News"Violence will be rewarded": Legal experts say Trump's Jan. 6 pardons send...

“Violence will be rewarded”: Legal experts say Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons send a clear signal

With President Donald Trump’s pardoning and commuting the sentences of some 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, former Justice Department officials are warning that he’s sending the signal that he will pardon just about anyone who acts in his name.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order pardoning supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol just over four years ago, including those convicted of violent crimes and attacks against police officers that day. The pardon paves the way for the release of both violent offenders and the leaders of far-right groups, like Enrique Tarrio, a Proud Boys leader who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and released from prison Monday evening.

“This is a big one,” Trump said while signing the pardons. “We hope they come out tonight, frankly.”

In addition to the pardons, Trump also appointed a longtime GOP operative and “Stop the Steal” activist, Ed Martin, as the new interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., and instructed the Justice Department to drop its 470 ongoing criminal cases against Jan. 6 defendants, raising serious questions about prosecutorial independence going forward.

Dennis Fan, a former Justice Department official who now teaches at Columbia University, told Salon that the sweeping pardon is most comparable to when President Andrew Johnson pardoned thousands of Confederate officials in 1866.

“The pardon power just as a historical power has often been exercised in political ways. When you pardon someone, you are inherently sending a message that some federal prosecution or that some crime was not so bad,” Fan said.

Fan noted that the Jan. 6 pardons are distinguished from other pardons because the Jan. 6 convicts were storming the Capitol with the goal of keeping Trump in power and overturning the results of the 2020 election. Fan said that Trump’s pardons send the signal that anyone working in pursuit of his political goals will be shielded from legal consequences.

“I don’t think anything off the table. If you say, ‘I’m willing to push police officers and potentially hit them for my preferred political candidate to take office,’ even if that’s not what the outcome would be if the political process went through, you are sending the message that we don’t care about the consequences as long as we win,” Fan said. 

Fan went on to say that the pardons were a symptom of a shift among Republican officials with respect to their view of the Justice Department’s independence from the president.

“Big picture-wise, I think modern Republicans have a very different view of whether independence is a virtue,” he said. “It’s one of these things that you would’ve asked maybe 20 years ago and they would have said, ‘Of course we want it to be independent.'”

Now, though, Fan added: “A lot of modern Republicans, especially in the Justice [Clarence] Thomas world, think that everything should be controlled by the president.”

Barbara McQuade,

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