This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 21 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
The first full week of Donald Trump’s second term is coming to a close and, until this moment, the U.S. president explicitly directing prosecutors to drop cases would be an administration-consuming scandal — and for good reason.
According to a tally, the DOJ has now dropped more than 300 pending cases related to Jan. 6. simply because Trump told them to.
That was the core of the degradation of the rule of law embodied in the Watergate scandal. The president of the United States attempted to wield the Justice Department as a personal tool for corrupt and abusive ends. It ended Richard Nixon’s presidency and permanently tarnished his reputation.
Trump is starting his second term by doing just that and he’s not trying to hide it. According to a tally by reporter Brad Heath from Reuters, the Justice Department has now dropped more than 300 pending cases related to Jan. 6. simply because Trump told them to.
I want you to think about this precedent for a moment: Let’s say your elderly father was ripped off along with thousands of others by a scammer, only for the scammer to finally be indicted by a local U.S. attorney. The precedent being set here is that no matter the harm caused or evidence of criminality, if that scammer is a Trump supporter, or a donor or an associate, the president can just order the DOJ to drop the case.
Imagine any federal crime, up to the most violent: That same precedent now hangs over those too.
Trump, of course, also pardoned the Jan. 6 participants who had already been convicted, about 1,500 in total. That includes people who violently beat police officers defending the Capitol.
Aquilino Gonell, a former sergeant of the Capitol Police, was one of the police officers attacked that day. After Trump announced those pardons on Monday, Gonell’s phone started blowing up. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has a system in which crime victims and witnesses are notified when a person they were harmed by or testified against is released from prison. Gonell posted screenshots on social media that showed his phone log full of calls notifying him that prisoners against whom he had testified — or who assaulted him — were now out free.
Another officer, Michael Fanone, was in court on Tuesday, seeking protective orders against the five men who assaulted him during the riot and who will now walk free.
Among those who were released from prison were members of the far-right, armed groups the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who were convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy for their role in plotting the Jan. 6 attack.
One of them, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, was sentenced to 18 years in prison in the spring of 2023. He is now a free man.
“I think Trump did the right thing,” Rhodes told reporters. “President Trump did the right thing, and letting these guys out, pardoning them because they did not get a fair trial. That’s not on him, that’s on the DOJ. You run a fair system and run fair trials.”
Rhodes was found guilty by a jury of his peers. But none of that seems to matter now.
And so here we are, almost at the end of the first full week of Trump’s presidency, and it is clear as ever that this is the culmination of a yearslong political project by the president.
Jan. 6 isn’t some side thing. It wasn’t a moment when Trump was weak and he got carried away. It’s the pinnacle of the project, which is a frontal assault on American democracy. Trump’s intentions here are clear as day. They were clear in the months leading up to Jan. 6, when Trump tried to overturn the election. They were clear on Jan. 6, when the rioters he just freed tried to do that by force. And it was clear in the intervening four years when Trump ran on a campaign to explicitly finish the job he started that day. Trump wants his people back on the street and he wants you to think there’s nothing that can be done to challenge him.
On his first day in power, he did that as best he could. And he did it in such a wanton, craven and reckless manner, that it contradicts what even his own vice president and nominee for attorney general have been saying in recent days. During her confirmation hearing, Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi told the Senate she condemned “any violence on a law enforcement officer in this country.” JD Vance told Fox News, “If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Well, that wasn’t so obvious to Trump, who has a long record of supporting, in word and deed, political violence. Trump’s promise to be a dictator on Day 1 is a promise to concentrate power in a way that’s completely anathema to the constitutional order that we’ve had since our country’s founding. In many respects, it represents an assault on it. There is no other way to put it and you should be clear-eyed about it. Trump wants his people back on the street and he wants you to think there’s nothing that can be done to challenge him. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
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