Too many of the Jan. 6 rioters who received pardons from Donald Trump have had subsequent run-ins with the law since receiving presidential clemency, but Taylor Taranto is an especially unsettling example of the phenomenon.
Two years after joining the insurrectionist mob in January 2021, Taranto was arrested again after he showed up with firearms near Barack Obama’s home. As NBC News reported, investigators said they found two guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in Taranto’s van, along with a machete, when he was arrested. Prosecutors alleged that Taranto repeatedly said he was trying to get a “shot” and that he wanted to get a “good angle on a shot.”
Trump’s pardon of Taranto’s Jan. 6 crimes had nothing to do with these unrelated charges, and in May, Taranto was convicted of illegal possession of guns and ammunition.
In theory, the focus was then supposed to shift to sentencing. In practice, the focus has instead shifted to the prosecutors in the case.
The federal prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, asked a federal judge to sentence Taranto to 27 months in prison. That, in and of itself, is unremarkable.
What proved far more significant was how the prosecutors asked for the sentence. In their legal filing, they said Taranto had been among the “mob of rioters” on Jan. 6. They also briefly noted that, after the assault on the Capitol, Taranto “returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.”
As MSNBC reported, after using phrasing about Jan. 6 that the president and his operation don’t approve of, the Trump Justice Department not only put Valdivia and White on leave, but it also locked the line prosecutors out of devices and escorted them out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian added, “The news of this is reverberating around the Justice Department. It’s another warning that you can’t, as a prosecutor, tell what you believe is the truth about the Jan. 6 riot without having some risk to your future and your job.”
The broader DOJ purge has been underway for roughly nine months, with Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump appointees punishing prosecutors for resisting politically motivated cases, for criticizing the president eight years ago while in private practice and, in one recent instance, even for urging government officials to comply with a court order. For that matter, the full list of prosecutors caught up in the purge of federal law enforcement because they worked on cases the president didn’t like has been difficult to keep up with. But the swift action against Valdivia and White opens a new chapter: Some prosecutors are being punished for writing a sentencing memo using accurate words and phrases that are at odds with Trump-approved language. The politicization of federal law enforcement is ongoing, it’s getting worse and there’s no reason to be optimistic about this improving anytime soon. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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