WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said on Monday that he was issuing roughly 1,500 pardons and commuting the sentences of six of his supporters in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when thousands of them stormed the building amid his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him.
He made the remarks after returning to the White House Monday evening.
An attorney for Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, told NBC News on Monday that his client was being processed for release from FCI Pollock, a medium security federal prison in Louisiana. Tarrio was serving 22 years in federal prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy.
“He is being processed out,” attorney Nayib Hassan said. “We do not know what type of clemency he is receiving.”
The pardons would fulfill one of Trump’s central campaign promises. Immediately after the Jan. 6 attack, Trump sought to distance himself from the attack, saying that those who broke the law should be held accountable.
But over the next few years, a new narrative emerged, and Trump soon began openly signaling his support for Jan. 6 rioters, calling them “hostages.”
The unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol, when the peaceful transfer of power was interrupted, was one of the most significant moments in American history.
It resulted in the largest FBI investigation ever, with criminal charges against more than 1,500 people and criminal convictions against more than 1,100 defendants. Many low-level riot defendants were sentenced to probationary periods after being convicted of misdemeanor offenses, like unlawful parading inside the Capitol.
But hundreds of others who committed serious felonies, such as assaulting police with deadly or dangerous weapons, received significant prison sentences.
At the time Trump issued the pardons, there were about 700 defendants who either never received prison sentences or had already completed their sentences, meaning that pardons or commutations would have little practical impact on them, beyond the restoration of voting rights and gun rights for those who were convicted of felonies.
More than 600 people were sentenced to periods of incarceration, but only a fraction of them are still behind bars. Of those who are in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons, many were convicted of violent attacks on police officers protecting the U.S. Capitol during an assault in which Jan. 6 defendants were armed with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive “Trump” billboard, “Trump” flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device.
More than 140 police officers were injured and several Trump supporters died during the attack, including one who was shot when attempting to breach the House Speaker’s Lobby and another who died in the middle of a brutal battle at the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of the day took place.
Trump did not speak about Jan. 6 in his inauguration address, in which he said he hoped he would someday be remembered as a “peacemaker and unifier.”
But shortly thereafter, Trump spoke to an overflow crowd of supporters in the Capitol and addressed the Jan. 6 defendants, once again airing his baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”
“I was going to talk about the J6 hostages,” Trump said in that speech, using the term “hostages” to refer to criminal defendants, including hundreds who admitted to their criminal offenses under oath and others who were convicted by either a judge or a jury of their peers. “But you’ll be happy because, you know, it’s action, not words, that count. And you’re going to see a lot of action on the J6 hostages.”
One attorney who worked on Jan. 6 cases as a federal prosecutor told NBC News that it was always possible that Trump would return to power and pardon Capitol riot defendants, but that the Justice Department “pressed ahead anyway” because “political considerations should not play any part in the Justice Department’s evaluation of facts and law, which showed that these were crimes — some of them terribly serious crimes — that warranted prosecution.”
The source said that they, and, they suspected, many of their colleagues, “have no regrets about having pursued these cases,” and that the effort remains highly consequential because it created “a definitive, public factual record of what actually transpired” on Jan. 6.
“These cases assured police officers and civilians who were assaulted at the Capitol that there were people, and there was a Department of Justice, who recognized what they endured and sacrificed. These cases led to hundreds of defendants acknowledging their crimes by pleading guilty in open court and hundreds of others being found guilty at trial,” they said. “The work is likely be terminated before it can be fully completed, most significantly by the abrupt termination of the special counsel’s work. But the record stands.”
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