Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday doubled down on his promise to pardon those arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those who violently attacked police officers, if he is elected in November.
Near the end of a 35-minute interview at the annual National Association of Black Journalists conference, ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott pressed Trump on comments he’s made pledging to vacate the convictions of some 1,400 of his supporters who took part in the attempted insurrection.
“You called yourself the candidate of ‘law and order,’” Scott said. “When Time magazine asked you if you would consider pardoning all the rioters, you said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ You called them ‘patriots.’ One hundred and forty police officers were assaulted that day. Their injuries included broken bones, at least one officer lost an eye, one had two cracked ribs, two smashed spinal discs, another had a stroke. Were the people who assaulted those 140 officers, including those I just mentioned, ‘patriots’ who deserved pardons?”
The former president dodged the question, talking instead about recent pro-Palestine protests in Washington, DC.
“Let me bring it back to modern day, like about five days ago. We had an attack on the Capitol, a horrible attack on the Capitol,” Trump said. “You saw the people that were protesting and spraying these incredible monuments, all this magnificent limestone and granite, with red paint, red spray paint, that will never actually come off, especially in the limestone — I’m a builder, I know about this stuff, you’ll see it in a hundred years from now. They viciously attacked our government. They fought with police. They fought with them much more openly than I saw on January 6. What’s going to happen to those people?”
Scott interjected. “My question is about the rioters who assaulted police officers. Would you pardon them?”
“Oh, absolutely I would,” Trump said. “If they are innocent, I would pardon them.”
“They’ve been convicted,” Scott shot back, drawing laughter from the crowd.
“They were convicted by a very tough system,” Trump said.
It is flatly untrue that the pro-Palestinian protesters in Washington fought more openly with police officers than the pro-Trump rioters did on January 6, 2021.
There were scattered demonstrations last week against a planned speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose US-backed offensive in Gaza has killed some 39,000 people.
About 200 protesters with the group Jewish Voice for Peace were arrested after holding a peaceful sit-in inside a congressional office building. None resisted arrest.
Another group of protesters attempted to march toward the Capitol, but were stopped by police and pepper-sprayed. Nine protesters were arrested during the street demonstrations across DC, four of whom were charged with assaulting a police officer outside Union Station. Some spray-painted graffiti on a monument near the train station.
Trump’s attempts to equate these demonstrations with the insurrection are in keeping with the Republican Party’s embrace of January 6 revisionism, which attempts to recast those who participated in the violent attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election as patriots and political prisoners. Last month, a Trump campaign spokesperson told The Washington Post that the former president would decide “on a case-by-case basis when he is back in the White House” about who to pardon — declining to say whether Trump might pardon members of extremist groups, like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
During the interview on Wednesday, Trump also repeated a persistent lie about the attack on the Capitol.
“What about the cops that were — and I’m all for the police, as you know — what about the police that were ushering everybody into the Capitol?” he said, alleging that some members of the Capitol Police told Jan. 6 rioters to “go in.”
Trump and other Republican figures have long made the false claim that the rioters were welcomed into the Capitol. In fact, there were long battles between rioters and police. The rioters who were able to walk into the Capitol with ease were in areas where police were greatly outnumbered, and only after rioters had already broken through barricades.
Trump’s comments Wednesday capped off a bizarre interview at the NABJ conference, which began with him making a racist remark about his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.
Asked if he agreed with assertions by his fellow Republicans that Harris only rose to public office because of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” commonly known as DEI, Trump falsely stated that Harris had decided to “turn Black.”
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris’ father is Black and from Jamaica; her mother is from India. She has always identified as both Black and Indian. She attended Howard University, one of the most prestigious historically Black colleges in the country, and joined the Congressional Black Caucus while serving in the US Senate.