President-elect Trump says pardoning rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol will begin his first day in office. "I'm going to look at everything. We're going to look at individual cases," Trump told NBC's "Meet the Press," reports USA Today. "I'm going to be acting very quickly... I'm looking first day." The ongoing prosecution of the people who violently entered the U.S. Capitol to try to block Congress' certification of the 2020 election is the most sprawling federal investigation in history. Officials expect to arrest up to a thousand more people. During his reelection campaign, Trump repeatedly referred to the jailed insurrectionists as political prisoners treated unfairly by an unjust system.
Trump said there may be some exceptions to his pardons “if somebody was radical, crazy.” He didn’t rule out pardoning individuals who pleaded guilty, including people who had admitted to assaulting police officers.
“Because they had no choice,” Trump claimed. Five people at the riot died and at least four police officers who responded died by suicide in the months after the incident. At least 1,572 defendants have been charged and more than 1,251 have been convicted or pleaded guilty in the attack. At least 645 defendants have been sentenced to incarceration, with the longest sentence being 22 years. There are 250 people in custody, most of them serving sentences after being convicted. A handful accused of violent crimes are being held in pretrial custody at the order of a federal judge. Trump said members of the now-defunct House committee tasked with investigating the Capitol riot should be in jail. “Everybody on that committee … for what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump said, including former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the top Republican on the panel.
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