Editor: I share this author’s feelings about Trump granting pardons to those guilty of assaulting over 100 Capitol Police officers and causing $2.8 million in damages to the Capitol.
I watched the events unfolding live that day. Once the storming of the Capitol began, I was glued to the television for rest of the day. I remember feeling sick to my stomach watching all of the violence. I couldn’t understand why these people were so hell-bent on murdering police officers for simply doing their job.
I say “murdering” because the aggression was so intense and what are you expecting to happen when you throw a fire extinguisher at someone’s head? Michael Fanone was dragged down concrete steps, beaten with flag poles, and repeatedly tased at the base of his skull. They didn’t stop when he was unconscious, and he had a heart attack due to the severity of the assault. The man who was using the stun gun was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
I’m surprised he didn’t suffer a brain injury or have a stroke from the Taserbeing used so many times against the back of his head. You cannot convince me that they intended not to kill these officers, considering the viciousness with which they attacked them.
That same man could soon be pardoned by Donald Trump.
The people who believe January 6th was all love and hugs, as Trump claims, have never seen videos of police being assaulted on Fox News (how do they avoid seeing them on social media?). I remember feeling relieved when the impeachment team was playing graphic videos of the officers being attacked during the second Trump impeachment trial.
The relief soon turned to hopelessness and anger when I switched over to Fox News to find they weren’t airing the hearing live like every other news station. That is when the “news” label should’ve been taken away from Fox. You can’t call yourself a news network and refuse to cover the impeachment trial of a U.S. President.
Once I thought about it, I realized they couldn’t possibly air the trial because it didn’t reflect the “reality” they had created for their viewers.
During the attack on the Capitol, I flipped around to the different news channels and saw there was a Fox News reporter broadcasting live. Their cameras were capturing the same scenes that were playing out on every other news channel. So how do viewers, who must have watched everything happen live that day, accept the narrative Fox hosts like Tucker Carlson created just a few days later?
I could understand why people on the right who only watch Fox News, Newsmax, or any of the other conservative networks might think that what happened on January 6th was whatever Trump and his allies say happened, except they had to have watched it live like all of us did that horrible day. I simply can’t come up with any explanation other than it’s intentional on their part to deny what they witnessed with their own eyes and instead accept what they’re being told.
I’ll end with this: To Republicans who attacked Kamala Harris for donating to a GoFundMe that was used to bail out protesters arrested during the BLM protests—claiming she should be attacked for bailing out people who assaulted police officers that day, how do you then not attack Donald Trump for pardoning people who assaulted police, were given a trial, were convicted by a jury and sentenced to prison?! You claim Harris is wrong because she bailed out people out who had been arrested, but they hadn’t had a trial where they were found guilty and sentenced!
I know. Hypocrisy means nothing to them anymore. They feel no shame and they are proud of being hypocritical. I’m not a religious person, but God help us!
When Peter Ninemire was freed by presidential clemency from a federal prison where he was serving a 27-year sentence on drug charges, it was widely hailed as just the way such executive actions should work.
If anybody deserved the presidential “prerogative of mercy,” as defined by the Supreme Court, it was Ninemire.
A nonviolent offender who was described as having the most positive attitude of all the inmates at the minimum-security prison at Englewood, Colorado, Ninemire had resolved to use his time in prison to improve himself and others. He began a program to show at-risk youths what life in prison was really like, reported the Salina Journal. Even the judge who sentenced him, Richard Rogers, wrote a letter in support of Ninemire’s presidential clemency.
Ninemire had served 10 years of his time for growing marijuana and other charges when Bill Clinton granted clemency in January 2001. Technically, it wasn’t a pardon, but a commutation.
Granting pardons and commutations is the most king-like of all presidential actions, enshrined in Article II of the Constitution and based on a “benign quality of mercy” reserved for the president alone. The Supreme Court defined that benign quality in 1866 and set only a few limits on its use. It cannot, for example, be used to escape impeachment.
