At least two people who pleaded guilty for their roles in the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol say they don’t want pardons for what they did, with one saying President Donald Trump can “shove his pardon up his a**.”
“I am guilty of the crimes I have committed and accept the consequences,” Jason Riddle, who was sentenced to 90 days in jail for two misdemeanour offences, told ABC News.
Riddle of New Hampshire admitted to drinking pilfered wine and stealing a book on Senate procedure from the Capitol during the 2021 violence. At the time of the attack, he said he was an “obsessor” of Trump and struggling with alcohol. His probation included him attending alcoholic treatment.
“It is thanks to those consequences I now have a happy and fruitful existence,” he said.
“I don’t need to obsess over a narcissistic bully to feel better about myself,” he said. “Trump can shove his pardon up his ass.”
Pamela Hemphill, a 71-year-old woman from Idaho who was publicly branded “MAGA Granny” after her participation in the events, also said she would refuse Trump’s pardon.
“I’m not going to take it. I gotta do some research on who to contact to refuse it,” she told KGW8.
“The message is, if I took a pardon, that what I did that day was OK,” she said. “They were criminals. They broke the law. I broke the law. Pay the price.”
The US Supreme Court ruled in US v Wilson back in 1833 that a presidential pardon may “be rejected by the person to whom it is tendered.”
“And if it be rejected, we have discovered no power in a court to force it on him,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote at the time.
Hemphill served two months in a federal prison in 2022 as part of a plea deal after prosecutors said she pushed past police barriers and rallied other rioters to follow her lead.
“Just come on it. What are you doing, just get in here. It’s your house,” she hollered, as seen in video she took of the events.
She said she fully believed that the election had been stolen from Trump and that if enough people fought back, he would stay in office.
“Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult,” she told The New York Times.