'This is blanket': Host nails Vance after Trump breaks promise on 'case-by-base' pardons

CBS News host Margaret Brennan grilled Vice President J.D. Vance after President Donald Trump broke a promise to pardon Jan. 6 rioters on a case-by-case basis.

During an interview that aired on Sunday, Brennan noted that Vance had promised in a Fox News interview that violent offenders would not be pardoned.

"Did you counsel the president against these blanket pardons for 1,500 people, including those who committed violence?" she asked.

"Margaret, I noticed that you cut off the thing that I said immediately after that," Vance complained. "The full quote is that, of course, there are gray areas."

Vance argued that the pardons were warranted because former Attorney General Merrick Garland had weaponized the Justice Department unfairly.

"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," the vice president insisted.

"Case-by-case basis," Brennan noted. "This is blanket."

"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," Vance asserted.

Brennan pointed out that Trump had pardoned people who beat law police officers.

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"If you stand with law enforcement, how can you call these people unjustly imprisoned?" she wondered.

"There's what the people actually did on January the 6th, and we're not saying that everybody did everything perfectly," the vice president opined. "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."

"Is violence like that against a police officer ever justified?" the CBS News host asked.

"Violence against a police officer is not justified. But that doesn't mean that you should have Merrick Garland's weaponized Department of Justice expose you to incredibly unfair process," Vance remarked.

Watch the video below from CBS or at the link.