What If He Throws Hunter Biden And Edward Snowden Into The Mix?
Does It Matter To You If Trump Pardons The Violent J-6 Insurrectionists?
I doubt Trump cares that much either. But he promised and now he has to do something. Yesterday CNN reported that there’s a national movement of people who want the insurrectionists freed— and they expect Trump to free them. But the most recent polling shows that most Americans see the Capitol rioters as responsible for an attack against democracy, not as political prisoners.
Marshall Cohen, Donie O’Sullivan and Curt Devine wrote that the issue poses a dilemma for Señor T with many of his most loyal supporters expecting him to “grant maximum clemency, even for some of the most violent offenders. But that could upset a majority of voters and even some GOP allies who previously urged Trump not to pardon anyone who assaulted police that day... ‘Unless the president pardons everybody, he is going to get some significant blowback,’ said John Pierce, a pro-Trump attorney who has represented dozens of the January 6 defendants. ‘They are not a shy group of people.’”
On the other hand, Jeffrey Crouch, one of the nation’s leading experts on the laws and history of presidential pardons sees the dilemma Trump faces but see a grant of clemency to the insurrectionists as an abuse of the pardon power.
Cohen, O’Sullivan and Devine reported that “Pardoning the rioters, or commuting their sentences, would drive a dagger through what has been the largest federal criminal investigation in US history, leading to the arrest of more than 1,500 Trump supporters who were involved in storming the Capitol in 2021. Nearly half of those arrested– 46%– have been convicted of low-level misdemeanors such as trespassing in the Capitol building. Another 33% were convicted of felonies such as assaulting officers or participating in a riot. The roughly 20% of remaining defendants, or about 315 people, are still awaiting trial. And a trickle of new defendants are still being arrested each week, nearly four years after the insurrection.”
Some have offered tearful public apologies and disavowed January 6. Others defiantly still insist the 2020 election was stolen from Trump— and have promoted false claims about the insurrection and the January 6 prosecutions to make their case for clemency. ‘Sometimes you have to break the rules to do what’s right… I want a full pardon,’ Zachary Alam, convicted of eight felonies and three misdemeanors, including assaulting police and destroying property, told a judge last week while he was sentenced to eight years in prison. This drew a harsh rebuke from the Trump-appointed judge, who called him “delusional.”
During the 2024 campaign, Trump embraced the January 6 movement and said he would “absolutely” consider pardoning every defendant, but he also hedged and said he might not do so because “a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.” He also promised to look “very favorably” and “very strongly” at “full pardons with an apology for many.”
Some defendants are elderly people who got caught up in the frenzy and went in the Capitol but never attacked anyone or broke anything. Others viciously assaulted police with batons, chemical sprays and baseball bats.The harshest sentences were doled out to those convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning to violently subvert the government.
“Not everybody who went to the Capitol was a saint, right? So, you have to draw distinctions between people,” said Joseph McBride, a lawyer for several January 6 defendants. “Even in the situations where people were violent, maybe a pardon is not the best idea, but maybe a commutation is, maybe a lessening of the punishment.”
The movement stayed loyal to Trump, and now “he has to deliver,” McBride added.
…Behind the scenes, defense attorneys representing rioters, along with an array of taxpayer-funded public defenders in DC, are scrambling to seek as much clemency as possible for their clients.
The most pressing concerns are for convicted rioters required to report to prison before Trump’s inauguration in January, and for rioters with sentencing hearings coming up, according to a source familiar with the discussions. Federal judges in DC have already received and rejected some requests to postpone sentencings because of Trump’s pardon pledge.
…Like the 2020 election denialism and anti-vaccine movements, the campaign to release January 6 prisoners is another form of MAGA mobilization and community organizing that has taken on a life of its own, with multiple support groups popping up since 2021.
American Patriot Relief runs an “Adopt J6er” program that allows patrons to select an inmate to “adopt,” and to make a monthly contribution to their commissary, which the inmate can use to buy items like coffee and snacks. The organization raised about $100,000 in the first half of 2024, according to financial records posted on its website.
…It’s wholly up to Trump to decide what to do, and his decision can’t be contested. The only constraints are political considerations, like upsetting his base or the broader public.
“There are no legal obstacles preventing Trump from pardoning as many January 6 defendants as he would like,” said Crouch, the pardon expert from American University.
The US Constitution gives the president a lot of flexibility, Crouch said. Trump could grant individual pardons for specific rioters by name. Or he could issue broad clemency proclamations for subsets of January 6 defendants, or all of them in one fell swoop.
…“The traditional rationales for clemency are to show mercy to someone who has been unfairly treated by the criminal justice system, or to put down a rebellion,” Crouch said, adding that pardoning the rioters could be seen as serving Trump’s “personal interests,” as happened with some controversial pardons in the Clinton and both Bush administrations.
There are also questions about whether Trump will direct the Justice Department to shut down the investigation and dismiss all pending charges. The January 6 probe has mostly fallen out of the daily headlines, but about 315 defendants are awaiting trial and the FBI is still seeking information on more than 500 unidentified Capitol rioters.
For many Americans, clemency for the January 6 rioters would be yet another betrayal of democracy by Trump, who incited the riot and tried to overturn his defeat in 2020.
There are people all along the political spectrum who oppose blanket amnesty.
Democrats, police officers who protected the Capitol, and anti-Trump Republicans have led the charge against the whitewashing of January 6. But some Trump allies say mass pardons are a bridge too far. GOP Sens. Tom Cotton and Markwayne Mullin have already drawn a red line and said Trump shouldn’t pardon anyone who attacked police.
“This is the crowning achievement of the effort to rewrite the history of January 6,” Marcus Childress, investigative counsel for the House committee that investigated the attack, told CNN. “The pardons don’t sit right with me. Now you have a presumption of unequal application of the law. What is the rule of law if it’s not being applied equally?”
The most recent CNN poll on this topic, from January, found that 69% of Americans opposed Trump pardoning “most people convicted of crimes” related to January 6. About 71% of independents and 77% of moderates opposed it. But Republicans were more split, with 55% supporting these pardons and 45% opposing them, the poll found.
One prominent Republican opposing pardons for violent rioters is Mike Pence. Yesterday Alex Griffing reported that Pence spoke at a conference and said “At the end of the day, I’ll always believe that, by God’s grace, we did our duty [on January 6] to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. I don’t think the president should pardon anyone who assaulted a police officer at the United States Capitol on January 6. Karen and I are literally praying that President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Vance will stand on the commitments that they will make when they raise their right hands on that day. And with God’s grace and the support of the American people, I believe they will.”
I kind of figure that Trump will pardon a whole panoply of people— including the crooked mayor of NYC and Hunter Biden maybe Don Siegelman, even Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, as well as allies like Bannon (whose next trialbegins Dec. 9), Flynn and Giuliani and declare he wants to start fresh and heal national divisions. That way he’d be sending multiple messages: reinforcing loyalty, challenging perceptions of justice, and potentially disrupting narratives about criminal accountability. Of course this would raise some unique ethical questions about himself and about the role of pardons in rewarding loyalty versus upholding the principle of impartial justice. I guess what I’m most worried about is that blanket pardons would embolden groups that justify political violence, signaling that they might be supported or forgiven if their cause aligns with Trump’s own interests.
