Ever since Donald Trump granted blanket clemency to more than a thousand Jan. 6 defendants, an open legal question has been how far that executive grace extends beyond offenses committed that day in 2021. For example, does it cover a defendant’s conviction for subsequently plotting to kill law enforcement who investigated him?
No, a federal judge in Tennessee ruled Monday.
It might seem like an obvious answer, but U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan had to formally reach it nonetheless. In doing so, the George W. Bush appointee laid down a judicial marker in the litigation fallout from Trump’s blanket pardon, as defendants argue that the clemency reaches beyond the day of Jan. 6 — even as the Trump Justice Department sides with some defendants, opposes others and sometimes changes its mind about how far it goes.
The DOJ didn’t side with Edward Kelley in the case decided Monday.
Kelley had been convicted in Washington, D.C., of assaulting law enforcement and other crimes committed Jan. 6 that were clearly covered by Trump’s order. But he was separately convicted of the murder conspiracy in his home state of Tennessee, based on evidence that, in December 2022, he planned to murder law enforcement, including FBI agents and employees.
As a reminder, Trump’s blanket pardon was for “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Varlan parsed that language — guided partly by a book on interpreting legal texts co-authored by late GOP icon Antonin Scalia — and concluded that the Tennessee charges are “temporally and spatially unrelated to ‘events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.’” The Tennessee case “was separated from the defendant’s conduct in the D.C. Case by years and miles,” Varlan wrote. Again, the conclusion may seem obvious, but the fact that Kelley raised the issue meant the judge had to address it. Closer cases could raise closer questions and be further complicated by DOJ siding with the defense, unlike in Kelley’s case. But judges considering the issue might wish to draw on Varlan’s opinion going forward as a body of law develops on how far Trump’s Jan. 6 clemency goes. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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