President-elect Donald Trump said he is looking to pardon his supporters involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as soon as his first day in office, saying those incarcerated are “living in hell.”
Trump made the comments, his most sweeping since he won the election, in an exclusive interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker. He also said he won’t seek to turn the Justice Department on his political foes and warned that some members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack “should go to jail.”
On his first day in office, Trump said, he will bring legal relief to the Jan. 6 rioters who he said have been put through a “very nasty system.”
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said, saying later about their imprisonment, “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump said there “may be some exceptions” to his pardons “if somebody was radical, crazy,” and pointed to some debunked claims that anti-Trump elements and law enforcement operatives infiltrated the crowd.
At least 1,572 defendants have been charged and more than 1,251 have been convicted or pleaded guilty in the attack. Of those, at least 645 defendants have been sentenced to incarceration ranging from a few days to 22 years in federal lockup. About 250 people are in custody, most of them serving sentences after having been convicted. A handful are being held in pretrial custody at the order of a federal judge.
Trump didn’t rule out pardoning people who had pleaded guilty, even when Welker asked him about those who had admitted assaulting police officers.
“Because they had no choice,” Trump said.
Asked about the more than 900 other people who had pleaded guilty in connection to the attack but weren’t accused of assaulting officers, Trump suggested that they had been pressured unfairly into taking guilty pleas.
“I know the system. The system’s a very corrupt system,” Trump said. “They say to a guy, ‘You’re going to go to jail for two years or for 30 years.’ And these guys are looking, their whole lives have been destroyed. For two years, they’ve been destroyed. But the system is a very nasty system.”
Charges have ranged from unlawful parading to seditious conspiracy in the sprawling Jan. 6 investigation, which included rioters captured on video committing assaults on officers and those who admitted under oath that they’d done so. Jan. 6 defendants in custody include Proud Boys and Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy, a Jan. 6 defendant recently convicted of plotting to kill the FBI special agents who investigated him, another charged with firing gunshots into the air during the attack and another arrested outside former President Barack Obama’s home after Trump posted a screenshot that included the address.
Trump said he wouldn’t direct Pam Bondi, whom he has said he will nominate for attorney general, to investigate special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two separate federal cases against Trump that were ultimately dropped after the election. Trump called Smith “deranged” and said he thinks he is “very corrupt.” Ultimately, he said, he’d leave those decisions to Bondi, and he said he wouldn’t direct her to prosecute Smith.
“I want her to do what she wants to do,” Trump said. “I’m not going to instruct her to do it.”
Trump claimed that members of the House Jan. 6 committee had “lied” and “destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony.”
He singled out Republican Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, a vocal Trump critic who left Congress, and Democrat Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, who chaired the committee, saying that they had destroyed the evidence collected in their investigation and that “those people committed a major crime.”
Cheney said in a statement released Sunday that Trump "lied about the January 6th Select Committee" when he said committee members "should go to jail."
"There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting — a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee — and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct," Cheney added.
Cheney called for the release of materials gathered by Smith during his investigation, adding, "Ultimately, Congress should require that all that material be publicly released so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history."
