In a stunning about-face, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Wednesday ordered the federal government to hand back every penny it took from two Jan. 6 defendants pardoned by President Donald Trump — a dramatic reversal from just a few months ago.
The couple at the center of the case, Cynthia Ballenger and Christopher Price, had been slapped with misdemeanor convictions and forced to cough up $570 each in government fees and restitution. But thanks to their case being mid-appeal when Trump returned to the White House and issued his sweeping pardons for roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, their convictions were later vacated by the D.C. Circuit Court.
And that, Judge Boasberg now admits, changes everything.
“Having viewed the question afresh, the Court now agrees with defendants,” Boasberg said in his memo order — a line likely to send a shockwave through a Washington establishment that has spent years portraying Jan. 6 defendants as irredeemable villains rather than misled protesters.
Just this past July, Boasberg had rejected the very same request, insisting that a presidential pardon alone wasn’t enough to trigger repayment. He even doubled down Wednesday, reiterating: “By itself, defendants’ pardon… cannot unlock the retroactive return of their payments.”
But the real turning point wasn’t the pardon — it was the legal fallout. Because their appeals were still pending when Trump issued the pardon, the D.C. Circuit wiped their convictions off the books entirely. Total vacatur. Clean slate.
Boasberg put it bluntly: “Vacatur — unlike a pardon — ‘wholly nullifie[s]’ the vacated order and ‘wipes the slate clean.’”
In plain English: no conviction, no cash owed. And if the government collected money based on a conviction that has now been erased? Pay it back.
The judge even brushed past concerns about sovereign immunity — the shield that typically protects the government from giving refunds — and declared the court fully empowered to make the feds return the cash. “Because the Court could order defendants to pay assessments and restitution, it can order those payments reversed,” Boasberg wrote. “Those are two sides of the same action.”
This ruling is likely to be celebrated as a rare victory by Trump allies, who have spent years watching federal judges block or stall the president’s boldest reforms — often painting them as “rogue” or “activist.” This time, however, Trump’s supporters leave the courtroom with a clear win.
Democrats, on the other hand, are sure to seethe. Earlier this year, the late Rep. Gerald Connolly, then the ranking Democrat on House Oversight, blasted the pardons, accusing Trump of letting Jan. 6 participants “off the hook” for a supposed $2.7 billion in damages — a figure critics have long called wildly inflated.
“When a conviction is vacated, the government must return any payments exacted because of it,” Boasberg declared.
And for Ballenger and Price, that means the government they were once accused of wronging must now give them their money back — in full.