When Donald Trump is sworn in for his second term just over two weeks from now, one of the things to watch for is whether he will make good on his promise to pardon most of those charged with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The mob’s goal was to disrupt a joint session of congress to count Electoral College votes and affirm the presidential election results. About 1,572 individuals were charged in the siege, according to the Department of Justice, and about 80% have since pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial.
Among those charged were 10 Kansans.
They are, according to the Department of Justice: Ryan Ashlock, Gardner; William Chrestman, Olathe; Michael Eckerman, Wichita; Kasey Hopkins, Kansas City; Christopher Kuehne, Olathe; Jennifer Ruth Parks, Kansas City; Will Pope, Topeka; Mark Rebegila, Topeka; Esther Schwemmer, Kansas City; and Chad Suenram, Haysville.
All have pleaded guilty except Pope, whose trial on felony charges was delayed by a District of Columbia federal judge, at Pope’s request, days after Trump’s 2024 victory. Pope, who is representing himself and expects to receive a pardon, recently filed a motion asking the court’s permission to attend the Jan. 20 inauguration.
“Rather than seeking peace and de-escalating tensions,” Pope said in another filing, on Christmas Day, “you have pushed forward with January 6 trials and sentencings even after the American people firmly rebuked you. Most repulsive of all, you have rushed to tear January 6 dissidents away from their families and throw them in prison before Christmas.”
At the end of the document he attached a doctored copy of his mugshot, depicting himself in a Santa hat, wearing sunglasses, with chains around his neck, and smoking a blunt. The weird image carried a caption that Pope was “YOUR GHOST” of Christmases past, present, and future.
During the campaign, Trump cast the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as political prisoners and patriots who were pressured by prosecutors into accepting plea deals. “Justice for All,” a version of the national anthem sung by incarcerated Jan. 6 defendants over prison phone lines, became a staple at rallies. Never mind that 140 police officers were assaulted, the damage to the Capitol exceeded $2.8 million, and that at least seven people died as a result of the attack.
For the most complete and authoritative account of the Jan. 6 insurrection, go to the House Select January 6 Committee Final Report.
The expectation that Trump will pardon the insurrections casts a long shadow over American justice. Even his stated inclination to do so has a chilling political effect, because it lays bare his belief that his pardon power should be used not to show mercy or correct wrongs but to reward the faithful and justify their elevation to heroic status.
Four years ago, we watched on television as the attack on the Capitol unfolded. It was brutal. Remember the police officers being crushed in doorways by the press of the crowd, rioters smashing windows to gain access, the flight of lawmakers to safety, the ropes to hang Mike Pence in effigy — or for real? How about the shock of seeing a Confederate battle flag being paraded about the halls? Or when we learned Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, a Trump flag draped over her shoulders, was shot dead by a police officer when she attempted to break into a House area where lawmakers feared for their lives?
Surely, I recall thinking as I watched, this repulsive violence will end the Trump madness. But I underestimated madness. Instead, in the months and years that followed, the Trump movement became energized by the violence, recast in a false narrative that the rioters were the victims. With the tragic but legally defensible shooting of Babbitt, Trump had his first blood martyr.
Reasonable people, however, were sickened by the violence and chaos.
“The violence and destruction of property at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 showed a blatant and appalling disregard for our institutions of government and the orderly administration of the democratic process,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in June 2021. “The FBI does not tolerate violent extremists who use the guise of First Amendment protected activity to engage in violent criminal activity. The destruction of property, violent assaults on law enforcement officers, and imminent physical threats to elected officials betray the values of our democracy.”
Now, those “violent extremists” may be rewarded by presidential pardon for their loyalty. While pardons have never been entirely free of politics, the scale of Trump’s contemplated clemency is worthy of a banana republic dictator. That term, “banana republic,” was coined by short story writer O. Henry to describe his fictional and thoroughly corrupt state of Anchuria.
