Sen. Adam Schiff was offered a friendly media platform earlier this week to hypocritically complain about pardons issued by President Donald Trump to Americans convicted of petty crimes related to the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.
After years of the Biden Justice Department going after and convicting more than 1,500 people — including older retired grandparents — of misdemeanor activities not related to the riot, Trump pledged during his campaign that he would grant pardons to most defendants.
And while now-former President Joe Biden issued sweeping pre-emptive pardons to his family, members of the Nancy Pelosi-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.”
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Despite Democrats’ continued insistence that Trump “incited an insurrection,” the fact of the matter is, the day of the riot, he gave a speech asking supporters to “peacefully” protest what they viewed as shady election results based on reports at the time.
Also, while some who were arrested were convicted of “seditious conspiracy,” there is zero evidence that what occurred that day at the capital was an “insurrection” rather than a riot much like those that occurred near the White House in 2020.
For his part, Biden’s mass pardons on his way out the door actually did draw some pushback from Democrats.
During an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation in December, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) was questioned by moderator Margaret Brennan about the 39 pardons and a record 1,500 sentence commutations granted by Biden.
“Are you comfortable with some of these decisions?” Brennan asked.
“No,” Klobuchar said bluntly, nothing further that she specifically “didn’t agree with the pardon of the president’s son.”
“We should have some kind of an outside board that governors have,” Klobuchar said. “Governors have the ability to give mercy to people after years have gone by, but a lot of them have boards that make recommendations and other things, instead of people just doing it in the middle of the night and people in the White House. This makes no sense to me.”
The Minnesota Democrat further stated that while she believes some recipients of clemency are deserving, there are several individuals on the list of over 1,500 that perplex her.
“I have no doubt there were some righteous pardons in this group,” Klobuchar said. “Okay, let’s say that. Now I believe that there were. But there were a number that I think make no sense at all.”
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