Mason Joel Courson and another unidentified January 6 rioter at FCI Coleman Low Correctional Institution. {Twitter}
A Tamarac man who assaulted police in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was released from prison overnight, just hours after President Donald Trump’s sweeping grant of clemency for all 1,500-plus people charged in the deadly siege.
Mason Joel Courson, 29, was serving out the remainder of a 57-month prison term at FCI Coleman Low, a low security federal correctional institution in Sumter County, Fl., when Trump granted him clemency.
Courson pleaded guilty in November 2022 to a felony charge of assaulting, resisting, or impeding a law enforcement officer with a dangerous weapon after video footage from the Capitol showed him using a police baton to strike a Washington, D.C. police officer and helping drag a second officer down a staircase.
Courson then brought the baton back with him to Tamarac as a possible “trophy,” according to a federal judge.
Mason Joel Courson during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Credit: U.S. Department of Justice.
In addition to prison time, Courson was sentenced to 36 months of supervised release and restitution of $2,000. His punishments are officially voided by Trump’s pardon.
WE MADE IT! Those were his first words. We did make it Mase! We f’in made it. We. Made. It.
He looks so different than when he went in, he has some adjustments to make in this outside world, but he will be ok. As a matter of fact he will be better than before, as they all will,… pic.twitter.com/PLBcejnCVt
— J6 Mom Angie (@J6PatriotMom) January 21, 2025
The act of clemency also removes any restrictions on Courson’s right to vote, hold state or local office, or sit on a jury. Presidential pardons do not signify innocence, according to the Department of Justice.
Courson’s mother, Angie, spent years advocating for the release of her son and other participants in the Jan. 6 attack, hailing them as heroic patriots and political prisoners.
“These boys are finally free and reminder to all … there is nothing more powerful than our God. #MAGA,” she wrote Tuesday morning in an X post featuring a photo of Courson and another freed Jan. 6 rioter outside FCI Coleman Low.
“WE MADE IT!” Coulson’s mother said in another post. “Those were his first words. We did make it [Mason]! We f’in made it.”
“Oh @realDonaldTrump you have no idea how happy I will be and every other person that has suffered, their families, friends, advocates, and strangers that we have grown to love like family because they have not left our side a single day and have fought for our J6ers relentlessly.”
During his first day in office Monday, Trump issued “full, complete and unconditional” pardons for Courson and all Jan. 6 rioters, including Enrique Tarrio, a Miami native who was chairman of the racist, right-wing militant group the Proud Boys. Tarrio was convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy for helping initiate the riots and was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Trump also put an end to hundreds of active prosecutions of riot participants by federal prosecutors and commuted the sentences of 14 people serving prison time for their roles in the attacks.
The 45th and now 47th president falsely claimed the election of Joe Biden in 2020 was fraudulent and called on supporters to come to Washington, D.C., to try and stop Congress from certifying the election results on Jan. 6., 2021.
Trump, who maintains the 2020 election was stolen, was indicted on federal felony charges for his efforts to overturn the election and likely would have gone to trial in Washington had he not won the presidency back in November.
The Jan. 6 attack left more than 140 police officers injured and either directly or indirectly led to the deaths of nine people – five police officers as well as four Trump supporters, authorities said.
Trump on Monday called the rioters “patriots” and “hostages,” saying his pardons would end “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years” and begin “a process of national reconciliation.”
Using a series of vivid still photographs from police body-worn police cameras and news footage, as well as evidentiary documents contained in federal court filings, the Department of Justice in 2021 accused Courson of participating in one of the most violent attacks on police on Jan. 6.
Court filings allege Courson left Florida with a friend on Jan. 4, 2021, to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally held by Trump in Washington, D.C. two days later.
After the rally, prosecutors said Courson participated in the violent assault of a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer who was beaten with a baton, flagpole, and crutch. That same afternoon, Courson participated in a “heave-ho” chant and a simultaneous push to storm the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace tunnels, which lead into the Capitol building, according to prosecutors.
“[Courson] was among those seeking to ‘battering ram’ their way through officers protecting the entrance and actually entered the Capitol,” a federal judge wrote. “Even more significantly, he attempted to injure another person–specifically [one] officer … by striking him with the baton and [a second] officer … by assisting in dragging him down the stairs.
On Dec. 14, around ten FBI agents, along with a SWAT team, executed a search warrant on Courson’s home in Tamarac, court records show. They found the baton he had used during the Capitol attack, along with two firearms and the clothes he had worn during the riots, according to the documents.
Courson, a father and businessman who sells audio equipment, has a criminal history that includes several arrests between 2013 and 2018, including busts for battery, grand theft, and resisting arrest without violence, records show.
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