With the flick of his wrist and a few seconds of his time, Donald Trump erased the sentences of more than 1,500 people who participated in the Jan 6 attacks on the Capitol.
Just over a week before, Vice President-elect JD Vance said that wasn’t the plan. "If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn't be pardoned,” he said in an interview on Fox News on Jan 12. The word “obviously” here suggests it wasn’t even a consideration.
But then, Trump changed his mind.
In an Oval Office interview last week with Sean Hannity, Trump was asked about the pardons. Hannity wondered why people who were convicted in incidents where they were “violent with police” had been given pardons.
Trump responded that he thought most of the people were innocent, but also, it would have been really time consuming to evaluate each case individually.
He told Hannity, “It would be very, very cumbersome to, look, you know how many people we’re talking about? 1,500 people, almost all of them…” he pauses for a beat here, “this should not have happened.” In the same interview, Trump later acknowledged that some of the people involved in Jan 6 attacked police, but he claimed they were minor incidents.
Several reports suggest the decision was made at the last minute. According to an adviser familiar with the discussions, “Trump just said: ‘F_ck it, release ‘em all.’”
It’s not just Jan 6 rioters. He has pardoned others, ones he made promises to on the campaign trail. They include nearly two dozen anti-abortion activists who were convicted of blockading a health clinic, hurting a nurse and accosting a pregnant woman. (One of them was later found with five fetuses at her home.)
Trump also pardoned a man who created a secret place on the dark web to buy and sell illegal drugs, and two police officers who were convicted in connection to the death of an African American man in 2020. (One was convicted of second-degree murder, the other of conspiracy and obstructing justice.)
Trump is obviously not the first president to issue a large number of pardons. Jimmy Carter pardoned more than 200,000 Vietnam War draft dodgers.
And like many of his predecessors, Joe Biden gave out loads of pardons and commutations before he left office. He pardoned his son Hunter after promising he wouldn’t, and preemptively pardoned several others, like Anthony Fauci, the Jan 6 Congressional Committee, and his own siblings, just in case Trump or Republicans wanted to try to go after them.
I talked about one person that Biden pardoned that I have a community connection to, here.
While yes, it’s common for outgoing presidents to issue pardons on their way out the door, we’re entering a new era, one in which pardons are being used as a public policy tool and a way to settle political scores. One in which pardons are a day-one priority and not a last-day housekeeping task.
We can see evidence of this “I am your retribution” mentality by taking a look at some of the Jan 6 pardons, like Andrew Taake. He was sentenced to just over six years in prison for attacking police with pepper spray and a metal whip. His indictment includes photos of him spraying pepper directly into the eyes of law enforcement. He used the metal whip to strike officers during the melee.
At the time of the attack, Taake was also awaiting trial in a different case, for soliciting a minor.
The criminal complaint against David Dempsey is truly shocking. Prosecutors called him “political violence personified.” On Jan. 6, he stomped on police officers’ heads, attacking them with a flag pole, crutches, pepper spray, broken pieces of furniture, his hands, and his feet.
In a video posted to YouTube, Dempsey stood in front of the wooden gallows that were constructed outside the Capitol and said, in part, “Them worthless f***ing s***holes… they don’t need a jail cell, they need to hang from these motherf***ers.” Dempsey pointed to the gallows. “They need to get that the time for peace is over.”
Dempsey also had a long criminal record. Before Jan 6, he had attacked anti-Trump protestors with bear spray, and in a separate incident, assaulted protestors violently with a skateboard.
He was sentenced to 20 years for what he did on Jan 6. And now, he walks free. Not because of a wrongful conviction, but because it apparently would have been too much trouble to exclude Dempsey from the list of people to be pardoned.
Christopher Quaglin was convicted of viciously assaulting numerous police officers. In his sentencing memo prosecutors said, “On at least a dozen occasions, Quaglin stood face-to-face with officers, pushing, punching, and choking them.
The document shows messages from Quaglin before Jan 6, saying he was headed to a “civil war” and said he’d be bringing bear spray. “The gel stuff that shoots 30 feet,” he said, and told people online to bring gas masks.
Quaglin showed no remorse after the event, bragging about a video of him being shown on TV, saying “When you guys see the footage, I was the guy in the red, white, and blue hoodie and the black helmet… So I’m on a loop right now. I’m absolutely on a loop on Fox News. “
Quaglin was sentenced by a judge appointed by Trump, and Quaglin wasn’t thrilled about that either, saying “You’re Trump’s worst mistake of 2016.”
The judge responded by telling Quaglin, “You’re a menace to our society.”
That menace to society can now forget about the 12 years he was supposed to spend in prison.
All told, more than 150 police officers were injured, some very seriously.
CBS’ Margaret Brennan interviewed JD Vance yesterday, and she asked him about the pardons. She said, “Daniel Rodriguez used an electro-shock weapon against a policeman who was dragged out of the defensive line by plunging it into the officer’s neck. He was in prison, sentenced to 12 years, 7 months. He got a pardon. Ronald McAbee hit a cop while wearing reinforced brass knuckle gloves, and he held one down on the ground as other rioters assailed the officer for over 20 seconds, causing a concussion. If you stand with law enforcement, how can you call these people unjustly imprisoned?"
Vance said they looked at all 1,600 people convicted in the Jan 6 attacks and concluded that not “everybody did everything perfectly,” but he said that the DOJ was to blame for “unjustly prosecuting well over a thousand Americans in a way that was politically motivated.”
Some of Trump’s Republican allies don’t agree with how this new era of pardoning is unfolding. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, said he disagreed with people who “beat up cops” being pardoned, and signaled that he was open to potentially curtailing the pardoning power of the president.
And it’s no surprise that Democrats oppose the pardons – some members of Congress are already readying a formal resolution condemning the pardons.
Beyond saying the attacks were minor, or the Jan 6 rioters were innocent, Donald Trump said something else that I took note of: that Biden made a mistake by not pardoning himself before leaving office.
“This guy went around giving everybody pardons. And you know, the funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon. And if you look at it, it all had to do with him… Somebody advised Joe Biden to give pardons to everybody but him.”
Is this a signal of what’s to come? Either a renewed effort to target Biden with criminal charges, or a sign that Trump intends to pardon himself?
The next few years will reveal the answer. But the fact that it’s being discussed less than a week into a new presidency is demonstrative of this fact: times have changed.