Although Vice President JD Vance said two weeks ago that those who committed violence during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot “shouldn’t be pardoned,” he defended the 1,500 pardons President Trump issued last week, which included the most violent offenders.
In an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” Vance was asked by Brennan about the 1,500 pardons issued by Mr. Trump last week to people accused or convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. She noted that just two weeks ago, in an interview on Fox News, Vance had said, ‘If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.'”
She asked Vance, “Did you counsel the president against these blanket pardons for 1,500 people — including those who committed violence?”
Vance, in his first interview since he became vice president, countered that she had omitted the next thing he had said in the Fox interview, that “there are gray areas.” He accused the Justice Department led by Merrick Garland of having “denied constitutional protections in the prosecutions,” and of applying “double standards in how sentences were applied to the J6 protesters, versus other groups.”
Mr. Trump extended clemency to those convicted of violent and serious crimes, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. He also ordered the attorney general to dismiss all pending indictments related to the Capitol riot, essentially eradicating the Biden Justice Department’s massive effort to hold accountable those who participated in the assault.
The vice president told Brennan that Mr. Trump had said defendants would be considered on a “case-by-case basis, and that’s exactly what we did. We looked at 1,600 cases.” He accused the Biden Justice Department of having denied “a lot of people” their constitutional rights, and he said he believed Mr. Trump “made the right decision.”
Brennan described two of the assaults against police officers on Jan. 6: “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 conceded, “There’s what the people actually did on January the 6th, and we’re not saying that everybody did everything perfectly,” but he blamed the Justice Department for “unjustly prosecuting well over a thousand Americans in a way that was politically motivated.”
Asked again whether “violence like that against a police officer ever justified,” Vance said it “is not justified,” and then repeated his accusation that the Jan. 6 defendants were exposed to an unfair process, “a double standard that was not applied to many people, including, of course, the Black Lives Matter rioters who killed over two dozen people and never had the weight of a weaponized Department of Justice come against them.”
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May 2020, millions participated in Black Lives Matter protests — over 2,000 in U.S. cities and in 60 countries around the world, according to The New York Times. According to the Trump-era Justice Department, 300 people were charged with federal crimes, including approximately 35 individuals who have been charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer and related offenses.
“We rectified a wrong,” Vance said, “and I stand by it.”
But one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, appearing on “Meet the Press” earlier Sunday, said he didn’t “like the idea of bailing people out of jail or parting people who burn down cities and big up cops, whether you’re Republican or Democrat.”
Graham continued that the pardons were within Mr. Trump’s “legal authority,” but he added, “I fear that you will get more violence.”
“Pardoning the people who went into the Capitol and beat up a police officer, violently, I think was a mistake, because it seems to suggest that’s an okay thing to do,” he said.
