BOISE, Idaho — On his first day in office after four years away from the White House, President Donald Trump granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged with crimes in the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol building staged by Trump supporters.

But one rioter, 71-year-old Boise resident Pamela Hemphill, once nicknamed “the MAGA Granny,” rejected her pardon.

“Accepting the pardon would be an insult to the Capitol Police officers, to the rule of law, to our nation,” Hemphill told the Idaho Statesman by phone Tuesday. “The J6 criminals are trying to rewrite history by saying that it was not a riot; it wasn’t an insurrection. I don’t want to be a part of their trying to rewrite what happened that day.”

Hemphill said her attorney informed her on Tuesday that Trump pardoned her. They have made plans to file a letter of rejection.

She won’t be the first to reject such an order. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1833, then later upheld that ruling in 1915, that a recipient has the power to turn down a presidential pardon.

After posting videos of herself entering the Capitol that day, Hemphill pleaded guilty in 2022 to one misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol Building in exchange for prosecutors dropping three additional misdemeanor charges.

A judge sentenced her to two months in jail, three years of probation and a $500 fine in a federal Washington, D.C., court.

Boise woman recalls storming of Capitol Building

Hemphill said she has clear memories of that day four years ago when she was part of a mob of Trump backers who entered the Capitol on the day that Congress was certifying former President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.

Despite recently undergoing surgery to remove cancerous breast tissue, she traveled to Washington with her stitches still in place.

“My brother said, ‘You’re gonna go start chemotherapy soon, so why don’t you go? It’ll probably be Trump’s last event,’” Hemphill said. “And I thought, yeah. Because you can’t do nothing once you start chemo.”

After Trump’s “March to Save America” rally, she said she began talking to a group of Proud Boys, eventually following them to the Capitol and becoming part of the crowd that forced its way through barricaded doors, attacked Capitol Police, broke windows and doors, forced lawmakers to flee and ransacked offices.

During the riot, Hemphill streamed much of what she was experiencing and posted videos to YouTube.

Surveillance footage from inside the Capitol showed Hemphill making her way inside and walking through the Capitol Rotunda wearing a blue baseball cap and a pink scarf, the Idaho Statesman previously reported.

Hemphill eventually found herself in a dangerous situation as the crowd grew more violent.

In another video shared on Facebook, Hemphill was recording just outside of a partly shattered door, the Statesman reported. In it, she was heard telling a man that her “knees are broke” and that several people “walked over her.”

“They stepped on me, threw me down, cut my knee, broke my glasses, stepped on my head, pulled out my shoulder,” Hemphill recalled Tuesday. “The officers pulled me up and put me behind them.”

Hemphill said she ended up struggling to breathe and in a lot of pain, especially around her stitches.

“I really probably should have been sent to the hospital,” Hemphill said. “Again, I should have left. But, no, Pam’s got to stay there and videotape.”

Hemphill said it’s the law enforcement officers with the U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department, including the ones who protected her, who are most on her mind this week. Trump rioters injured about 140 of them during the attack, according to the United States Attorney’s Office.

“The pardon is a slap in their face,” Hemphill said. “It’s like the country let them down. They were the heroes that day.”

Hemphill noted that Republicans in the House of Representatives have still not hung the plaque created in the officers’ honor, despite a 2022 law passed by Congress that required it to be placed by March 2023.

Hemphill said she got out of ‘a cult’

The lack of respect shown to police officers played a significant role in changing her opinions about Trump and the whole event, according to Hemphill.

Hemphill, who moved to Boise from California in 2011, said she recovered from addiction 45 years ago, which inspired her to become a drug and alcohol counselor. It wasn’t until after her retirement in 2011 that she became interested in politics.

She said she found herself without much direction for the first time in decades. Her time — once spent counseling others and reading addiction research — was suddenly empty. Soon enough, she was spending it with far-right figures, both in person and online, and became connected with Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights Network.

“It’s like a community,” Hemphill said. “It starts becoming like a little family, people you can talk to about the government and the policies and the new laws they want to bring in. We were standing up for the nation because the Democrats want to turn it into a communist nation. I’m laughing now. I mean, it’s ridiculous. But that scared me.”

After her two months in prison, Hemphill got out and immediately created a place on X Spaces, previously known as Twitter Spaces, for those involved in the Capitol riot.

“They started talking about supporting people that had actually been violent, and I wasn’t happy about that,” Hemphill said. “I thought we were going to stand up for anything that was government overreach or something like that, not people that are in jail for harming officers.”

Hemphill said she started noticing other rioters spreading misinformation and lies.

“We are not victims, we were volunteers,” Hemphill said. “Nobody went up to them with a gun to their head and said, ‘You’re going to go break a window. You’re going to go destroy property. You’re going to push an officer.’ They had a choice.”

She said she began researching the election for the first time and concluded it had not been stolen. She now thinks of herself as having been “in a cult.”

“I got my critical thinking back and started doing my own research, which I’m guilty of not doing back then because they gaslight you so much,” Hemphill said. “It’s really weird when you come out of a cult. It’s like you look back and you go, what was I thinking?”

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