On his first day in office Trump pardoned and/or commuted the sentences of over 1500 people who took part in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Many people he pardoned and/or commuted their sentences had viciously attacked Capitol police and Metropolitan police who were defending unarmed lawmakers inside the building about to certify the election for Joe Biden. In his speech on the Ellipse, Trump had encouraged the rioters to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore”. Trump falsely claimed the election had been stolen from him and that he had won. That was a lie. And Trump knew it was a lie based on the testimony of close aides and family members who told him the truth about his loss over and over again.
Trump has pardoned these loyalists as part of his attack on our democracy and the rule of law.
WHO WAS LET OFF THE HOOK?
CNN Reports:
After the attack, the Justice Department and FBI launched a nationwide manhunt to identify and arrest rioters, which turned into the biggest criminal probe in US history. Prosecutors charged more than 1,580 people and secured roughly 1,270 convictions.
About 55% of January 6 prosecutions are misdemeanor cases, with charges like disorderly conduct or trespassing, according to Justice Department data. For those convicted, the vast majority were sentenced to probation or a few months in prison and were already released.
More than 730 people have been convicted of misdemeanor offenses in connection with January 6, according to the latest Justice Department estimates. Further, there are about 300 prosecutions still pending in court as of Monday, including many accused of violent felony crimes, such as assaulting police. Trump’s executive order called for those charges to be dropped with prejudice. (Which means the case cannot be reopened in the future.)
Trump has called January 6 “a day of love and peace” and claimed his supporters posed “zero threat.” These false claims are belied by hundreds of video clips of Trump supporters beating police with flagpoles, batons, wooden clubs and baseball bats, deploying stun guns and chemical sprays, and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police officers.
Who are these people Trump let off the hook for assaulting police?
More than 140 police officers were injured during the seven-hour siege, which also led directly and indirectly to the deaths of four Trump supporters in the mob and five police officers.
That group includes individuals like Julian Khater, who assaulted US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick and later pled guilty to assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon; Devlyn Thompson, who hit a police officer with a metal baton; and Robert Palmer, a Florida man who attacked police with a fire extinguisher, a wooden plank and a pole.
Andrew Valentin and Matthew Valentin, who both pleaded guilty in September to assaulting police and were each sentenced last week to two-and-a-half years in prison, walked out of the DC Central Detention Facility Monday night. Matthew Valentin had tried to tear a baton from a police officer on January 6, and Andrew Valentin threw a chair at a police line.
Also included among the 14 individuals whose sentences were commuted by Trump on Monday is Kelly Meggs, an Oath Keeper member and the leader of the Florida contingent of the group who was sentenced to a decade in prison for the seditious conspiracy conviction.
Clemency was also granted to Thomas Caldwell, who was not a member of the Oath Keepers, but led the effort to organize the quick reaction force so that the far-right group could quickly transport firearms into DC on January 6 should they decide it was necessary.
Oath Keepers member Jessica Watkins, who had been serving a nearly nine-year prison sentence for conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding and other felony charges, also had her sentence commuted by Trump. [CNN]
What is a Pardon or Commutation?
Pardons don’t erase a defendant’s criminal record and don’t overturn a conviction, though the pardon will be added to their record.
But a pardon forgives the offense and restores the recipient’s civil rights, like gun ownership or voting rights. For convicted rioters on probation, a pardon will end their probation early.
Presidents also have the power to commute sentences of people convicted of federal crimes. For instance, a president can reduce or eliminate someone’s prison sentence, which could pave the way for incarcerated January 6 rioters to be freed from custody.
Unlike a pardon, a commutation does not forgive the crime and does not restore the recipient’s civil rights. Similar to pardons, a commutation does not erase a conviction. [CNN]
REACTION TO TRUMP’S PARDONS AND COMMUTATIONS
The brother of US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died one day after being assaulted during the insurrection, condemned Trump’s plan to pardon many of the rioters.
Craig Sicknick recently urged supporters of a liberal advocacy group to sign a petition opposing the pardons, saying it will allow the rioters to “evade responsibility” and that “it’s just plain wrong,” according to a copy of the email obtained by CNN.
“Donald Trump and his loyalists not only celebrate the deadly mob that killed my brother — they are determined to pardon those responsible,” Craig Sicknick said in the message. “It is a betrayal to not only the families and loved ones of those who were injured and killed but to all Americans.” [CNN]
Most Americans oppose January 6 pardons
Most Americans oppose these pardons, according to recent polls on the topic that were conducted before Trump took office. Independents are also firmly against pardons for January 6 rioters – but they are very popular among Republicans, according to the data.
