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Vice President JD Vance on Sunday defended President Trump’s controversial move to grant clemency to more than 1,500 people involved in the Jan. 6 riots, after saying he opposed pardons for violent offenders.
Vance, 40, argued that the Trump administration made good on the president’s promise to evaluate the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters on a “case by case basis.
“What the president said consistently on the campaign … is that he was going to look at a case by case basis … and that’s exactly what we did,” Vance told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” in the pretaped interview.
“We looked at 1,600 cases. And the thing that came out of it, Margaret, is that there was a massive denial of due process of liberty, and a lot of people were denied their constitutional rights,” he told host Margaret Brennan. “I think he made the right decision.”
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump, 78, said he intended to grant clemency to the Capitol rioters, but he had been coy about how targeted his approach would be.
Vance said earlier this month that people who protested “peacefully” should be pardoned.
But he also added, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
There were 608 people charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding or obstructing officers during the civil unrest, and of that group, 174 were accused of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
Some people were slapped with multi-year sentences for assault on police officers or other serious crimes during the insurrection.
Trump, 78, has gotten swift blowback over the fact that some of the freed rioters had bludgeoned and carried out such acts of violence against cops.
“We’re not saying that everybody did everything perfectly,” Vance acknowledged Sunday, while accusing the Biden administration of “unjustly prosecuting well over a thousand Americans in a way that was politically motivated.
“Violence against a police officer is not justified. But that doesn’t mean that you should have Merrick Garland’s weaponized Department of Justice expose you to [an] incredibly unfair process,” Vance replied when pressed on that point.
Vance compared the prosecution of the Capitol rioters to the government’salleged kid-glove handling of the Black Lives Matter rioters in 2020 who vandalized businesses across the country, and he accused the Justice Department of having a “double standard.”
“We rectified a wrong, and I stand by it,” Vance said.
But Trump’s decision on the Jan. 6 pardons had been met with unease even in Republican circles. Some critics have argued that he should have been more selective.
“When you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large. And it’s not what you want to do to protect cops. But he has that power,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
The 47th president’s mass clemency came during a blizzard of executive orders and other actions Trump took when he roared back into the Oval Office on Inauguration Day.
“They’ve already been in jail for a long time,” Trump told reporters while approving the sweeping clemency. “These people have been destroyed.”
Days later, congressional staffers were shocked when Oath Keepers founder Steward Rhodes was spotted in the Longworth House Office Building.
Rhodes had been slapped with an 18-year sentence related to seditious conspiracy charges from Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors accused him of giving marching orders to members of his militia group that ransacked the Capitol that day.
“My only regret is that they should have brought rifles,” Rhodes bemoaned in an audio recording later obtained by federal investigators. “We should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang f–king [then-House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi from the lamppost.”
A federal judge has since barred some of the key figures in the riots such as Rhodes from entering the US Capitol.
In addition to the mass clemency, Trump instructed his Justice Department to cease prosecutions in some 450 cases still pending.
