When Cleveland Grover Meredith, Jr., arrived at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was divorced, unemployed, and the father of two young men who, like their father, share their names with Republican Presidents. Two years earlier, north of Atlanta, he had sold a car-wash business, called Car Nutz, after stirring up bad press with a billboard that read #QANON. A previous business of his, an auto spa, had gone bankrupt. Car trouble had delayed Meredith from getting to D.C. until hours after the insurrection. But he had conveyed his intentions for that day in Facebook posts and text messages, which had been troubling enough to compel his mother—an interior designer whose work has appeared in Southern Living—to call the F.B.I. On January 1st, Meredith posted to Facebook, “Allow your enemy to be boastful, to think he has won. Present yourself as weak, disorganized. Then eradicate.” Three days later, he sent a text that read, “We’re gonna surround DC and slowly constrict.” On January 6th, more texts: “War time” and “I’m gonna collect a shit ton of Traitors heads.” Meredith told an uncle that he planned to shoot House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on live television, prompting the uncle to respond, “What the fuck are you thinking.” Meredith wrote back, “Psychological warfare. I’ve been on the radar for a while now, they now I’m harmless.” On January 7th, according to prosecutors, he head-butted someone and then punched that person while they were on the ground. He also texted a friend, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG cunt,” adding, “I hope you’re reading this Mr. FBI agent, FK U.”
The F.B.I. arrested Meredith, who goes by Cleve, at a Holiday Inn a mile from the Capitol. Inside his room were some THC edibles and a vial of testosterone. In Meredith’s trailer, authorities found a 9-millimetre semi-automatic firearm with a Stars and Stripes pattern, an assault-style rifle with a telescopic sight, approximately twenty-five hundred rounds of various kinds of ammunition—some of which could pierce armor, he’d noted in a text—and multiple large-capacity ammunition-feeding devices. He was charged with possessing unregistered firearms and unlawful ammunition, and with making a threat to injure someone from across state lines. In 2021, in a filing prior to Meredith’s sentencing, his then attorney, Paul Kiyonaga, claimed that Meredith had these weapons with him because he had come straight from a ski trip, in Colorado, where he had planned to do target practice with his sons if there wasn’t enough snow to enjoy the slopes.
Kiyonaga also offered a biographical sketch of Meredith. He grew up in a prosperous family, attended an expensive private high school in Atlanta called the Lovett School, and matriculated at Southern Methodist University before graduating, with an economics degree, from Sewanee: The University of the South. He married and had kids, and he spent his weekends racing motorcycles and cars. At some point, his marriage unravelled. According to Meredith’s ex-wife, whom Kiyonaga quoted in his filing, the dissolution of his marriage had resulted from his “extremism with politics and guns,” which had put him in “the prime place to be swept up into something.” Kiyonaga went on, “It was in the extreme and distorted conspiracy theories of QAnon and its angry call to action that Mr. Meredith felt he had found the illusory sense of purpose and meaning that eluded him.” A friend of Meredith’s, who did not align with him politically but found him likable, described Meredith to me, when I first reported on him, in 2021, as “a sheltered boy from the northern suburbs of Atlanta pretending he’s tough.” Meredith had never been convicted of a crime, but he had twice assaulted his father, according to a sentencing memo filed by the U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia—once even pushing his father’s head through a window during an argument. On another occasion, Meredith pointed a gun at a driver during a road-rage incident. Kiyonaga did not directly address these claims in his sentencing report, but he did quote Meredith’s father, who described his son as “a passionate American . . . drawn into the rhetoric and the lies of conspiracy theorist groups.”
He was first drawn to Donald Trump by a chance encounter. A former close friend of Meredith told me that Meredith had gone out to Aspen, Colorado, in the early nineties and worked as a valet at the Ritz-Carlton. Meredith came back from Colorado and said that he’d met Trump there. “And ever since Cleve’s brush with fame, he’s been a loyal guy to Trump,” the friend said. Meredith recently wrote on Facebook, in a message to someone who had apparently antagonized him, “I met Trump in 92, go ahead and fk with me and see what happens.” (Meredith did not respond to a request for comment about his alleged encounter with the President, but records show that he lived in Aspen, where Trump vacationed, around this time.)
Kiyonaga acknowledged that Meredith had “lost his way.” He noted an unspecified childhood trauma of Meredith’s and the loss of a sister to cancer when he was in his early twenties. He had suffered concussions, too, including a bad one from a recent motorcycle accident. The attorney cited the opinion of Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and a former Army brigadier general, who, having examined Meredith for the defense, in the wake of his arrest, diagnosed him with depression, anxiety, and A.D.H.D. Kiyonaga told the court that Xenakis “believes that Mr. Meredith, with the stabilizing effect of comprehensive mental health care and appropriate medications, will be able to repair his life without posing a threat to himself or others or without repeating the conduct that placed him into his current predicament.” Kiyonaga went on, “The key . . . is that Mr. Meredith disengage from the corrosive online and political influences that caused him to commit the instant threat.” On September 10, 2021, Meredith pleaded guilty to all counts. He received twenty-eight months of prison time, plus three years of supervised release. The court strongly recommended that he receive “intensive medical health treatment.” On January 20, 2025, fifteen hundred and seventy-nine rioters of the January 6th insurrection had their sentences commuted or their cases dismissed, or were simply pardoned by Trump. Meredith was among them.
The Program on Extremism at George Washington University has compiled the most comprehensive public-facing data set on the J6ers. Its stated goal is to act as a resource for “understanding the scope of prosecutions and trends among those charged in connection with the Capitol attack.” Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow on the project, recently shared with me some of what he’s learned. “The majority of these folks still harbor some resentment toward these government officials, specifically Pelosi,” he said. “They still wax on about Barack Obama and conspiracy theories and how J6 was a ‘Fed-op,’ or an inside job, and that sort of thing. It’s the conspiratorial mind-set that these people are still perpetually stuck in.”
Some J6ers have already run afoul of the law again. Baumgartner has counted nearly two dozen people who have so far committed a variety of offenses since the insurrection, including three who have been arrested since Trump’s mass-pardoning earlier this year. “They range from physical assaults to child pornography or sex-abuse charges,” he said. In January, a Missouri woman, photographed holding Nancy Pelosi’s broken nameplate on January 6th, received ten years in prison for killing a woman while driving drunk. In April, a Tennessee man, who’d been among the first to enter the Capitol, was found guilty of plotting to murder F.B.I. agents last year. (In July, he was sentenced to life in prison.) Also in April, a West Virginia man, who had attacked federal law enforcement during the insurrection, was indicted on charges of armed robbery and assault after stabbing the owner of a Mexican restaurant. (He took a plea deal and is serving six months in jail for unlawful assault.) Then there is Jared Wise, a former F.B.I. agent—who yelled, “Kill ’em, kill ’em, kill ’em, get ’em, get ’em,” as Capitol Police officers were being attacked—previously charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and aiding and abetting an assault on law-enforcement officers. Wise’s case was dismissed when Trump took office, before Wise had entered a plea, and in early August he received a new job: he is now a senior adviser in the Department of Justice.