Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons wantonly betray the rule of law

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Advocates for the police, especially those who also support President Donald Trump, often frame and phrase their ethos as “Back the Blue.”

But with Trump, it’s more betray the blue, with his pardoning of nearly every one of 1,600 people charged with being a member of the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol and assaulted members of law enforcement on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump went even further, commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, most of whom had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. What’s more, the president, in office only hours, ordered the attorney general to seek the dismissal of the nearly 450 remaining cases.

“We are going to bring law and order back to our cities,” Trump touted in his inaugural address. Unless, evidently, that city is Washington, D.C., the crime scene is the citadel of this country’s democracy that should be a beacon worldwide, and the intended victims of the attackers were elected officials, including then Vice President Mike Pence, threatened with hanging, a lethal peril Trump shrugged off by saying “so what” when he was informed of it.

The targeting of Pence came after Trump posted on X (back then, tweeted on Twitter) that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

In Trump’s eyes, what should have been done was help him steal the 2020 presidential election — one that he lost and has lied about constantly.

What happened on Jan. 6 was unacceptable and criminal. But Trump’s insistence and persistence of his “Big Lie” has changed the narrative of many of his backers, including many in Congress, even though their and their colleagues’ lives were at stake. Or people like Vice President JD Vance, who recently told Fox News that “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

But those who did have now been pardoned. Which “suggests that if you commit acts of violence, as long as you do so on behalf of a politically powerful person you may be able to escape consequences,” Alexis Loeb, a former federal prosecutor who supervised many of these cases, told the New York Times. “They undermine — and are a blow to — the sacrifice of all the officers who put themselves in the face of harm to protect democracy on Jan. 6.”

Those convicted of Jan. 6-related crimes have often been referred to by Trump and his supporters as “J6 hostages” — an Orwellian inversion of the term “hostages.” According to a Justice Department update issued on the four-year anniversary of the attack, approximately 608 people have been “charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder, including approximately 174 defendants charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”

And those weapons? According to the DOJ, they included: “firearms; OC spray; tasers; edged weapons, including a sword, axes, hatchets, and knives; and makeshift weapons, such as destroyed office furniture, fencing, bike racks, stolen riot shields, baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles, PVC piping, and reinforced knuckle gloves.”

Among the officers injured was Michael Fanone, who along with other officers who testified to the Jan. 6 committee in Congress investigating the attack — as well as the committee members and their staffs — were given preemptive pardons by outgoing President Joe Biden on Monday.

Fanone told the Times that it is “insane that we live in a country where the president of the United States feels the need to offer a preemptive pardon to American citizens who testified in an investigation regarding an insurrection, which was incited by the incoming president because he’s promised to enact, or exact, vengeance on those participants and the body that investigated them.”

Insane, indeed. As is the “sanewashing” by supporters and supplicant news organizations of Jan. 6, Trump’s role in it and his campaign pledge that “I am your retribution.”

A more normal, confident country would completely reject rhetoric and actions like this, and instead would heed the findings of Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s account of his attempt to prosecute Trump for what he deemed an “unprecedented criminal effort.”

Congress also investigated the matter, as it should have. A bipartisan committee heard from witnesses — almost all Republicans — about the attack, including Trump’s instigation. The committee performed an essential public service — in fact, the scandal would have been if Congress overlooked an attack on its own building and our own democracy. Biden’s preemptive pardons of its members should in no way be equivalized to Trump’s pardon of perpetrators, a point made by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who said in a statement that “We have been pardoned today not for breaking the law but for upholding it.”

Smith’s pursuit of justice ended with the president’s election. But there is no statute of limitations on truth. And the truth is that those pardoned on Monday had been convicted of or charged with attacking the Capitol in an attempt to thwart the elected will of the American people.

So, while it’s too late to reverse Trump’s pardons, it’s not too late for every American to truly back the blue — and the red, white and blue of our country and democracy — by rhetorically rejecting the pardons and the lies behind them.