Last week in the U.S. Capitol, GOP Sen. Steve Daines of Montana told The Dispatch he trusted Donald Trump to “very thoughtfully go through” the list of January 6 convicts and “do exactly the right thing” when deciding which to pardon.
Trump had, after all, promised to go “case-by-case,” and Vice President J.D. Vance said a week before the inauguration: “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
But on Monday night, newly inaugurated President Trump issued a blanket pardon that effectively exonerated almost all of the nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants, including hundreds who had committed acts of violence against police officers. Only about 250 convicts were still in prison, and with the stroke of a pen Trump set them all free. The only 14 individuals who didn’t immediately get a pardon—including those convicted of seditious conspiracy for organizing the attack—had their sentences commuted.
When The Dispatch caught up in the Capitol last week with Daines—who said in 2021 that January 6 rioters were “domestic terrorists” who “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”—he assiduously avoided commenting on whether Trump had done the right thing. In a subway car on Tuesday, Daines declined to take a question about the January 6 pardons. When asked the following day about former President Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons, Daines said: “We’re moving forward.”
“You asked me about pardons yesterday,” Daines added. But weren’t the pardons a slap in the face to the police officers who were assaulted while protecting members of Congress? In reply, Daines again muttered something about “moving forward” and said: “Go write the story you want to write.”
The story I’d like to write would be how members of Congress had at least maintained some semblance of their convictions on this matter. But that’s a story Daines as well as many of his Republican and Democratic colleagues make impossible to write in the wake of both Trump and former President Joe Biden’s recent pardons.
In 2021, for example, Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz referred to the January 6 rioters as domestic terrorists—comments he partially walked back in an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight in 2022 while still maintaining the term “terrorist” applied to those who had assaulted police officers. “For a decade, I have referred to people who violently assault police officers as terrorists. I’ve done so over and over and over again,” Cruz told Carlson in 2022.
Asked for comment this week about Trump’s pardons of those who had assaulted police officers on January 6, Cruz told The Dispatch: “Call our press office.” Cruz’s press office did not reply to a request for comment.
Some Republicans in Congress, such as Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, did speak out against Trump’s January 6 pardons of violent offenders, but they tended to be the exception. Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski told The Dispatch she worried for the police officers who “put themselves in harm’s way. They suffered injury. They suffered, in addition to physical harm, great mental stress that was not just limited to that day.” Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Washington state, called the pardons for those who assaulted police a “middle finger to law enforcement and to our judicial system.”
There was, of course, widespread outrage over Trump’s January 6 pardons among Democrats on Capitol Hill, but Biden’s last-minute pardons undermined his party’s credibility on the matter too.
In addition to his pardon of his son Hunter Biden in December, the former president pardoned his siblings minutes before leaving office. While he claimed those pardons were simply a response to Trump’s threats of politically motivated retribution, Biden’s Department of Justice had already opened investigations into his brother Jim. In December 2020, as Trump reportedly considered issuing preemptive pardons for his children, Biden said: “It concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks [at] us as a nation of laws and justice.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer condemned Trump’s January 6 pardons as “un-American,” but when asked this week at a press conference if it was appropriate for Biden to give his family members preemptive pardons on the way out the door, Schumer said: “We’re looking forward.” Schumer’s words almost precisely mirrored the talking points of Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson on the January 6 pardons. (Shortly after calling for everyone to move on from Trump’s January 6 pardons, Johnson announced the creation of a House subcommittee to investigate “false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee.”)
Biden may have also undermined his party’s credibility on January 20 by commuting the sentence of Leonard Peltier, a man convicted of murdering two FBI agents at close range in the 1970s. Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had declined to grant Peltier clemency, and a parole board had denied his appeal in 2024. “Peltier is a remorseless killer, who brutally murdered two of our own – Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams,” then-FBI director Chris Wray wrote to Biden on January 10. “Granting Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified and would be an affront to the rule of law.”
Clemency for Peltier had become a cause for some because he was an activist for Native American rights, and his advocates argued that prosecutorial misconduct played a role in his conviction. Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who signed a letter calling for clemency for the 80-year-old Peltier, told The Dispatch: “Commutation is different [than a pardon]. He’s an elderly man who’s dying who’s been let out of prison to go home to be with his family.”
Warren said there was no equivalence between Biden’s commutation for the man convicted of double murder and Trump’s January 6 pardons: “Donald Trump yesterday pardoned people who participated in an insurrection.”
Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, another advocate of clemency for Peltier, told The Dispatch: “The lead prosecutor in the case believes that it was wrongly decided.”
“My Republican colleagues are deeply, deeply embarrassed by [Trump’s January 6 pardons] and are trying to find some sort of false equivalence,” Schatz said. “I was there in that chamber [on January 6] and then I was there in the secure facility and we were all pissed and outraged and unified, and they are never going to say it publicly, but they are, to a person, disgusted by this decision.”
The power is sweeping and embedded in the Constitution, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that the president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution over pardons. But Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who has condemned both Trump’s January 6 pardons and Biden’s pardons for his family members, called again this week reforming the presidential pardon process. “To really [reform] it, you’d have to have a constitutional amendment,” Klobuchar told The Dispatch. Without a constitutional amendment, she suggested that presidents could voluntarily submit to a congressionally funded commission for vetting pardons, similar to what many governors do. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut also called for reforming the pardon power and suggested Congress may have some power in this area. “The presidential pardon power in the Constitution is very broad, but there is the possibility for at least requiring transparency, and opportunity for opposition to be expressed,” Blumenthal said.
Freshman Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey also spoke out against Biden’s pardons of his family members. “It feels like it’s like some exclusive club,” Kim said. “If you’re in the club, then you get to pull strings, make some connections and, you know, the law doesn’t apply to you.”
Trump, who has called for the death penalty for drug dealers, showed on Tuesday what it takes to join that club when he pardoned drug kingpin Ross Ulbricht—the fulfillment of a campaign promise Trump made to woo the votes of Libertarian Party members.
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