Trump Vows To Pardon Jan. 6 Defendants, Calling It Only Fair To The People Who Did What He Asked Them To Do

The Filing

CONROE, Texas. Addressing a friendly crowd at a Save America rally Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump pledged that, should he return to office, he would pardon the more than 700 people then facing federal charges in connection with the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, describing the prosecution of individuals who breached the building at his urging as a grave injustice that only he could correct.

"If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly," Trump told supporters. "And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly." The former president did not specify which portion of storming the seat of American government in an effort to halt the counting of electoral votes he believed had been handled with insufficient fairness.

The remarks arrived a little over a year after the assault, which left scores of police officers injured and which Trump had encouraged in real time before declining for several hours to ask the rioters to leave. By the night of the rally, federal prosecutors had charged hundreds of defendants with offenses ranging from trespassing to assaulting officers to seditious conspiracy, a tally the former president cited not as evidence of a crime but as evidence of a persecution.

Observers noted that the pledge functioned, in practical terms, as a standing offer: loyalty to Trump on January 6 would, under a future Trump administration, be retroactively rendered lawful. Sources close to the former president characterized the promise as both a gesture of gratitude to his most committed supporters and a useful reminder to anyone weighing future cooperation with investigators that clemency in Trumpworld flows to the devoted and not to the forthcoming.

Reaction within his own party was mixed. Senator Lindsey Graham, who had voted to acquit Trump at his second impeachment trial weeks after the attack, called the suggestion of pardons "inappropriate" and said he did not wish to signal that it was acceptable to defile the Capitol. The former president, who had built much of the evening around the premise that defiling the Capitol had been a reasonable response to losing an election, appeared untroubled.

At press time, Trump had clarified that the fairness he sought applied specifically to the people who had attacked the building on his behalf, and not to the officers they attacked.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who recasts the mob that stormed Congress on his behalf as innocent victims, converts his own legal and political exposure into a loyalty test he personally administers, and signals to potential witnesses that silence will be rewarded and cooperation will not.
§The January 6 defendants and convicted rioters, offered a public path to having charges including assault on police officers and obstruction of an official proceeding eventually erased.
§Far-right and militia organizations whose members faced seditious conspiracy charges, now handed a former president's on-the-record promise of future clemency.
§Save America PAC and the small-dollar fundraising operation, for which a rally built around grievance and the prospect of pardons reliably converts outrage into donations.
§Any future participant in election interference, now on notice that violence undertaken in Trump's name carries the prospect of a pardon rather than a sentence.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment