Vance defends Trump's Jan. 6 pardons, including those who attacked police

Vice President Vance defended President Trump’s decision to issue sweeping pardons to roughly 1,500 individuals charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, including to those accused of assaulting police officers.

In an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” host Margaret Brennan asked Vance about remarks he made two weeks ago, when he said that peaceful Jan. 6 protesters should be pardoned, but that “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

Brennan asked: “Did you counsel the president against these blanket pardons for 1,500 people, including those who committed violence?”

Vance did not address the question directly, instead insisting that Brennan cut off the rest of the quote, which Vance said noted that the Jan. 6 cases involved some “gray area."

“And here's the nature of the gray area,” Vance continued in the interview that aired Sunday. “Merrick Garland's Department of Justice denied constitutional protections in the prosecutions. There were double standards in how sentences were applied to the J6 protesters versus other groups. What the president said consistently on the campaign is that he was going to look at a case-by-case basis, and that's exactly what we did,” he said.

“We looked at 1,600 cases. And the thing that came out of it, Margaret, is that there was a massive denial of due process of liberty, and a lot of people were denied their constitutional rights," he continued. “The president believes that. I believe that, and I think he made the right decision."

Vance stressed that the Jan. 6 rioters were pardoned because of what the vice president described as a lack of due process — not because the White House necessarily condones the actions that the rioters took four years ago in attacking the Capitol.

“There’s an important issue here. There's what the people actually did on January the 6th — and we're not saying that everybody did everything perfectly — and then what did Merrick Garland's Department of Justice do in unjustly prosecuting well over a thousand Americans in a way that was politically motivated.”

Brennan asked about specific examples of violence committed by pardoned individuals against law enforcement officers and whether that’s “ever justified."

“Violence against a police officer is not justified," Vance responded. "But that doesn't mean that you should have Merrick Garland's weaponized Department of Justice expose you to incredibly unfair process, to denial of constitutional rights, and frankly, to a double standard that was not applied to many people."

“The pardon power is not just for people who are angels or people who are perfect. And of course, we love our law enforcement and want people to be peaceful, with everybody, but especially with our good cops. That's a separate issue from what Merrick Garland's Department of Justice did. We rectified a wrong, and I stand by it.”

Trump granted roughly 1,500 “full, complete and unconditional pardons” for rioters who were charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. In total, 1,583 defendants have been charged. Some 600 of those defendants were accused of resisting and assaulting police officers.

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