(LifeSiteNews) — Donald Trump has clarified that if he is re-elected, he will pardon January 6 prisoners on a “case-by-case basis” instead of acquitting them en masse, as he previously suggested he might.
Trump sat down for an extensive interview with Time magazine last month. It covered everything from abortion and Operation Warp Speed to foreign policy and what a potential second term would look like.
Time asked Trump if he would “consider pardoning every one of” the more than 800 persons imprisoned for their actions in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. He responded that he would “absolutely” consider doing that for the “J-6 patriots” but added, “if somebody was evil and bad, I would look at that differently.”
Trump also noted that “many of those people were ushered in [to the Capitol]. You see it on tape, the police are ushering them in. They’re walking with the police.”
The day the Time interview went to print, Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for the Trump campaign, issued a statement to NBC News.
“As President Trump has promised, he will pardon January 6th protestors who are wrongfully imprisoned by Crooked Joe Biden’s Justice Department, and those decisions will be determined on a case-by-case basis when he is back in the White House,” she said.
Trump has commented on how he would handle January 6 detainees on multiple occasions. In a Truth Social post on March 11, he said one of his first acts as the 47th president would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” At a rally in Conroe, Texas, in January 2022, he announced that, if he is re-elected, “those people from January 6” will be treated “fairly,” and “if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”
At the Pray Vote Stand Summit in September 2023, Trump vowed to pardon or commute the sentences of recently jailed pro-life advocates as well as “every political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration.”
READ: Jailed pro-lifer held in prolonged solitary confinement suffers stroke
As previously reported by LifeSite, much of the footage released by the mainstream media about the events in Washington, D.C., were held back by the corrupt January 6 Congressional Committee, which included Deep State RINOs like Liz Cheney. Tucker Carlson previously observed that “taken as a whole” the “video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim. And that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it.”
GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene has been one of a few elected officials on Capitol Hill to draw attention to the human rights abuses carried out against detainees over the past several years.
Trump told Time that the way January 6 protesters have been treated is far different from the way Black Lives Matters and Antifa rioters were in years past.
“It’s a two-tier system” he noted. “When I look at Portland, when I look at Minneapolis, where they took over police precincts and everything else, and went after federal buildings, when I look at other situations that were violent, and where people were killed, nothing happened to them. Nothing happened to them. I think it’s a two-tier system of justice. I think it’s a very, very sad thing.”
Trump also said that he “tried to stop” protesters from entering the Capitol. “I offered 10,000 soldiers and Nancy Pelosi turned me down. So did the mayor of Washington, she turned me down in writing,” he said.
Trump will face off against presumptive Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden this summer in a re-match of the 2020 race. At present, most polls show Trump is ahead in a number of key swing states.