In a Truth Social posting on Monday, Donald Trump, the former president, wrote that pardoning those jailed for crimes committed on January 6th would be one of his initial acts if elected again in November. Trump wrote:
“My first act as your new President will be to close the border, DRILL BABY, DRINK, and free the January 6 Hostages who are wrongfully being imprisoned!”
Trump has previously made several statements regarding pardoning prisoners, but his post on Monday may be the most forceful he’s taken. He stated in May 2023 that he “most probably” would pardon “a significant portion of them,” and added, “and this will be very soon.” Trump, who was under federal investigation at the time, held a fundraiser in June for the defendants, promising to personally donate.
Trump’s comments come after his former advisor Peter Navarro was ordered to report to jail for ignoring a congressional subpoena issued by the January 6 Select Committee. A federal judge denied Navarro’s request for a stay of his four-month sentence, ordering him to begin serving it on March 19, 2019.
In a post that accompanied it, Trump called the committee the “J6 Unselect Committee” and called it a “total scam destroying documents,” while thanking Republicans in Congress for “exposing the lies.”
A report of 81 pages released by the House Administration Committee oversight subcommittee led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), revealed that four White House staffers failed to verify the important details of Cassidy Hutchinson’s dramatic testimony about Trump’s actions on that day.
The report states
Hutchinson’s story that President Trump lunged for the steering wheel in the Beast is not supported by any White House employees. Some witnesses described the mood of the President after his speech at the Ellipse.
The driver of Trump’s car on January 6, who corroborated the former president’s claim that he joined his supporters at the Capitol, is one of the witnesses who dispel Hutchinson’s version of the events.
The committee’s investigators were told by the unnamed driver.
[President Trump] did not grab the steering wheel. I didn’t even see him try to jump into the front seats.
The transcripts of the driver’s testimony show that, although Trump requested to be driven to the Capitol building, he did not shout or scream at Bobby Engel, the head of Trump’s security detail as was previously claimed. The driver told investigators:
The president insisted on going to the Capitol. I could tell he wanted to go to the Capitol. He wasn’t screaming at Mr. Engel. He wasn’t screaming at me. He was certainly agitated, but I didn’t think he was angry.
Joe Biden also keeps the events of the 6th of January 2021 in the American’s minds, by mentioning them in his State of the Union address on Thursday. Biden said,
The history is watching just as it did three years ago, on the 6th of January. Insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building and stabbed the American democracy with a dagger. Many of you were present on that dark day. These insurrectionists, we all saw them with our own two eyes.
More than 1,230 people were charged with federal crimes three years after the Capitol Riots. Only two of them have been found not guilty.
