The violent January 6 prisoners Trump pardoned reenter a country increasingly endangered by political violence. He loves it.
Trump supporters storm the Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results on January 6, 2021.(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
Convicted felon Donald Trump, also known as our 47th president, unleashed such tyranny, cruelty, and idiocy on his first day in office that I can’t tell you which of his moves is “worst.” (Read my friend and colleague Elie Mystal for his breakdown of Trump’s attempted takedown of the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship.)
Trump’s quick move to pardon or commute the sentences of roughly 1,600 January 6 prisoners has to be at the top. It’s like he just liberated his own paramilitary force. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 and 22 years in prison, respectively, got out Tuesday. They and others who helped plan the violent insurrection are now back on the streets.
One Proud Boy told Reuters this would be a recruitment boon. “A lot of people stayed away from us after there were arrests,” he said. “Now they are going to feel like they are bulletproof.”
Oh, yeah, and Trump pardoned Robert Keith Packer, who was famously wearing that “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt. (Happy, Jared?)
If I were being charitable, I might say this is one rare example of Trump showing loyalty to others. Just as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts made sure Trump didn’t have to pay for inciting the January 6 riots, so did Trump bestow his own special form of “immunity” on his followers who were charged for that bloody day. He continued to call them “hostages.”
They “have already served years in prison and they’ve served them viciously,” Trump declared at a Tuesday night news conference. “It’s a disgusting prison. It’s been horrible. It’s inhumane. It’s been a terrible, terrible thing.”
For those of us who deeply hoped Trump would serve years in prison—a humane prison, because we don’t share right-wing values—these pardons are a terrible, terrible thing.
Just Security broke down exactly who Trump pardoned. While GOP leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, earlier said they expected him to pardon nonviolent protesters, and opposed any other move, in fact he pardoned more than 600 people convicted of assaulting or obstructing law enforcement officers. Almost 200 pleaded guilty to assaulting them. (Trump also pardoned 300 defendants who hadn’t been tried yet.)
Here’s just a swath of who were pardoned, thanks to Just Security:
At least three Jan. 6 defendants pleaded guilty to assaulting Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer Michael Fanone, who reportedly “suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury during the attack” and was forced to retire from the police force. Daniel Rodriguez pleaded guilty on Feb. 14, 2023 to tasing Fanone, as well as other charges. Another defendant, Kyle Young, pleaded guilty on May 5, 2022 to assaulting Fanone, as he “held the officer’s left wrist” and “pulled” Fanone’s “arm away from his body.” During the attack on officers in a Capitol tunnel, Young also “held a strobe light toward the police line and pushed forward a stick-like object.” A third man, Albuquerque Head, pleaded guilty to dragging Fanone into the crowd of rioters, yelling “I got one!” Rodriguez was subsequently sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, while Young received more than seven years and Head was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison.
Back the blue, indeed.
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At least one of the people Trump pardoned seems to agree. Pamela Hemphill, the so-called “MAGA granny” who served time in jail for her participation in the Capitol riot, said of her pardon, “I pleaded guilty because I was guilty, and accepting a pardon also would serve to contribute to their gaslighting and false narrative. We were wrong that day, we broke the law—there should be no pardons.”
The Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police also criticized the pardons and commutations, not only those of the January 6 prisoners but also of individuals whose sentences President Joe Biden commuted, saying they were “deeply discouraged” by both presidents’ actions. “The IACP and FOP firmly believe that those convicted of [killing or assaulting law enforcement officers] should serve their full sentences,” the groups said in a joint statement.
Maybe the most poignant testimony on Tuesday came from former Capitol Police sergeant Aquilino Gonell, who shared the messages alerting him when every convicted felon he’d testified against got released.
“Each email and call log is a different violent rioter who assaulted me in the tunnel. If you are defending these people who brutally assaulted the police, maybe you ARE NOT a supporter of the police and the rule of law to begin with. If you did you would want accountability.”
On Patriots.Win, a Trump-boosting website, at least two dozen people hoped for the executions of Democrats, judges, or law enforcement linked to the January 6 cases, Reuters reported. “They called for jurists or police to be hanged, pummeled to death, ground up in wood chippers or thrown from helicopters.
“Gather the entire federal judiciary into a stadium. Then have them listen and watch while the judges are beaten to death,” one wrote. “Cut their heads off and put them on pikes outside” the Justice Department.
Jacob Chansley, known as the Q-Anon shaman, had already served his three years in prison. But he celebrated his pardon this way: “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!”
Remembering that his mom demanded that Chansley be served organic meals in prison, I have a hard time believing he’ll become a cold-blooded killer. But that’s probably just my lack of imagination.
I don’t know how we turn Trump’s law enforcement backers against him with this awful news. I just know we have to try.
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Ahead of the inauguration, I took a few days off to prepare for this unfolding political, legal, and moral apocalypse. Like so many of us, I felt burnt out—not just from election season but from our 10 years of Trump. And if you covered his racist birther nonsense about President Barack Obama, as I did, that takes you back at least another four years of cruelty and crazy. I did wind up working on Inauguration Day, to write my remembrance of Cecile Richards, but that was a labor of love.
I think my time off helped, coming home two days into this nightmare, to see things more clearly. These pardons are evil. And a lot of people won’t know about it unless we talk about it, all of it, a lot.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.