On the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland attempted to convey the enormous scope of law enforcement’s effort to bring rioters to justice, calling it “one of the largest, most complex and require more resources. investigations in our history.”
With the stroke of a pen, President Donald Trump turned that effort into dust Monday with a blanket pardon of virtually all federal defendants on Jan. 6, save for a few whose prison sentences were still commuted.
“I don’t think that’s right,” Jason Manning, who spent years as a line prosecutor working on the Jan. 6 cases in Washington, told NBC News in an exclusive interview. “The pardons seem atrocious to me.”
People at the Justice Department and legal experts call the move a dangerous and unprecedented use of the pardon power that dealt a crushing blow not only to federal law enforcement but also to the American justice system. They say it makes a mockery of years of work by FBI agents, prosecutors and federal judges, some of whom Trump appointed, after an effort that included charges against 1,583 defendants, more than 1,000 guilty pleas and more than 200 convictions at trial. . Some are concerned that this signals an open season on political violence, given that 608 of the defendants were charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers or officers, while others are concerned the marker set for future presidents.
Manning said the pardons were an affront to the many police officers who were seriously injured that day.
“We have to think about what it means for those officers and their loved ones to receive this message that these assaults don’t matter, that attacking police officers in that way is okay,” he said.
When Manning joined the effort to prosecute January 6 violators, he said, he thought about it in terms of protecting democracy. But after spending time with police officers who responded to the riots, “once I got a sense of the hell they went through and how much they endured to try to defend this country, the cases really became as much about vindication as victims,” continuous.
Trump said in his order granting pardons that the sweeping move “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated against the American people over the past four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
In total, Trump pardoned approximately 1,500 defendants on January 6, including those convicted of brutal assaults on police. Only 14 riot organizers were not pardoned, but still received commutations of long prison sentences. Trump also ordered the dismissal of hundreds of cases that were still being prosecuted.
Alberto Gonzales, who was attorney general during President George W. Bush’s administration, told NBC News that he would have urged Trump not to pardon violent criminals.
“Obviously, to me it’s disappointing for anyone involved in a violent crime to get a full pardon,” he said. “If you assault a police officer, it is a very serious crime and there should be a serious prison sentence associated with it. “I don’t know how you can argue that this is a witch hunt when the prosecutions were successful.”
Gonzales, dean of the Belmont University School of Law, also lamented the waste of resources.
“The department spent a lot of time and money processing these cases. All that is in vain. Talk about government waste, right?” said.
Inside the Justice Department, officials were still grappling with a presidential action that struck like a bolt of lightning. Nearly everyone expected some pardons on Jan. 6, but Trump’s own vice president and attorney general nominee has said in recent days that people convicted of attacking law enforcement officials should not receive favorable treatment. Many Republican members of Congress, who were in danger during the attack, have said the same.
One senior career Justice Department official called the blanket pardons a “terrible injustice,” while another said it “sends a very strong green light for political violence” that “basically signals that nothing that happened on January was bad.” It is what I see as a campaign of personal retribution” by Trump.
The first official said he was even more concerned about the appointment of Ed Martin, who has been a prominent supporter of the January 6 defendants, as acting federal prosecutor in Washington, DC.
“That could really drive people out,” the first official said. “Pardons are terrible. But if it were limited to pardons without a lasting assertion of control, that would be bad, but not fundamentally contrary to how the U.S. attorney’s office would operate in the future. We have seen very controversial pardons over the years. … This is extreme not only in pardons, but also in the future.”
Mike Davis, a lawyer who informally advises Trump on law enforcement issues, defended pardoning even those who committed violence. He told NBC News that the Biden administration “went after” the Jan. 6 defendants by labeling them insurrectionists and treated them differently than others who committed similar crimes.
He did not oppose criminal charges being filed against those who attacked police officers, Davis said, but even those people “have suffered quite a bit over the last four years. They have already paid a higher price than anyone else [Black Lives Matter] protester who attacked the police.”
Even violent rioters who had not yet been prosecuted, he said, have paid a heavy price.
Among some legal experts and attorneys who have represented the Jan. 6 defendants, there was a more limited argument to justify pardons of at least nonviolent offenders: that the Justice Department was unusually and unfairly harsh on them.
“The resources spent by the FBI and the Department of Justice to prosecute the average J6er were crazy,” said one lawyer who asked not to be identified because he regularly deals with the Department of Justice. “Particularly given that the Department of Justice has either made blanket dismissals for many crazy acts of vandalism/violence in other contexts or simply prosecuted ringleaders.”
There were stories of members of the mob who did nothing more than illegally enter the Capitol, plead guilty to serious crimes and spend time in jail, in many cases a devastating event.
Paul H. Robinson, the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, argued in an interview that authorities did not devote similar resources and intensity to people who engaged in violence during the summer riots. of 2020 in response to the police. Murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Many Republican politicians have also made that argument.
“It’s hard to look at the situation and not say there’s a big political component here,” Robinson said. “I think there was really a kind of overzealousness at the Justice Department to turn this into something it wasn’t.”
Justice Department officials disagree, arguing that the attack on the Capitol was different from other riots because it was an attempt to prevent the legal transfer of power that occurred in plain sight, with an unprecedented amount of video evidence.
But even many skeptics agree with prosecutors on this: Trump went too far when he pardoned people who participated in violence.
“The guys with real violence, real planning, weapons, etc., those pardons are ugly and bad,” said the lawyer who regularly deals with the Justice Department. “I guess they just didn’t want to have the headache of separating the sheep from the goats, so they opted for the blanket.”
Robinson, in an op-ed published Monday morning in The Hill newspaper, urged Trump to exercise restraint on the Jan. 6 pardons. He told NBC News: “He obviously didn’t listen to me. “It’s not good for the country and it’s not good for the president.”
Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and professor at George Washington University Law School, said he viewed the pardons as “a terrible blow to the justice system, and I would say it is one of Trump’s most dangerous abuses of power to date.” date”. The signal it sends is that if you commit crimes in Trump’s name, he will have your back and make sure you are not held accountable.”
Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School, called it “a situation in which there is not a thoughtful and insightful use of the presidential pardon power, but a president pardoning his allies for their participation in a violent coup d’état.”
Some legal scholars, including Ackerman, said former President Joe Biden’s last-minute preemptive pardons to members of his family were also an abuse of the pardon power.
But Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and NBC News contributor who agreed that some of Biden’s pardons were deeply problematic, said: “Whataboutism doesn’t work here.” He added: “Pardons are most appropriate for people who have paid their debt to society, shown contrition and remorse, accepted responsibility and earned grace. None of that seems to have been part of the Trump equation.”
Trump and his allies have long waged a disinformation campaign about January 6, claiming that Antifa or FBI agents provoked the riot or that descriptions of the violence were exaggerated. Trump repeatedly called the January 6 defendants “hostages.”
In addition to video evidence documenting the violence, independent investigations debunked conspiracy theories, including one by the Justice Department’s inspector general that found no evidence that anyone linked to the FBI did anything to incite the riot.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, pointedly addressed the lies in a sentencing opinion a year ago, writing: “In my thirty-seven years on the court, I cannot remember a time when such justifications unfounded criminal offenses The activity has become widespread.”
“The Court fears,” Lamberth continues, “that such destructive and misguided rhetoric may portend greater danger to our country.”
Manning, a former prosecutor in the Jan. 6 cases, said that while the pardons are painful, they do not “change the fact that these crimes were committed” or that the Justice Department obtained more than 1,000 convictions.
“So, speaking only for myself, I have no regrets about the effort we put into building these cases, and even after these pardons, the record stands,” he said.
