Vice President Vance defended President Trump’s determination to challenge sweeping pardons to roughly 1,500 people charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, together with to these accused of assaulting law enforcement officials.
In an interview on CBS Information’s “Face the Nation,” host Margaret Brennan requested Vance about remarks he made two weeks in the past, when he mentioned that peaceable Jan. 6 protesters must be pardoned, however that “if you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Brennan requested: “Did you counsel the president against these blanket pardons for 1,500 people, including those who committed violence?”
Vance didn’t handle the query straight, as an alternative insisting that Brennan minimize off the remainder of the quote, which Vance mentioned famous that the Jan. 6 instances concerned some “grey space.”
“And here’s the nature of the gray area,” Vance continued within 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 mentioned.
“We checked out 1,600 instances. And the factor that got here out of it, Margaret, is that there was a large denial of due technique of liberty, and lots of people had been denied their constitutional rights,” he continued. “The president believes that. I believe that, and I think he made the right decision.”
Vance careworn that the Jan. 6 rioters had been pardoned due to what the vp described as an absence of due course of — not as a result of the White Home essentially condones the actions that the rioters took 4 years in the past 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 requested about particular examples of violence dedicated by pardoned people towards regulation enforcement officers and whether or not that’s “ever justified.”
“Violence towards a police officer shouldn’t be justified,” Vance responded. “However that does not imply that you need to have Merrick Garland’s weaponized Division of Justice expose you to extremely unfair course of, to denial of constitutional rights, and admittedly, to a double normal that was not utilized to many individuals.”
“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 had been charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. In complete, 1,583 defendants have been charged. Some 600 of these defendants had been accused of resisting and assaulting law enforcement officials.
