Washington In relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when thousands of his supporters stormed the building amid his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he was commuting the sentences of six of his supporters and issuing about 1,500 pardons.
He said this after arriving back at the White House on Monday night.
Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, has a counsel who informed NBC News on Monday that his client is being prepared for release from Louisiana’s FCI Pollock, a medium security federal prison. Tarrio had been found guilty of seditious conspiracy and was incarcerated in a federal prison for 22 years.
Attorney Nayib Hassan stated that he is being processed out. What kind of clemency he is getting is unknown to us.
One of Trump’s main campaign pledges would be fulfilled by the pardons. Trump attempted to disassociate himself from the attack immediately following the Jan. 6 incident by stating that lawbreakers ought to face consequences.
However, a new narrative developed over the ensuing years, and Trump soon started publicly expressing his support for the Jan. 6 rioters by referring to them as “hostages.”
One of the most important events in American history was the historic attack on the Capitol, which disrupted the peaceful handover of power.
More than 1,500 persons were charged with crimes as a result of it, and more than 1,100 defendants were found guilty, making it the largest FBI investigation ever. Many low-level riot offenders convicted of petty violations, such as unlawful parading inside the Capitol, were placed on probation.
However, hundreds of others were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for major felonies, including assaulting police officers with lethal or dangerous weapons.
Beyond the restoration of voting and gun rights for those convicted of felonies, pardons or commutations would have little practical impact on the approximately 700 defendants who had either never received prison sentences or had already served them when Trump issued the pardons.
Only a small percentage of the more than 600 individuals who received prison sentences remain incarcerated. Many of the inmates in the federal Bureau of Prisons were found guilty of violently attacking police officers guarding the U.S. Capitol during an assault on January 6 in which the defendants were armed with firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, ametal whips, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a huge Trump billboard, Trump flags, apitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches, and even an explosive device.
The attack left over 140 police officers wounded and several Trump supporters dead, including one who was shot while trying to enter the House Speaker’s Lobby and another who lost his life in a bloody skirmish at the lower west tunnel, which saw some of the day’s worst violence.
In his inauguration speech, Trump expressed his hope that he would one day be known as a “peacemaker and unifier,” but he made no mention of January 6.
Shortly after, however, Trump addressed the Jan. 6 defendants in front of an overflowing crowd of supporters in the Capitol, once again voicing his irrational allegation that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”
“I was going to talk about the J6 hostages,” Trump stated in that speech, referring to criminal defendants as “hostages”—including hundreds who confessed to their crimes under oath and others who were found guilty by a judge or a jury of their peers. However, you’ll be content because, as you know, actions speak louder than words. Additionally, there will be a lot of activity around the J6 captives.
It was always possible that Trump would retake power and pardon the defendants in the Capitol riots, but 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,” one lawyer who worked on the Jan. 6 cases as a federal prosecutor told NBC News.
According to the source, they and many of their colleagues “have no regrets about having pursued these cases,” and the endeavor is still very significant because it produced “a definitive, public factual record of what actually transpired” on January 6.
“Police officers and civilians who were attacked in the Capitol were reassured by these cases that there were people and that the Department of Justice understood what they had to go through and give up. “Hundreds of defendants admitted their crimes by entering guilty pleas in public court as a result of these cases, and hundreds more were found guilty at trial,” they claimed. “The study will probably end before it is finished, especially because the special counsel’s work was abruptly stopped. The record, however, remains intact.