Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both California Democrats, are complaining bitterly — and in hypocritical fashion — after President Donald Trump kept a campaign pledge to pardon the vast majority of Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants, the majority of whom were convicted of misdemeanors like trespassing on the Capitol grounds.
Though now-former President Joe Biden issued sweeping pre-emptive pardons to his family, members of the former House speaker’s hand-picked Jan. 6 Committee, a former joint chiefs chairman, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, those outrages paled in comparison to Trump’s pardoning of grandmothers and trespassers, according to Schiff, who appeared on former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki’s MSNBC program on Tuesday.
“There — there is so much I — I want to get to you — with — get to with you, Sen. Schiff,” Psaki began during a segment. “I just have to start, I mean, the — in the last hour, Donald Trump was in the Oval Office, which I see as a choice, and just pardoned 1,500 people convicted for the attack on our Capitol. You did so much important work on the January 6th Committee. You have never held back in talking about the impact of this on our country. What — what is going through your head right now?”
“It’s obscene. It’s a grotesque display of his new power as president to pardon these 15 or 1,600 people, which I have to imagine includes people that committed violent assaults on law enforcement,” Schiff — who pushed false conspiracies involving Trump and alleged ‘Russian collusion’ for years — began.
“It certainly includes, apparently, one of the leaders of the Proud Boys, rather fitting, sadly, that among his very first acts in office is to give a pardon to a white nationalist leader like that. So hard to imagine that we were sitting in the Capitol, the site of that attack, and hours later, the man who incited that attack pardons the people who participated in that attack. It really is a terrible way to begin, but not a surprising way to begin the new administration.” Watch the interview below.
In a post on the social media platform X, meanwhile, Pelosi called Trump’s action “an outrageous insult to our justice system.”
“Tonight, the President announced pardons and commutations of sentences for those who violently attacked the Capitol and law enforcement officers on January 6th. The President’s actions are an outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol, the Congress and the Constitution,” she continued.
“It is shameful that the President has decided to make one of his top priorities the abandonment and betrayal of police officers who put their lives on the line to stop an attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. Despite the President’s decision, we must always remember the extraordinary courage and valor of the law enforcement heroes who stood in the breach and ensured that democracy survived on that dark day,” Pelosi added.
