Philip Sean Grillo participated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He repeatedly encouraged his fellow rioters to “charge” as he entered Congress, and is seen on video claiming he was “storming” the Capitol “to stop the theft” of the 2020 election from Donald Trump, which he spread. that hoax that he had been the real winner. He was prosecuted for several crimes and last month went to a federal court in Washington to hear his sentence. The judge sentenced him to one year in prison and sent him to jail. After hearing his sentence and while a guard handcuffed him, he defiantly proclaimed: “Trump is going to pardon me anyway.”
Like Grillo, hundreds of those prosecuted and convicted for the assault on the Capitol are now singing victory. Some of those whose movements are restricted by a court decision, such as Christopher Belliveau, Cindy Young and William Pope, have requested special permits to be able to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in Washington on January 20. For them, it is a great day. The leader for whom they participated in the revolt not only regains power, but has promised massive pardons for those convicted.
The fourth anniversary of the assault on the Capitol, which shook the foundations of American democracy, is marked by Trump’s victory in the elections on November 5. This January 6, Congress will certify his victory at the polls, four years after his supporters tried to prevent Joe Biden from being declared the winner after his victory in the 2020 presidential elections.
Since the first rally of his long campaign, the one he held in Waco (Texas), in March 2023, the Republican has paid tribute to the insurrectionists. That day he opened the event with the song Justice for All(Justice for all), which mixes a chorus of imprisoned insurrectionists who sing the national anthem (The Star-Spangled Banner, The Star-Spangled Banner) with Trump himself reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and closes with the prisoners chanting USA. While it was playing, the giant screens showed images from January 6, 2021.
Trump, who said he saw a lot of “love” the day of the assault on the Capitol, has repeatedly referred to the insurrectionists as “patriots” and those imprisoned as “hostages” or “political prisoners.” Faced with that message, the president, Joe Biden, and then a candidate for re-election, took advantage of the third anniversary of the assault, a year ago, to criticize Trump for “glorifying,” instead of condemning, political violence and the risk that it represented for democracy. Democracy, however, has returned Trump to power.
The president-elect has promised massive pardons, although he has indicated that they will be studied on a case-by-case basis. “We are going to do it very quickly, and it will start the first hour I take office,” he said last month in an interview in the magazine Time,later specifying in a somewhat strange way that he would take care of it “maybe in the first nine minutes.”“A large majority should not be in jail, and they have suffered gravely,” he added. Trump himself has evaded his possible criminal responsibilities upon being elected president. He is, so to speak, the first pardoned: the voters have forgiven him.
According to the Department of Justice, more than 140 police officers were assaulted on January 6, 2021, including more than 80 from the Capitol Police and more than 60 from the Metropolitan Police. Five people died that day. The most recent balance indicates that charges have been filed against 1,572 defendants. There are 1,068 who have received sentences for their criminal activity that day, including 645 sentenced to periods of incarceration and another 145 convicted who have been allowed to serve their entire sentence under house arrest. There are 133 sentences under review after the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, decided in June that the crime of obstruction of an official procedure is not applicable to the assault on the Capitol (despite the fact that it obstructed the procedure for certifying Biden’s victory) .
The largest sentence has been the 22 years in prison for Enrique Tarrio, president of the far-right Proud Boys militia, found guilty of seditious conspiracy. His lieutenant Ethan Nordean received 18 years, the same as Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the far-right group Oath Keepers, a type of paramilitary militia.
Allison Dinner (AP)
It remains to be seen if those convicted with more serious sentences also benefit from Trump’s pardon measures. Judge Amit Mehta, who sentenced the leader of the Oath Keepers, recently expressed his concern about this. “The idea that Stewart Rhodes could be acquitted scares and should scare anyone who cares about democracy in this country,” he declared on December 18 at a hearing in which he sentenced another member of the militia.
Joyce Vance, a researcher at the Brennan Center and professor at the University of Alabama, is very critical of possible presidential pardons. “If Trump pardons the January 6 rioters, he would be using the right of pardon to erase an attack against the Constitution and the country,” he maintains. “The return of those accused of January 6 would give a boost to the white supremacist and internal terror groups in which many of them participated before storming the Capitol, and would seriously undermine the deterrent effect of our laws against future attacks,” he says. . The pardon “would put the presidential seal on crimes that go to the heart of an attack on our democracy,” he argues. “By announcing his willingness to pardon people who supported him before the Constitution, Trump is sending a message to the people he counts on to support him this time: if they protect him, he will take care of them. It is a message worthy of an aspiring authoritarian,” he concludes in an article published this week.
This Thursday, Biden decorated Liz Cheney, the Republican who served on the congressional commission that investigated the assault on the Capitol, “for putting the American people above the party.” But the situation is such that Biden’s team is studying whether to grant Cheney a preventive pardon that will protect her from the persecution that the Republicans threaten her with.
Veteran judge Royce Lamberth, who sent Grillo to jail a month ago, was aware that Trump may soon pardon him. “Everyone in this room, including Mr. Grillo, is aware that the president-elect has publicly contemplated pardoning individuals who participated in the Capitol riots at various points during his campaign. This court has nothing to say about that decision. When the president [Ronald] “Reagan appointed me as a judge 37 years ago, I swore an oath to fulfill my obligations under the Constitution of the United States and I have lived every day since then in accordance with that oath,” he argued. “I will do my job, as I am bound by oath, and the president will do his; “It’s that simple,” he said, before adding: “Regardless of what ultimately happens with the capital riot cases already concluded and still pending, the true story of what happened on January 6, 2021 will never change.”