The most notorious pardon in American political history is when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon in 1974 for “all offenses against the United States that he … committed or may have committed.” Ford had assumed the presidency after Nixon had yielded to public pressure to resign following the Watergate scandal, in which Nixon and his aides had engaged in illegal campaign activity in 1972 and then attempted to cover it up. By accepting the pardon, Nixon publicly acknowledged his guilt. But in 1977 he told interviewer David Frost, speaking generally, that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
This bit of Nixonian hubris is something the Supreme Court has recently made into law in Trump v. United States, which holds that presidents cannot be held legally accountable for official acts they commit as president. This gives presidents such broad power that Trump could hand out pardons for just about any reason — as political favors, for his amusement, or even in exchange for a bribe — and face no legal consequences.
While we have yet to see how far Trump will take these new powers, the thought of such monarch-like authority is anathema to the ideal of American democracy.
The presidents who made the widest use of the power to pardon were Andrew Johnson, who granted it to thousands of ex-Confederates after the Civil War, and Jimmy Carter, who pardoned by executive order more than 200,000 in his first day of office in 1977 for evading the draft during Vietnam. Both were attempts to heal the nation after a great division, with only marginal success.
But Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons would bring no healing.
The wound was made all the deeper last month by President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, which after Ford’s pardon of Nixon may be the second-most notorious act of executive clemency on record (so far). While it is easy to understand a father’s love for his son, it is difficult to understand a president who betrays his principles to shield a family member. Even if you believe Hunter Biden was singled out for unfair prosecution because of his father — which the White House claimed on official stationary — there’s the matter that Joe Biden went back on his word not to give Hunter Biden a pardon.
In a spectacular bit of hypocrisy, Joe Biden lowered himself to the level of his opponent in claiming a weaponized prosecution. He also did serious damage to his legacy.
All of the above brings me back to Ninemire, whose sentence on drug charges was commuted by Clinton.
The then-45-year-old Kansan, who grew up at Coffin Rock Ranch in Norton County up near the Nebraska line, had caught the mandatory minimum sentence for growing several hundred marijuana plants in northeast Kansas. He already had two prior marijuana convictions.
He had been arrested in 1989, pleaded guilty in federal district court at Wichita, but skipped out on bail before sentencing. He faced a minimum of five years in prison, according to reporting by the Wichita Eagle.
Ninemire was, for a time, was Kansas’ third-most wanted fugitive.
The manhunt ended when federal agents staked out a home near Miami where they knew Richard Lacey, a Wichita drug trafficker who had also jumped bail. They also found Ninemire. Both were brought back from Florida without incident.
Ninemire was sentenced to 322 months in prison for manufacturing marijuana and failing to appear, according to a Justice Department webpage. In that prison in Colorado, Ninemire began to turn his life around. After his release, he earned a master’s degree in social work from Wichita State University, according to his website, and became a licensed specialist social worker helping others overcome their addictions to drugs and alcohol.
“Here I am today living the dream of helping others that I was so afraid to dream in prison,” Ninemire posted on his site. “I’m here only because I gained recovery from drugs that allowed everything that is wonderful to happen in my life.”
Will anything wonderful happen if Trump pardons the Jan. 6 insurrectionists?
It depends on how you define “wonderful.”
While there would be few checks on Trump’s power to grant pardons, the rules of clemency might present some challenges.
While both pardons and commutations are forms of clemency, according to the U.S. Office of the Pardon Attorney, a commutation reduces a punishment but does not imply forgiveness or restore the civil rights lost on conviction, such as the right to vote or run for public office. There’s also the understanding, from a Supreme Court decision, that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt — a bitter pill that Nixon had to swallow back in 1974.
This will likely be of little consequence for Trump supporters. Trump himself was convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush money trial, making him the first U.S. president with a rap sheet, but that did not seem to tarnish his appeal among supporters. When guilt is just another word for an allegedly weaponized justice system, where is the shame?
We are poised to enter a period in American politics in which those with the least respect for the law have the most power over the institutions entrusted with preserving it. The prospective pardoning of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists is the passport to a land where justice is replaced by dull political brutishness.
Welcome to Anchuria. May our stay be brief.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Excerpts or more from this article, originally published on Kansas Reflector appear in this post. Republished, with permission, under a Creative Commons License.