Ideas | Trump’s Contempt Opening Act

On January 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, the former Republican district attorney of Queens, jumped through a broken window of the US Capitol with a megaphone. He walked through the streets of the Capitol police and opened the outer doors of the Rotunda so that other rioters could enter the building and dispose of it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he cheered on video, and was seen smoking drugs and other Donald Trump supporters who fought with police. “We shut it down! It was done!”

Nearly three years later, a federal judge convicted Mr. Grillo of multiple felonies. But he didn’t give up: Last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison, there was a personal taunt for the federal district judge who sentenced him, Royce Lamberth.

“Trump is going to pardon me,” he yelled at the judge, before being handcuffed and led away.

He was right. On Monday evening, several hours after the inauguration of President Trump, he fulfilled the promise he made several times to allow almost all the rioters who attacked and damaged the Capitol in 2021 to prevent the victory of Joe Biden from being confirmed. Mr. Grillo and about 1,500 other rioters received a full pardon from Mr. Trump, while 14 others received commuted sentences.

The presidential pardon for Mr. Grillo not only makes a mockery of his conviction and sentence of Judge Lamberth. Mr. Trump’s mass pardons make a mockery of a justice system that has worked for four years to prosecute nearly 1,600 people who tried to block the Constitution, a system that has convicted 1,100 of them. and punished more than 600 of them. prison.

More importantly, the amnesty sends a message to the country and the world that breaking the law in support of Mr. Trump and his actions will be rewarded, especially when considered in conjunction with the pardons. his advisors committed a crime in the past. Loudly declare, from the highest office in the land, that the rioters did nothing wrong, that violence is a perfectly legitimate form of political expression and that there is no price to pay. for those who seek to disrupt the sacred transfer of power of the constitution.

The presidential amnesty system is often abused in modern times by giving last minute gifts to cronies, donors or relatives, and these breaches of trust are very bad. Mr. Biden issued a dubious pardon for his son and, on his way out the door, several other families, as well as preemptive pardons for current and former government officials for wrongdoing. there are crimes, to protect them from possible Republicans. retaliation – the broad use of pardoning powers that further defeats its purpose.

But what Mr. Trump did on Monday was completely different. He used mass amnesty at the beginning of his term to write a wrong chapter in American history, to try to erase crimes committed at the foundation of American democracy.

Opening his term with an act of contempt of the legal system is bold, even for Mr. Trump, and should send an alarming signal to Democrats and Republicans alike. Members of both parties had to defend themselves that day from the public, which made little distinction between political party or ideology as Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the assassination. the Assembly. In that pardon, Mr. Trump pardoned and encouraged domestic terrorists who put members of Congress at risk; the long-term cost will be borne by the entire political system, not just its critics.

For four years, he tried to manage the erasure of his role in promoting the attack. Hours after the attack, his allies in the House and on Fox News began casting doubt on the rioters’ motives, saying they were orchestrated by leftists masquerading as Trump supporters. that’s it. In 2022, when he was under investigation by the January 6 House committee, he began to refer to the rioters as “political prisoners” pursued by Democrats and publicly said that the FBI had helped in the attack. In the run-up to his presidential campaign last year, he completely transformed the day’s bloody outrage into a “day of love” and falsely insisted there was no his supporters brought guns to the Capitol.

But Mr. Trump’s dense fog of misinformation cannot change what happened that fateful day, as the Times editorial board wrote at the time. , “supported the dark memory and fear of global democracy”. An early reaction after the attack resonated with even senior Republicans, some of whom will go to the polls to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in his campaign.

At least 20 people who joined the attack carried guns on the Capitol grounds, including Christopher Alberts, who wore body armor and carried a 9mm pistol loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition. in 12 separate holsters that. there were empty bullets. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison after being convicted by a jury on nine charges, including assaulting a police officer, but received a full pardon on Monday. More than 140 police officers were assaulted that day; Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer, was killed, and another officer was decapitated with a weapon; they were crushed, burned, and crushed; four died by suicide.

“My concern is that people believe that if they physically attack me or my family, Donald Trump will relieve them of their jobs,” Michael Fanone, a former police officer who was attacked by a mob, told on January 6, in The Times. “And who’s to say he won’t?”

For many of the officers who were pepper-sprayed or beaten with two-fours or beaten that day, the thought of giving in to the wishes of the country’s chief executive is repugnant. “Releasing those who have convicted us is a travesty of justice,” Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol police sergeant who sustained permanent injuries during the riots, wrote in a Times Opinion guest article this month. “If Mr. Trump wants to heal our divided nation, he will let his convictions stand.”

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keeper militia, who helped organize the attack, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after being convicted of conspiring to stockpile $20,000 worth of weapons for use at the Capitol. US District Judge Amit Mehta, who sentenced Mr. Rhodes, called him “a continuing threat and a threat to this country, to the Republic and to our democratic system.” Judge Mehta later said he was surprised that Mr. Rhodes could be pardoned.

“The thought that Stewart Rhodes could be impeached is frightening and should frighten anyone who cares about democracy in this country,” the judge said last month.

Mr. Rhodes was not pardoned, but his sentence was commuted, and he should be released immediately.

Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys militia, was described by a federal judge as the “supreme leader” of the rebellion, although he was arrested and barred from Washington as soon as he arrived there and did not enter the Capitol. However, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison after the Justice Department said he “fired the group in a rage against law enforcement and then turned it into the Capitol, Tarrio did far worse than he could have done as a private rioter.” Two weeks ago, on January 6, his lawyer wrote to Mr. Trump to ask for a pardon, describing his client as “nothing more than a proud American who believes in very conservative values,” and was granted his request on Monday.

Judge Lamberth, a senior federal judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the DC District Court, has been on the bench since 1987 and has seen it all, serving with the Judge Advocate General of the Army in Vietnam and as a federal prosecutor in Washington for a time. in the 1970s. But in announcing a sentence against the rioters last January, he said he had never seen such a level of “undue justification of criminal activity” in the political arena. .

“I was outraged to see the distortions and outright lies that have entered the public eye,” he wrote. “I was shocked to see some celebrities trying to rewrite history, saying rioters behave ‘peacefully’ like ordinary tourists or martyrs accused of being ‘political prisoners’ or, incredibly, ‘hostages’ . It’s all nonsense. But the court is concerned that harmful and false speech could be more dangerous to our country.

On his first day back in office, Mr. Trump triggered the threat of a jury, acquitting hundreds of people who were found guilty of involvement in the deadly attack on the Capitol – not because they did not commit a crime but because they committed their crime. in his name. By doing so, he is inviting such crimes to happen again.