By any fair measure, Donald Trump’s pardon pen has been getting a workout. In recent weeks, the president has extended clemency to, among others, the spouse of a congressional loyalist, those who helped him try to overturn the 2020 election results and a man who helped finance the president’s stablecoin and put money in the Trump family’s pockets.
But looking back over the last year, among the most scandalous of the president’s pardons were his commutations for Jan. 6 rioters, including felons who violently clashed with police officers defending the U.S. Capitol. Those pardons were initially issued just hours into the Republican’s second term.
Nearly 10 months later, however, the president has issued another round of pardons for Jan. 6 rioters. The New York Times reported:
President Trump issued pardons this weekend to two people convicted of crimes stemming from the events of Jan. 6, 2021, but not directly tied to the attack on the Capitol. … The pardons were announced online on Saturday by Ed Martin, a longtime supporter of the Jan. 6 rioters who is the Justice Department’s pardon attorney. And they were part of Mr. Trump’s continuing efforts to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 and to depict those who took part in the storming of the Capitol not as criminals, but rather as victims of a weaponized justice system — much like he sees himself.
A Kentucky man named Dan Wilson, for example, had already received a pardon from Trump for his Jan. 6 crimes. But as part of the same investigation, investigators discovered a cache of illegal weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his home — firearms he was not legally permitted to have due to previous felony convictions.
Wilson’s lawyers insisted the presidential pardon applied to the gun charge; prosecutors and a federal judge disagreed; so Trump re-pardoned him. If that weren’t quite enough, the president also pardoned a Florida woman named Suzanne Kaye, who was sentenced to prison for threatening to shoot FBI agents. From the Times’ account: [FBI] agents reached out to Ms. Kaye by phone three weeks after Jan. 6, court papers say. … But before the meeting took place, the papers say, Ms. Kaye posted a series of videos online threatening the agents. One of the videos, the documents say, showed her taking a drink from a nearly empty whiskey bottle and declaring that if the agents showed up at her home, she would exercise her ‘Second Amendment right’ to shoot them. Taking stock of the broader circumstances, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut explained via social media, “Trump is now pardoning January 6th rioters for unrelated crimes, just to reward them for their violence to keep him in power. The Republican Party is in the full-time business of endorsing and incentivizing political violence.”
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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