On the evening of April 22, 2025, Nathaniel Moran held a town hall at a hotel in Tyler. KLTV's report the next morning opened with a line that says most of it: "His voice was rarely the only one in the room."
One man was removed by hotel staff for yelling expletives. People stood outside with signs, worried about their 401(k)s and Social Security. And in the middle of it, a man named Ryan Nichols interrupted the congressman.
Nichols had a complaint about due process:
"Four years for January 6, there's no due process in this country, and he doesn't care."
Then, per KLTV's account, Moran later told the crowd that some Jan. 6 prisoners were treated unfairly.
It's worth knowing who he said that about.
Who Ryan Nichols is
Ryan Nichols is from Longview, in Moran's district. In November 2023 he pleaded guilty to two felonies: obstruction of an official proceeding, and assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers.
At his sentencing on May 2, 2024, prosecutors played videos for Judge Royce Lamberth. In one, Nichols waved a crowbar and urged the crowd on: "You need to get your weapons." In another, the government summed him up for the court: "So if you want to know where Ryan Nichols stands? Ryan Nichols stands for violence."
Court documents laid out the planning. Nichols traveled to Washington with a friend from Carthage because they believed the 2020 election was stolen. In the days before, he texted his friend a photo of body armor with prices, noting what bullets it would stop. In another message he wrote:
"Dad and I are building a gun container in the truck today. Just know I have intel that Washington will be a warzone. Big possibility that actual battle goes down."
Lamberth sentenced him to 63 months in prison and fined him $200,000. His lawyers had asked for release, citing his years of hurricane rescue work and his service as a Marine Corps veteran with PTSD.
Then Trump pardoned him, and by April 2025 he was standing in a Tyler hotel ballroom telling a congressman there is no due process in this country.
There was due process. It ran for three years. It included a guilty plea entered by Nichols himself, a federal judge, and video evidence. What ended it was a pardon.
What Moran chose to say
A member of Congress who had just been heckled by a man convicted of assaulting police officers had a wide range of accurate things available to say.
He could have said the man in front of him pleaded guilty to attacking officers. He could have said the courts worked. He could have said nothing.
What KLTV reported is that he told the crowd some Jan. 6 prisoners were treated unfairly — and afterward, told the station: "I wasn't able to hear what he said from the back of the room. We answered some January 6 questions tonight. It's unfortunate he took that tactic."
Note what's missing from that reaction. Not one word about the officers.
Moran was not in Congress on January 6, 2021 — he took office in 2023. He has no certification vote to defend. This was a choice he made in front of his own constituents, four years later, with no vote on the line at all.
He is also one of five Republicans on the House Committee on Ethics — the panel that judges the conduct of members. That is the standard-setting seat in the House.
This has become the party's default
Moran is not an outlier here, which is the point.
Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants. Rep. Pat Harrigan — a Green Beret — called that decision "leadership rooted in honesty and accountability" in the same statement in which he said Joe Biden's pardons undermined trust and integrity in leadership. The difference between the two sets: many of the people Trump freed had attacked police.
That is the frame Moran adopted in miniature at a hotel in Tyler. Not a defense of the whole riot — just a gentle "some of them were treated unfairly," offered to a room that included a man who had brought a crowbar to the Capitol.
The other thing that happened that night
The rest of the town hall was, by the reporting, mostly noise: shouting, one ejection, and a congressman telling reporters afterward that "some folks showed up tonight just wanting to scream and fight and yell."
He also said this, and we should hold him to it:
"I think it's a responsibility to the constituents to do those face-to-face town halls to engage to be transparent, and I expected some emotion tonight and that's what we saw."
Good. Face-to-face town halls are a responsibility — he's right about that, and plenty of his colleagues only do them by telephone, which isn't the same thing.
So here's the follow-up question for East Texas, and it isn't rhetorical: at the next one, will Nathaniel Moran say plainly whether he thinks a man who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers was treated unfairly?
The people in that room deserve a straight answer. We deserve better.
Sources
- JD Conte, "'We want to hear him': Shouts, chaotic questions engulf Moran town hall," KLTV, April 23, 2025. Photo: KLTV.
- Brendan Cullerton and KLTV Digital Media Staff, "Longview man gets prison sentence, 6-figure fine for involvement in Jan. 6 riot," KLTV, May 2, 2024.
