Jim Risch Election Denial Checks & Balances Idaho

"No! No, Don't Ask the Question." Jim Risch Still Won't Talk About the Mob That Trashed His Office.

Rioters smashed the window of Jim Risch's Capitol office on January 6. Five years later, with the Justice Department moving to erase the convictions of the people who organized the attack, Idaho's senator told a reporter not to ask.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 08, 2026

"No! No, Don't Ask the Question." Jim Risch Still Won't Talk About the Mob That Trashed His Office.

In April 2026, the Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to throw out the convictions of 12 members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — men a jury found guilty of seditious conspiracy for organizing the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

The Spokesman-Review went to Northwest Republicans and asked what they thought. Several answered plainly.

Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Spokane said he "was not a fan of the blanket pardon," and called January 6 "an unfortunate stain on our republic."
Rep. Dan Newhouse of Yakima said those convicted "should serve jail time," and that reversing the convictions is "an affront to the rule of law."
Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho Falls said he had issues with "the organizers" getting clemency.

Then there was Idaho's senior senator.

Jim Risch had a reason to have an opinion that none of them had. The mob broke into his office.

He wouldn't answer. The paper sent written questions to his office a day ahead. He told a reporter that morning he would talk later. That afternoon, per the Spokesman-Review, his response was:

"No! No, don't ask the question."

What happened in room ST4M

This isn't a small detail. It is one of the more violent scenes of the day, and it happened inside the office assigned to Idaho's senator.

In March 2023, NBC News reported what newly released court documents and video showed. Rioters fought their way up the stage built for Biden's inauguration, came in through a window on the mezzanine level, and got into a suite of Senate hideaway offices. An FBI affidavit disclosed that one of those rooms, ST4M, "was assigned to Senator James Risch on January 6, 2021."

Video showed a rioter smashing out Risch's window — the one overlooking the National Mall and the Washington Monument — trying to open a new way into the Capitol for the mob behind him. Later video showed Risch's trashed desk, with what looked like a framed campaign image bearing his own last name lying in the wreckage.

The man smashing that window was Daniel "D.J." Rodriguez. He is the rioter who drove a stun gun into the neck of Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, nearly killing him. Around the same time first responders were rushing Fanone to the hospital unconscious, Rodriguez was inside the senator's office suite. Afterward he wrote to a MAGA group chat: "Omg I did so much f---ing s--- rn and got away tell you later. Tazzed the f--- out of the blue."

A cooperating witness testified under oath that rioters defecated in one of the offices next to Risch's.

Rodriguez was sentenced to 12.5 years. On his first day back in the White House, Trump gave commutations and pardons to every defendant charged in the attack — including the ones who assaulted police. Rodriguez went free.

Three chances to say something

The night of January 6, 2021, before anyone knew what was on the video, Risch was clear. He voted to certify Biden's win and called the attack "unpatriotic and un-American in the extreme." He praised the police who "placed themselves in harm's way," and said he was proud to reconvene "to prove that mob rule never prevails."

That was the last plain thing he said about it.

In March 2023, NBC News reviewed his public statements and found no indication that he had ever mentioned what happened to his own office. Reporters asked him directly and told him about the new video. His full answer:

"I don't do interviews on Jan. 6, but thanks."

Asked again if he had any response, he said only: "Thanks for asking." His office didn't answer follow-up emails.

In January 2025, the day after Trump's mass clemency, Risch called Joe Biden's pardons of people convicted of attacking police officers "stomach-turning." When a reporter asked whether he felt the same way about Trump pardoning people who did the same thing, he abruptly ended the interview.

Before the inauguration, asked about the coming pardons, he had said: "I don't want to go there. He's going to do what he's going to do, and we'll talk again if he does."

They did not talk again.

The one time he did address it

Risch finally spoke about his own office in January 2026 — five years after the attack. According to the Spokesman-Review, he told the paper that the rioters had mistaken his office for the next-door office of a Democrat.

That is his explanation. Not that a mob attacked the Capitol. That they got the wrong room.

He also skipped the vote to investigate it

On May 28, 2021, the Senate voted on whether to even begin debating a bill to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack — the kind of commission the country created after 9/11.

It needed 60 votes. It got 54, and died.

Risch was recorded Not Voting. He was one of eleven senators who did not vote that day. On the question of whether anyone should officially investigate the mob that broke his own window, Idaho's senior senator did not register an opinion at all.

Silence is a choice he makes a lot

This is the same senator who, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, refused for more than three months to hold a public hearing on a war the president started without a vote of Congress — insisting the classified briefings were enough.

And it is the same senator who has not held a public town hall since 2020, by the Idaho Democratic Party's count. When Idaho State University students and the League of Women Voters held one in Pocatello in April 2026 and invited him, he declined, and they held it with an empty chair.

Three of his Northwest Republican colleagues managed to say, on the record, that people who organized an attack on the Capitol should not have their convictions erased. It is not a hard thing to say. Risch is 82, running for another six-year term, and — as the Spokesman-Review put it — has Trump's endorsement and is likely to cruise to another term so long as he does not draw the president's ire.

He still wouldn't say it.

We deserve better.