Cleveland Meredith of North Carolina was arrested Monday for a Facebook post in April 2025 that allegedly read: "ALL J6 Federal JUDGES will be EXECUTED!" Meredith was among the nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants pardoned by Donald Trump on his first day back in office in 2025. He had previously served time after pleading guilty to threatening to shoot then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The new charges, filed by federal prosecutors in Georgia, go beyond the April post. Prosecutors allege Meredith posted "several threatening and concerning messages calling for violence following the midterm elections" last month, including: "Make damn sure you're on the right team going into the midterms/… firing squads will commence 11/04/26." The government argues these constitute true threats under the circumstances, not protected speech. Meredith's history is instructive. He traveled from Colorado to Washington on January 6, 2021, arriving late due to car trouble. Days before the riot he posted his strategy: "Allow your enemy to be boastful, to think he has won. Present yourself as weak, disorganized. Then eradicate." On the day itself: "War time" and "I'm gonna collect a shit ton of Traitors heads." The FBI found him at a hotel near the Capitol with a 9mm pistol, an assault-style rifle with telescopic sight, approximately 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and large-capacity magazines. His mother turned him in. A relative received a text containing the Pelosi threat, contacted Meredith's mother — an interior designer whose work has appeared in Southern Living — who then contacted the FBI. He was sentenced to 28 months in December 2021 after pleading guilty. Trump's mass clemency order erased that conviction. Prosecutors now say the April Facebook post was part of a sustained campaign spanning at least sixteen months. Meredith had been referred to the FBI as recently as July 2025 for threatening an unnamed individual; when interviewed, he "acknowledged making them but denied they were threatening in nature." The government is seeking pretrial detention. Meredith is not an isolated case. Prosecutors note he is one of a number of Trump's J6 pardoned defendants who have allegedly reoffended. The structural question is whether mass clemency for politically motivated violence creates a signal — to the pardoned, to potential imitators, and to the judiciary being targeted — that the state will not hold the line on threats to its own institutions. Before January 6, Meredith ran Car Nutz, an Atlanta-area car-wash business that attracted controversy in 2018 for sponsoring a billboard linking itself to QAnon. Asked about the connection, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "We all support freedom and independent thought." The through-line from QAnon billboard to armed travel to the Capitol to judicial death threats is not a radicalization arc that clemency interrupted — it is one that clemency ratified.
