Trump rewriting history on Day 1 of his second term in office

Click here for an article in The New York Times from January 20, 2025, by Alan Feuer, entitled "Trump Grants Sweeping Clemency to all Jan. 6 Rioters," subtitled "The extraordinary pardons and commutations extended to those who committed both violent and nonviolent crimes on Jan. 6, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy."

President Donald J. Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Mr. Trump’s moves amounted to an extraordinary reversal for rioters accused of both low-level, nonviolent offenses and for those who had assaulted police officers.

And they effectively erased years of efforts by federal investigators to seek accountability for the mob assault on the peaceful transfer of presidential power after Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. As part of his pardon order, Mr. Trump also directed the Justice Department to dismiss “all pending indictments” that remained against people facing charges for Jan. 6.

The article goes on:

The pardons will also wipe the slate clean for violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.

Moreover, Mr. Trump pardoned Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was serving a 22-year prison term after being convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy — a crime that requires prosecutors to prove that a defendant used violent force against the government.

Rewriting history:

Beyond the effect the pardons and commutations will have on the lives of those who received them, they also served Mr. Trump’s mission of rewriting the history of Jan. 6. Throughout his presidential campaign and after he won the election, he has tried repeatedly to play down the violent nature of the Capitol attack and reframe it, falsely, as a “day of love.”

Mr. Trump’s actions were in essence his boldest moves yet in seeking to recast his supporters — and himself — as the victims, not the perpetrators, of Jan. 6. By granting clemency to the members of a mob that used physical violence to stop the democratic process in its tracks, Mr. Trump gave the imprimatur of the presidency to the rioters’ claims that they were not properly prosecuted criminal defendants, but rather unfairly persecuted political prisoners.

 More:

More than half of the nearly 1,100 people who have been sentenced for their crimes were sentenced to at least some time in jail. Mr. Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader, received the longest prison term of any defendant — 22 years. He was followed closely by a Proud Boys member from California, David Dempsey, who had attacked the police with his hands, his feet, a flagpole, pepper spray and other weapons and was sent to prison for 20 years.

Both of those sentences will now be erased, along with others for far-right leaders like Mr. Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder, who was serving an 18-year prison term when the commutations were issued.

A misstep by Vance, quickly corrected:

A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance said on Fox News that rioters who had assaulted the police would most likely not get pardons.

“If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” Mr. Vance said, but added that “there’s a little bit of a gray area there.”

Mr. Vance’s comments elicited almost immediate outrage among many of the rioters.

“J6 defendants are very angry at JD Vance,” Philip Anderson, who was accused of taking part in a violent scrum in a tunnel outside the Capitol, wrote on social media. “All J6 defendants need to be saved.”

Mr. Vance quickly tried to walk back his remarks.

“I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up,” he wrote on X. “Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial.”