A man pardoned by President Donald Trump for his January 6 related conviction has been arrested and charged with threatening to execute the federal judges who presided over January 6 cases. Cleveland Meredith, 58, of Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia, was charged in a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Atlanta and made public on Monday with interstate communication of threats. Prosecutors say an April Facebook post attributed to him read, in capitals, that all January 6 federal judges will be executed.
The FBI affidavit, dated October 29, ties the account to Meredith’s phone number and email, and prosecutors told the court he had posted several threatening messages in recent weeks calling for violence following the midterm elections. Agents had interviewed him twice before about online posts, in November 2024 and August 2025. A magistrate judge granted the government’s request to keep him detained pending a hearing on Thursday, November 5.
Meredith’s history is the reason the charge carries weight beyond one defendant. On the evening of January 6, 2021 he drove to Washington with a pistol, a rifle, 2,500 rounds of ammunition and 10 large capacity magazines, and texted a relative about putting a bullet in then Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head, according to the original charging papers. He pleaded guilty in 2021 to interstate threats and was sentenced to 28 months in prison by Judge Amy Berman Jackson. He was later among the more than 1,500 January 6 defendants covered by Trump’s January 2025 clemency.
Status: charged, not convicted. No plea has been reported and the allegations remain unproven. The November 5 detention hearing decides whether he stays in custody while the case proceeds, and the case will be watched as an early test of prosecutions of pardoned defendants for new conduct.