One poll found 59% of adults oppose pardoning people who “forced their way into the Capitol.” Two separate surveys found 66% and 62% opposition to pardoning anyone “convicted” in the attack on the Capitol. A poll from Quinnipiac University found 59% of registered voters oppose pardoning anyone who was “convicted and jailed” in connection with January 6.
But a large swath of Trump’s base supports clemency. The Quinnipiac that asked about pardons for already “convicted and jailed” found solid GOP support at 67%. [CNN]
WHY TRUMP DID IT
There were 6 big reasons:
- 1) Trump is proving that loyalty to him gets you special treatment including a get out of jail free card.
- 2) He is saying “up yours” to our legal system. Most would-be dictators chip away at the legal system so that eventually their word is the law.
- 3) He is testing Republican lawmakers for their loyalty to him. They should be in lock step with his revisionist history to avoid being attacked by him and his followers. Lawmakers must pretend they believe the rewritten version of history even though they know better.
- 4) Revenge and retribution.
- 5) Owning the libs which gets his base riled up and happy.
- 6) He may be creating his own militia or Brownshirts as Hitler did.*
WHO WERE HITLER’S BROWNSHIRTS?
The Brownshirts, recruited from various rough elements of society, were founded by Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1921.
David Crane, Chief Prosecutor, Sierra Leone writes:
Dictators, autocrats, and strongmen thrive on chaos in the beginning of their rise to power. At first they come to that power legally, within domestic law. Once in power the autocrat takes the law and uses it and bends it, eventually shaping it to his will. This is not an easy process and history shows that this phase of totalitarianism can be marked with strife, chaos, and even bloodshed in the streets. Though the law is a bulwark against tyranny it can also advance it.
Germany went through this tension early in the 1930s as Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party came to power. A mix of nationalism and racism, the party had been lurking in the shadows since the early 1920s. The Nazis, as they were known, had both, a political as well as a military purpose. Adolf Hitler was the head of the party overall, but he let Ernst Roehm loose with his brown shirted thugs called the Sturmabteilung (Assault Division) to sow division, chaos, and feed on the anger of a society in distress due to reparations from losing World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression.
Roehm’s Brown Shirts roamed the streets picking fights, assaulting non-Aryan citizens, particularly Jewish citizens. Shops were looted and burned, the Brown Shirts’ mission to stir unrest and the need for law and order became a campaign issue. Behind the scenes, Hitler encouraged Roehm, while at the same time publicly stated that his party was the party of law and order, a nationalistic group of concerned German citizens who wanted to make Germany great again, safe from the Jew and the Bolshevik. It soon became a campaign slogan. As the economy weakened further, Germany’s citizens began to look for alternatives to the current governmental structure. Hitler blamed the weak liberal government for its inability to govern a society that was controlled by Jews and Bolsheviks. As the economic stress tightened, chaos mounted, which was egged on by the Brown Shirts.
Germany was ripe for new and strong leadership and they found it in the guise of an unlikely politician, head of a once-obscure political party calling for a proud Germany, a greater Germany free of liberals and Jews who were weakening Dem Deutshe Volk (the greater German People). Making Germany great again rang true and getting control of the streets on a law and order platform of a greater Germany rallied the German people to elect Adolf Hitler Chancellor. In some ways, the rest is a sad and tragic history, but of note, the new Chancellor had no interest in being just the Chancellor; he wanted to establish total control over Germany and build a cult to advance his sordid personal agenda. He had no intention of ever giving up power again.
To do this he turned on those he felt were a threat to Germany—the press, the law, other political parties, and of course the ultimate boogeyman, the Jews, and Bolsheviks. He used the Brown Shirts, now a complete vigilante political army, to go after and harass and intimidate these threats.
Hmm, Does this sound familiar? Trump is targeting immigrants so far but even if you think “I am not an immigrant. I will be fine.” Think again. Once a dictator takes hold, rights and freedoms are curtailed. It doesn’t all happen at once. It happens over time. The dictator gets his supporters to rationalize and normalize what he is doing, just as Republicans in congress are doing now when they refuse to criticize Trump for undermining the rule of law in the first days of his second term by releasing bad actors who attacked police on January 6th. We have seen this play out before in the history of the world. We should understand what is coming. We should also refuse to normalize what Trump has done.
Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, and others are normalizing Trump’s pardons with “whataboutism”. “Yeah, well…what about Biden?!” Johnson and others allege Biden’s pardons of his family are comparable.
What Biden did was protect his family against retribution by the incoming Trump administration after Trump and others had vowed to investigate his family members without evidence of wrongdoing. What Trump did was release convicted criminals on the streets of our country after the criminal justice system fairly investigated them and they were found guilty of committing crimes for which they had been duly sentenced. There is no comparison to Biden’s pardons for his family.