The Irony: Trump Pardons Jan. 6 Rioters Despite Condemning BLM
President Trump, Who Condemned Black Lives Matter As Violent, Pardons All But 14 Jan. 6 Defendants
President Donald Trump shows an executive order he signed at Capital One arena in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. | Source: Xinhua News Agency / Getty
Newly sworn-in President Donald Trump’s first act as commander-in-chief was to remind America — as if it needed reminding — that with his new administration comes the blanket normalization of white nationalism, including but not limited to the blanket pardoning of perpetrators of acts of white terrorism.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of white terrorists stormed the U.S. Capitol with the expressed purpose of preventing lawmakers from certifying the legally cast votes that named Joe Biden president. They brutally attacked police officers. They brought down barricades, scaled walls and broke U.S. Capitol building windows. They threatened legislators and unlawfully occupied their offices. On Monday night, just hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump decided that more than 1500 of them — all but 14, in fact — had done nothing wrong and should be given full pardons.
From the Washington Post:
That means everyone prosecuted by the Justice Department, from the plotters imprisoned for seditious conspiracy and felons convicted of assaulting police officers to those who merely trespassed on the restricted grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, will soon be released from incarceration, if they were still in federal custody.Trump ordered his attorney general to make sure that those who are “currently held in prison are released immediately” and also to dismiss all pending indictments.“We hope they come out tonight, frankly,” Trump said as he signed the order.
Protesters gather on the second day of pro-Trump events fueled by President Donald Trump’s continued claims of election fraud to overturn the results before Congress finalizes them in a joint session of the 117th Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. | Source: Kent Nishimura / Getty
Of course, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Trump instigated the criminals he is now pardoning. It’s almost ironic that he gets to be the president to absolve domestic terrorists of crimes they wouldn’t have committed if not for the months he spent conjuring baseless and factless propaganda about the 2020 presidential race being stolen from him.
Donald Trump is pretending to usher in a new era of law and order, but, really, it’s an era where crimes committed by him, on his behalf or in service of MAGA nationalism aren’t really crimes at all.
This is America — once again.
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President Trump, Who Condemned Black Lives Matter As Violent, Pardons All But 14 Jan. 6 Defendants was originally published on newsone.com