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Prez-Elect Trump reiterates pledge to grant Jan 6 pardons on “first day” in office

By Douglas Berman

Prez-Elect Donald Trump conducted a new interview during which, according to this NBC News piece, he discussed his pardon plans for January 6 defendants.  Here is the start of the article:

President-elect Donald Trump said he is looking to issue pardons to his supporters involved in the attacks on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as soon as his first day in office, saying those incarcerated are “living in hell.”

Trump’s comments, the most sweeping he’s made since winning the 2024 election, came during an exclusive interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker. He also said that he will not seek to turn the Justice Department on his political foes, and warned that some members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack “should go to jail.”  On his first day in office, Trump said he will bring legal relief to the Jan. 6 rioters who he said have been put through a “very nasty system.”

“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said, adding later about their imprisonment, “they’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”  Trump said that there “may be some exceptions” to his pardons “if somebody was radical, crazy” and pointed to some debunked claims about anti-Trump elements and law enforcement operatives infiltrating the crowd.

At least 1,572 defendants have been charged and more than 1,251 have been convicted or pleaded guilty in the attack. Of those, at least 645 defendants have been sentenced to periods of incarceration ranging from a few days to 22 years in federal lockup.  There are roughly 250 people currently in custody, most of them serving sentences after being convicted. A handful are being held in pretrial custody at the order of a federal judge.

Trump didn’t rule out pardoning individuals who had pleaded guilty, including when Welker asked him about those who had admitted to assaulting police officers. “Because they had no choice,” Trump said.

Asked about the more than 900 others who had pleaded guilty in connection to the attack but were not accused of assaulting officers, Trump suggested that they had been pressured unfairly into taking guilty pleas. “I know the system.  The system’s a very corrupt system,” Trump said. “They say to a guy, ‘You’re going to go to jail for two years or for 30 years.’ And these guys are looking, their whole lives have been destroyed. For two years, they’ve been destroyed.  But the system is a very nasty system.”

The crimes that have been charged range from unlawful parading to seditious conspiracy in the sprawling Jan. 6 investigation that included rioters captured on video committing assaults on officers, and who admitted under oath that they’d done so.

If Trump makes good on this pledge to grant pardons to the vast majority of Jan 6 defendants on this first day, he will set all sorts of modern clemency records.  These clemency statistics assembled by DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney show it has been half a century since a President has granted more than a few pardons at the start of a term in the Oval Office, and it has been a full century since a President had done more than 1200 pardons in his entire tenure.  (Notably, these DOJ data leave out mass clemencies like Prez Biden’s mass marijuana possession pardons; if the Trump does Jan 6 pardons en masse, I am not quite sure how best to run the numbers.)

And, of course, as I have covered in recent posts here and here, lots of folks are urging Prez Biden to go big on clemency in his final weeks in office.  Biden statement in support of his most recent clemency decision suggests, when it comes to his child, he largely agrees with Trump’s view on the “very nasty” federal criminal justice.  But since I dooubt, especially in this arena, that Biden is capable of “acting very quickly,” we may have to keep waiting to find out if any other people’s children might Biden’s grace.

Excitingly, any and everyone interested in these issues still has time to register for the online event, “President Biden’s Pardon Legacy and the Future of the Federal Clemency Power,” being hosted on December 10 by the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center (DEPC) at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.  More details and a list of panelist can be found on this event page.  

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