Donald Trump revealed Thursday he is meeting with and financially supporting January 6 insurrection defendants, while he floated pardons for them in remarks he made on the far right wing Wendy Bell Radio streaming podcast. His remarks are causing concern among legal and government experts.
“So I met with a number of fans but I met with and I’m financially supporting people that are incredible,” Trump announced (video below), referring to those who he said are being charged with crimes related to the January 6 insurrection, while mentioning that “contributions should be made.”
“And they were in my office actually two days ago. It’s very much on my mind. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them. What they’ve done to these people. It’s disgraceful and, and mostly, I mean, you know, it’s firemen, they’re policemen, there are people in the military. There are people that were, you know, you look at what took place with the police where there are ushering them in and so many different things.
Trump went on to bash “radical leftists,” who he called “sick,” and said, “there’s something wrong with them, and nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”
He also called federal prosecutors the “most cold-hearted people,” saying “they don’t care about families. They don’t care about anything. They just, and you see what they’re doing with the sentencing.”
“And I will tell you, and I’m looking at it very carefully, I’ve studied it, I study cases and contributions should be made. We have to do that because you know, they have some good lawyers, but even the good lawyers, you get some of these judges that that are so so nasty and so angry, mean, the sentences, and I will tell you, I will look very, very favorably about about full pardons, if I decide to run and if I win I will be looking very, very strongly at pardons – full pardons.”
“I think that’s probably going to be the best because even if they go for the two months or six months and you know they have sentences that go a lot longer than that, but we’ll be looking very, very seriously at full pardons. Because we can’t let that happen here, and I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he declared.
Experts are expressing outrage.
“So, if you are meeting with seditionists and giving them money and promising them pardons which could be seen as obstruction of justice and support for further anti-government violence…isn’t that, um, sedition?” asked foreign policy, national security, and political affairs expert, journalist, CEO, and political commentator David Rothkopf.
“If Trump is elected, he’ll apologize to the J6 traitors because the Capitol police got in the way of their bats, poles, stun guns and bear spray,” observed former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob.
“But this isn’t fascism, right?” former U.S. Dept. of Defense official Adam Blickstein noted sardonically.
“Coup leader pledges relief to his assistants,” observed attorney Eric Columbus, who served at DOJ, DHS, and as a special counsel in the House and Senate.
“Trump admits to funding the people who violently attacked the capitol in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the election. Also, he wants to pardon them and wants America to apologize to them, said Democratic strategist and former Clinton aide Jesse Ferguson.
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