JD Vance Is Lying About the J6 Pardons
He’s whitewashing the insurrection and trying to memory-hole his previous qualms.
DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND TERM, like his first, will focus on two projects. The first is destroying the rule of law. The second is lying. And in these pursuits, Trump has a new right-hand man: Vice President JD Vance.
Trump’s previous vice president, Mike Pence, tried to excuse Trump’s corruption. But on January 6, 2021, Pence failed his boss. He refused to overturn the 2020 election, and he denounced the attack on the Capitol.
Last year, Vance signaled that he would do for Trump what Pence had refused to do. So Trump picked Vance as his new running mate. And a week into their administration, Vance is hard at work, lying and excusing January 6th.
On January 12, Vance was asked on Fox News Sunday about Trump’s plans to grant pardons related to J6: “Where is the line drawn on who will and wouldn’t be considered for a pardon?” He replied:
I think it’s very simple. Look, if you protested peacefully on January the 6th, and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there, but . . . there are a lot of people we think in the wake of January the 6th who were prosecuted unfairly. We need to rectify that.
“Very simple.” “Obviously.” The distinction was clear: Nobody who committed violence would get a pardon.
But a week later, when Trump took office, he ordered the release of everyone involved in the attack. Fourteen people convicted of seditious conspiracy or related charges got commutations. The rest—more than 1,500 people, including hundreds who had pleaded guilty to or had been convicted of assaulting police officers—got “a full, complete and unconditional pardon.”
That discrepancy made things awkward for Vance when he appeared Face the Nation this past Sunday for his first big interview as vice president. The moderator, Margaret Brennan, quoted part of what Vance had told Fox about the pardons. She asked him about the conflict between what he had said and what Trump had subsequently done.
Vance could have ducked the question. He could have replied, minimally, that he supported Trump’s decision. Instead, he tried to rewrite what he’d said:
Margaret, I noticed that you cut off the thing that I said immediately after that. The full quote is that of course, there are gray areas. And here’s the nature of the gray area: 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.
This was a remarkably dishonest answer. First, Vance implied that Brennan was trying to deceive viewers by omitting what he had said about gray areas. Then, having cast himself as the victim of a journalist’s deceit, Vance changed his own quote. Since CBS viewers hadn’t heard what he’d actually said on Fox—that there was “a little bit” of a gray area, but that it didn’t affect the fundamental distinction between violent and nonviolent offenses—Vance exploited the omission and pretended that he had spoken of a broad gray area having something to do with Justice Department malfeasance.
Brennan pointed out that Trump had previously said he would consider J6 pardons on a “case-by-case basis.” Again, Vance lied:
And that’s exactly what we did. 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. The president believes that. I believe that. And I think he made the right decision.
Even setting aside Vance’s made-up jargon—“due process of liberty” isn’t a phrase he would have learned at Yale Law—this statement was preposterous on its face. Trump hadn’t pardoned some of the J6 assailants, or even “a lot” of them. He had pardoned all of them. That’s not case-by-case.
Vance’s story was also logistically impossible. In the Fox interview on January 12, he had ruled out pardons for anyone who committed a violent crime in the attack. Then, on January 20, Trump had pardoned more than 1,500 people, including the hundreds who were guilty of violence. Evidently, something had changed that week. But there simply wasn’t time for hundreds of case-by-case reevaluations.
Then Brennan asked about two specific cases:
Daniel Rodriguez used an electroshock weapon against a policeman who was dragged out of the defensive line, by plunging it into the officer’s neck. He was in prison, sentenced to 12 years, seven months. He got a pardon.
Ronald McAbee hit a cop while wearing reinforced brass knuckle-gloves, and he held one down on the ground as other rioters assailed the officer for over 20 seconds, causing a concussion.
If you stand with law enforcement, how can you call these people unjustly imprisoned?
Vance couldn’t explain how a case-by-case review would have vindicated these thugs. So he countered that the real villain was the Department of Justice. He claimed again, without offering any examples or evidence, that federal prosecutors had put the J6 defendants through an “incredibly unfair process” and denied their “constitutional rights”—this time adding that the defendants were held “to a double standard that was not applied to many people, including, of course, the Black Lives Matter rioters who killed over two dozen people.”
This is the kind of racial-disparity allegation that conservatives often brush aside when it’s made on behalf of black or Latino defendants. But when the defendants are Trump supporters, Vance finds it useful to accuse the justice system of bias.
Vance’s allegation is bogus. In September 2020, DOJ announced that more than 300 people had been federally charged with crimes related to the BLM-related protests. A month later, a Washington Post analysis found that at least 582 people had been charged with violence-related state or federal crimes. And in August 2021, an Associated Press review concluded that right-wing allegations of exceptional harshness against J6 defendants, relative to BLM defendants, had “not been borne out when comparing the sentences that federal judges have given to Jan. 6 defendants and those who are accused of crimes during the protests against police brutality.”
More than 120 defendants [in BLM-related cases] have pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy. More than 70 defendants who’ve been sentenced so far have gotten an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more. . . . President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has continued the vast majority of [prosecutions] and has often pushed for lengthy prison time for people convicted of serious crimes.
Trump, by contrast, has just wiped away the J6 cases and has ordered the release of everyone who beat up a cop that day. But Vance won’t even acknowledge the brutality of these crimes. “We’re not saying that everybody did everything perfectly,” he told Brennan, referring to the two thugs whose assaults she described. “The pardon power is not just for people who are angels,” he added.
This is what the Republican party has become: soft on crime and contemptuous of law enforcement when the criminals in question support Trump. To smear prosecutors or excuse Trump’s goons, there’s no lie Vance won’t tell. That’s why he’s in the job.
