Vice President-elect J.D. Vance says those who committed violent crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol should not be pardoned.
He made the remarks on “Fox News Sunday,” as people wonder whether President-elect Donald Trump thinks the same and thus how broad will be the scope of his expected Jan. 6 pardons.
“If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6, and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Mr. Vance said on Fox News Sunday.
“If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” he said, while adding that there’s “a little bit of gray area there.”
“There are a lot of people, we think, in the wake of Jan. 6 who were prosecuted unfairly,” he said. “We need to rectify that.”
Over 1,500 people have been charged with crimes tied to the event and over 1,000 have pleaded guilty and 250 convicted as of Jan. 1 this year. More than 1,000 have been duly sentenced, with the other sentencings still pending.
Many of the charges were for crimes such as assaulting police officers trying to keep the rioters out of the U.S. Capitol or for destroying federal property, but many were not.
The conservative complaint about the Jan. 6 cases is that Mr. Garland’s Justice Department pursued every last rioter with the zeal of Javert — bringing charges years later, scouring social media posts to find every civilian in Congress that day, and demanding prison time for such minor offenses as trespassing and interrupting a congressional proceeding.
In the meantime, Mr. Vance and others on the right have charged, the feds turned relatively blind eyes to political rioters on the left such as Black Lives Matter, Code Pink and antifa.
Mr. Vance caught some heat for his comments on the Sunday morning show, saying he didn’t go far enough to defend those who took part in the Jan. 6 riots. He defended himself in an X post, saying he “donated to the J6 political prisoner fund and got roasted for it during my Senate race” in 2022 in Ohio.
“I’ve been defending these guys for years,” he said.
“The president saying he’ll look at each case (and me saying the same) is not some walkback,” he said. “I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up. Yes, that includes people provoked, and it includes people who got a garbage trial.”
Mr. Trump has vowed before that he will look to pardon those who took part in the event.
He said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” last month that he would look into the pardons “very quickly” and on the first day.
“Those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look,” he said, adding that “these people have suffered. Their lives have been destroyed.”
When asked about the ones who attacked police officers, Mr. Trump argued that “they had no choice.”
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.