Apologies to Sam & Dave for the headline, but this is the strongest commitment yet from Donald Trump on potential pardons for those convicted of participating in the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill.
They won't have to wait long, either. As part of Time Magazine's celebration of its Person of the Year choice, its editors sat down for an interview with Donald Trump a couple of days before Thanksgiving to discuss his plans for the new administration. Among his top priorities, Trump declares, will be to end the prosecution of non-violent participants in the J6 riot, and to pardon most of those already prosecuted and convicted.
Violent offenders may not get clemency, but that leaves a lot of others whose lives have been ruined already:
Have you decided yet whether you're going to pardon all of the January 6 defendants?
Yes.
You’re going to do all of them?
I'm going to do case-by-case, and if they were non-violent, I think they've been greatly punished. And the answer is I will be doing that, yeah, I'm going to look if there's some that really were out of control.
So you will not include those who committed violent acts?
Well, we're going to look at each individual case, and we're going to do it very quickly, and it's going to start in the first hour that I get into office. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail. A vast majority should not be in jail, and they've suffered gravely. And I say, why is it that in Portland and in many other places, Minneapolis, why is it that nothing happened with them and they actually caused death and destruction at levels not seen before? So you know, if you take a look at what happened in Seattle, you had people die, you had a lot of death, and nothing happened, and these people have been treated really, really badly. Yeah, it's an important issue for me. They've suffered greatly, and in many cases they should not have suffered.
A handful of people did get prosecuted for the riots in Minneapolis, but hardly on the same scale. Those riots went on for almost two weeks and caused at least $500 million in damage and two deaths directly from the violence. Over 600 people got arrested once police and the National Guard started taking action, but only 18 faced federal charges, and less than a hundred others faced state and local charges.
How does that compare to the enthusiasm of the DoJ on J6? Merrick Garland's prosecutors have charged 1,265 people in the J6 riot and put 460 of those in prison for a riot that lasted a far shorter time and did far less damage. And those are just the cases that have already been presented; the DoJ is still working on more charges for more participants.
Trump could have prevented this by pardoning the rioters in the final days of his first term. Many of them expected Trump to do just that, but Trump had his hands full with another impeachment at that time, too. This time, however, Trump tells Time that pardons may come not just on the first day but within the first minutes of his new term, while outlining other Day One priorities:
J6 pardons. Do you have in mind what the first 24 to 48 hours will look like?
I'll be looking at J6 early on, maybe the first nine minutes. I'll be looking at oil prices bringing down, you know, coming down very substantially—meaning energy, energy costs coming down. And with energy comes everything else. See, they really hurt themselves. It went away from my energy policies, totally. It was going to crash. The numbers were through the roof. And then they went back to them. They said, Okay, just let it be. That was the difference between the energy, what they did on energy, and what they did at the border. At the border, they just opened it up to the world. They didn't stop it. You know, we had Remain in Mexico. We had—that border was in was in great shape. Not easy to do. But on that one, they just said, open it up. And they didn't change. They just did that. With energy, they opened, you saw what was going on. The energy was going through the roof. And then they said, just go back to Trump's policy. And they went back. Now the difference is that I would have had three times as much now. They have essentially, sort of, they tried to get to equal but if they didn't do that, you'd have energy, you'd have you'd have inflation that would have been much worse than it is. And it already was probably the worst this country has ever had. We've had the inflation. They lost on inflation, they lost on immigration, they lost on—as a part of immigration, I think a very big part is the border, the border itself. You know, if you can self subdivide the word immigration. They lost on the economy. But it was a different kind of—it was the economy as it pertains to groceries and small things that are actually big things for a family.
It sounds as though Trump plans to issue full pardons to those who didn't get accused of violent actions or plotting violence in the riot, and to end any further charges that do not relate to violent acts. Others might get commutations or nothing at all, but this is just a Day One pledge. Trump could continue to review the J6 cases during the rest of his term and commute any remaining cases on an individually-considered basis.
Of course, Trump might have generated some political blowback with these clemency actions, had it not been for Joe Biden dropping the pardon for his son and bagman Hunter. That took place after Time's interview of Trump, in which Hunter's name never comes up at all. (Joe Biden himself barely comes up, in fact.) Biden has given Trump a lot of political cover for the wholesale J6 pardons with that smelly and corrupt decision, but he gave Trump even more cover for it last night with his own blanket clemency action:
President Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 convicted of nonviolent crimes, the largest grant of clemency by an American president in a single day, the White House announced in a statement on Thursday.
The commutations affect mostly those who had been released from prison and placed in home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic. The people who received pardons were convicted of nonviolent crimes, including possession of marijuana.
Note how the qualifier applies in this instance. Only the pardons were exclusively applied to non-violent convictions; the clemency action applied to those who may have committed violent crimes. That doesn't make the decision wrong on its face, but it will be hard to criticize Trump for pardoning non-violent J6 convicts after Biden let violent convicts go free in a blanket move. That won't end the debate entirely, but it will make it a lot tougher for Democrats and the media to wax sanctimonious when the J6 pardons start dropping.
