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20 hours ago
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Donald Trump supporters who carried out violence during the US Capitol attack in early January 2021 should not be pardoned by him after he begins his second presidency, JD Vance said Sunday.
The incoming vice-president’s remarks on Fox News Sunday with host Shannon Bream slightly deviated from a prior promise by Trump to consider pardoning even those who acknowledged assaulting police officers, saying “a very corrupt system” left them with “no choice”.
“If you committed violence on that day, obviously you should not be pardoned,” Vance said to Bream.
Yet, later off air, Vance assured that pardons remained on the table for at least some convicted in the 6 January 2021 attack, saying the second Trump administration cared about “people who got a garbage trial” and were “unjustly locked up”.
More than 1,200 people have been convicted in connection with an attack on Congress that has been linked to several deaths – including officer suicides – and was meant to keep Trump in the Oval Office after he lost re-election in 2020 to Joe Biden.
After he won a second presidential term by defeating Kamala Harris in the 5 November election, Trump went on NBC News and said one of his first acts in office would be to free convicted Capitol attackers prosecuted in a “very nasty system”.
“The system’s a very corrupt system,” said Trump, who himself was convicted in May in New York state court on felony charges of criminally falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels. “And … their whole lives have been destroyed.”
Appearing on Fox in what was billed as Vance’s first television interview since November’s race, Trump’s running mate said those who “protested peacefully … should be pardoned”. He made it a point to add that those who “committed violence on that day, obviously”, should not receive the same benefit.
Some of Trump’s fiercest supporters reacted angrily to Vance’s comments with their 20 January inauguration looming.
One – far-right provocateur Nicholas Fuentes – published a social media post seeming to allude to how Trump avoided substantial punishment in the Daniels case as well as rulings from the conservative-dominated US supreme court that undermined efforts to prosecute the president-elect for the Capitol attack.
“If Trump got a ‘get out of jail free’ card, then so should EVERY ONE of his supporters who rallied for him January 6th,” Fuentes wrote on social media.
Luke Lints, who pleaded guilty to interfering with law enforcement during an instance of civil disorder on the day of the Capitol attack, separately wrote on social media: “I’m absolutely emotionally distraught right now.”
Vance subsequently sought to clarify his comments on social media, saying he and Trump would weigh all January 6 convictions for pardons individually – whether or not the underlying offenses were violent in nature.
“We care about people unjustly locked up,” Vance wrote, in part. “It includes people who got a garbage trial.”
