WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump, who is currently facing felony criminal charges in connection with Jan. 6, said that, if elected, he'd "absolutely" consider pardoning every single one of the hundreds of criminals convicted in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
But Trump's campaign, in a statement to NBC News, said such pardons would be "on a case-by-case basis," not the sort of blanket pardon Trump referred to in a recent interview with Time magazine.
Trump told Time he was "absolutely" considering pardoning every single Capitol rioter, who he described as "J-6 patriots." That group would include Jan. 6 defendants caught on tape brandishing or using firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive "Trump" billboard, "Trump" flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches and even an explosive device during the brutal attack that injured about 140 police officers. "If somebody was evil and bad, I would look at that differently," Trump added in his interview with Time.
Trump's campaign, in a statement to NBC News following the conviction Friday of the latest of nearly 1,000 Jan. 6 defendants who have either admitted their guilt in court or been found guilty by a jury of their peers, said that Trump would make individualized decisions about the more than 1,387 cases brought to date.
"As President Trump has promised, he will pardon January 6th protestors who are wrongfully imprisoned by Crooked Joe Biden’s Justice Department, and those decisions will be determined on a case-by-case basis when he is back in the White House,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said.
Last month, Trump said that he would "free" the Jan. 6 "hostages" as one of his "first acts" as president. But the new campaign statement avoided using the term "hostages," a phrase that has come under criticism from some of the relatives of real hostages who were abducted during Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel. In reality, only about 15 Jan. 6 defendants are currently being held pre-trial after federal judges determined there was clear and convincing evidence that they posed a threat to their community or a risk of flight. The vast majority of those pretrial detainees, prosecutors say, were caught on video assaulting officers. All other incarcerated Jan. 6 defendants are serving time after being sentenced by a federal judge.
The Trump campaign statement came in response to a question from NBC News about the sentencing last week of John Sullivan, who was a political outlier among Jan. 6 defendants, the majority of whom have made clear they were driven by Trump's election lies. Sullivan is not a Trump supporter, raising questions about whether the former president would seek to pardon him. Prosecutors said Sullivan was an "antiestablishment" activist who wanted to "burn it all down" and who tried to "incite violence" and "foment anarchy" during the Jan. 6 attack. Sullivan previously held himself out as a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement (although activists distanced themselves from Sullivan before Jan. 6) and was caught on video after the Capitol attack bragging about how his goal had been to "make those Trump supporters f--- s--- up.”
Sullivan — who said in court evidence that he shot video as a "ploy" to avoid arrest, attempted to recast himself as a journalist after Jan. 6 and captured footage that he subsequently licensed to media outlets, including NBC News — was sentenced to six years in federal prison, among the longest sentences given to a Jan. 6 rioter. The median prison term for the more than 500 Jan. 6 rioters sentenced to terms of incarceration is about eight months, according to an analysis by NBC News, while hundreds of additional rioters have received only probationary sentences.
Trump’s position has evolved since he began floating the possibility of pardons in January 2022, at a time when 700 people had been charged, the longest sentence given to a Jan. 6 rioter was five years, and no Jan. 6 defendants had actually gone to trial. Now, in 2024, nearly 1,400 defendants have been charged, the longest Jan. 6 sentence is 22 years, and trials are unfolding on a weekly basis at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse near the U.S. Capitol.
Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill who also support clemency for Jan. 6 defendants have generally avoided getting into specifics about their cases and instead talked about the group more broadly. When Trump has embraced individual rioters it has sometimes caused some blowback, like the time he hugged a convicted rioter who said she "would like a front seat of Mike Pence being executed."
Julie Kelly, a conservative writer who has focused on Jan. 6 cases, told NBC News that a Trump aide had called her in the summer of 2022 to ask about the possibility of bailing out Jan. 6 defendants who had been held in pretrial detention. Unlike in many state systems, pretrial detention in the federal system is based not on a defendant's access to cash, but on their risk of flight and the danger they posed to the community. Kelly had to explain to the aide that judges had ordered dozens of Jan. 6 defendants held pretrial and bail wasn't an option, she said.
Soon, Kelly and Cynthia Hughes — an advocate for Jan. 6 defendants who would soon speak at a Trump rally and who has hosted fundraisers at Trump's club in Bedminster — met with Trump himself at the New Jersey club, Kelly told NBC News. The meeting took place in August 2022, just a few weeks after the FBI searched Trump's estate in Mar-a-Lago, which soon led to the first-ever federal criminal charges against a former president. (Trump has pleaded not guilty in both the classified documents case and in the election interference case, as well as to state charges in Georgia. Trump's New York hush money trial is ongoing.)
Kelly said she spent time during the 2022 meeting providing Trump with information about the cases against Jan. 6 defendants that he didn't seem to be aware of. "Your supporters are saying 'We were there for him, where is he for us?'" Kelly said she told him.
Details of the meeting were previously reported in the book "Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System," in The New York Times, and Semafor. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump fans, meanwhile, are continuing to be sentenced in federal court. Their motivations for attacking the Capitol, laid out in charging documents and their own videos and posts, are often crystal clear: They believed Trump's lies about the 2020 presidential election. On Thursday, a judge plans to sentence Ryan Nichols, a Trump fan who bragged that he “stands for violence,” called Jan. 6 “the second f---ing revolution” and assaulted officers with a chemical weapon.
“So, yes, today, Ryan Nichols, Ryan Nichols grabbed his f---ing weapon and he stormed the Capitol, and he fought! For freedom!” Nichols said, while holding a crowbar, in a video recorded on Jan. 6. “For elegrity— uh— intention— uh— election integrity, I fought!”
Nichols is one of many Jan. 6 defendants who later indicated to authorities that they felt duped by Trump's lies. According to a 2021 FBI record filed in court by his defense team, Nichols "stated he no longer trusted the president or other prominent legal leaders because he felt they had led him in the wrong direction," and specifically mentioned "statements made by President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, General Michael Flynn, and Lin Wood that helped him form his opinion."
