still tries to be present in her son's life to the extent that her ex allows it.

She's still fighting the courts. Now she's fighting the courts for her boyfriend. And she works at Amazon like six days a week. That’s a lot on a young person that's just trying to make her way through the world. Whether it's the pardon or getting frustrated that anytime [they] mention January 6 in her local paper, her picture comes up.

She just wants to be able to move forward. She feels kind of despised by all sides.  

MV: Near the end of the documentary, Jack Griffith was walking into the distance and Shaner mentioned that Griffith may still view things as a game. Do you think what Trump did with the pardons encourages this "game-like" belief? 

AK: No question. It's absolute lunacy—with the volume of material evidence, documentation, and trial transcripts—that there is this revisionist effort to completely rewrite history. The first gut punch is the pardons. It undermines the legal system.

 Now you see these deliberate efforts to completely flip the script. So the prosecutors are now the perpetrators, and the perpetrators are the victims.

It's just so absurd. The only thing that gives me solace—and I think it would for Annie too—is that I do believe the historical record will hold out. But even that historical record has to be carefully preserved.

I'm seeing an effort … trying to literally pollute and purge the public record.

And, fortunately, the legal system and the legal record system is out of the purview of an administration. But who knows what these high-tech whizzies can do?

From the beginning, Trump made very deliberate attempts to call [January 6] a “day of love,” to call it anything but what it was. First he goes after the courts, absolves all these folks of whatever responsibility and accountability they had. He turns them into his own personal militias, being the first U.S. president ever to offer such blanket clemency and pardons to paramilitary groups. Now they're all out there. 

I'm scared for people like Annie. I'm scared for Heather, who knows what these people are capable of doing in this era of emboldened revenge and retaliation. They're now going after the records and anyone who did their job to pursue evidence, whether you were an FBI agent or a prosecutor. It's beyond belief.

There are very deliberate efforts on how to counter these specific policy, regulatory, legal, and narrative initiatives to rewrite history. There's just so much evidence. It's going to be hard for them to try to whitewash it.

MV: Your documentary, and the work of other journalists who meticulously captured January 6 and its aftermath— the rioters’ experience and different perspectives—is very important.

How is your work used in fighting misinformation or the forces that may want to rewrite history?

AK: I think stories are critical. People may have their own set of facts, but are you going to argue with someone's experience and someone's story?

That, to me, is what's important [about] storytelling, particularly filmmaking. I don't have to add a caption.

You see how that exchange played out. You see how Heather disagreed on a very strong level with the political or even personal beliefs that [Jack and Annie] brought to the table. But you also see her making an effort to listen without judgment and try to personally connect [with them]. To not just say, "Why do you believe what you believe," but "How did you come to believe what you believe?"

That's a huge difference when you ask that question. If you ask me, “How did you come to believe what you believe?” I'm telling you a story. It's like a storyboard. It's my story. And that's hard to argue with.

 The important thing that I learned out of this is that you don't have to agree. Agreement is not a prerequisite to having a conversation. And that to me was critical in observing how Heather worked with Annie and Jack.

 What I love about this film is that it forced me to also re-evaluate where I was coming from and my own gut preconceptions and biases. I think binaries, whether it's in our beliefs or how we interact, are really dangerous. Unfortunately, fear is driven by binary thinking. You can push fear out with empathy.

One of Annie's favorite books was Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson. I [asked] her, "What was it about? What really resonated with you?" She said the sense that you shouldn't be defined by the worst thing that you did. If you steal, you're not just a thief. If you were an insurrectionist, you're not just an insurrectionist. That's when she said, "I just want to be Annie."

MV: Given everything unfolding around your film—the developments surrounding the January 6 pardons and the challenges Howell is facing—are you considering expanding or revisiting the ending of Public Defender?

AK" I've already revised the coda twice, along with some commentary and visuals, since the film's initial release in October. I'm planning on updating it again—especially after Trump’s blanket pardons, FBI purges, and the administration's ongoing and deliberate attempts to rewrite history continue to unfold.

I’ve been holding off until more of this settles, but with Kash Patel likely to be confirmed [as FBI director], I expect even more aggressive efforts to reshape the narrative around January 6. As of today, the film is slated to be broadcast in early September on public television, provided they keep to this commitment, it'll be broadcast with a new coda and potentially further modifications. 

(Editor’s note: Patel was confirmed as FBI director in February.)

Kalin is currently working on a documentary titled Witness: Seeking Truth/Defending Freedom, which will highlight the lives and efforts of journalists across the globe who lost their lives while reporting: from L. Alex Wilson, who died in 1960 after being injured in an attack while reporting on the Little Rock Nine, to Miroslava Breach, who was killed in 2017 while investigating drug trafficking and government corruption in Mexico.