Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) sharply criticized President Trump for issuing a sweeping pardon to nearly all defendants charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Schiff, a former member of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, called the move a “grotesque display” of power in an interview on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
“It’s obscene. It’s a grotesque display of his new power as President to pardon these 15- or 1600 people, which I have to imagine includes people that committed violent assaults on law enforcement.
“It really is a terrible way to begin, but not a surprising way to begin the new administration,” he added.
Trump said briefly Monday night that he granted roughly 1,500 “full, complete and unconditional pardons” for rioters charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. There have been 1,583 total defendants charged.
“What they’ve done to these people is outrageous,” Trump said while signing various orders from the Oval Office.
Trump also commuted the sentences of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members who were charged with plotting to forcibly halt the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 to time served. However, former Proud Boys national chair Enrique Tarrio — who is serving a 22-year prison term, the longest handed down in connection with the attack — received a pardon.
On Tarrio’s pardon, Schiff said, it is “rather fitting, sadly, that among his very first acts in office is to give a pardon to a white nationalist leader like that.”
“To pardon him, I think is very symbolic of where the President is coming from. It, to me, harkens back to his statement, vis a vis the Proud Boys, years earlier, where he said, stand back and stand by, or something along those lines,” Schiff said, paraphrasing Trump.
“Well, apparently, he had their back after all,” Schiff added.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), another member of the former House Jan. 6 committee, told CNN on Monday that the new Trump administration has “a lot of explaining to do” about clemency issued to the Jan. 6 defendants.
“Why were they being pardoned? That’s my question,” Raskin asked CNN host Kaitlan Collins.
“In other words, were they innocent? Nobody’s asserting that. Were they denied due process? No one’s asserting that. So are they reformed and rehabilitated and no longer a threat to democracy, no longer a threat to society? Or were they being pardoned simply because they were the willing political soldier for Donald Trump when he incited an insurrection against the government?” he added.
The pardons clear the way for potentially hundreds of his supporters to be released from prison in the coming days, some of whom were sentenced to years in prison for violently attacking law enforcement that day.
They came just hours after former President Biden in the eleventh hour of his presidency issued preemptive pardons for members and staff of the House Jan. 6 select committee, including Schiff and Raskin.
