(The Epoch Times)—Vice President-elect JD Vance on Sunday said that individuals who were violent during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach “obviously” should not be pardoned. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to use his clemency power for people who have been charged in connection to the incident over the past four years.
Those who “protested peacefully” on Jan. 6 should receive a pardon, Vance told Fox News. He added that there is also a “little bit of a gray area” in some of those cases.
“I think it’s very simple,” Vance elaborated. “If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
More than 1,500 people have been charged with federal crimes in connection to the Capitol breach, according to records from the Department of Justice. A number of people were charged with misdemeanor offenses for entering the Capitol in an unauthorized manner, while some were charged with felonies.
Leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as plots to use violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to then-President-elect Joe Biden.
Vance said Sunday he believes that “a lot of people” have been “prosecuted unfairly” over the past several years.
“We need to rectify that,” Vance said. “We’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.”
Also on Sunday morning, Vance responded to critics on social media who said his comments to Fox News didn’t go far enough, with some saying that all Jan. 6 defendants should be pardoned.
“I’ve been defending these guys for years,” Vance wrote on social media platform X. “The president saying he’ll look at each case (and me saying the same) is not some walkback … I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up. Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial.”
That comment came in response to a prominent conservative social media account’s statement on Sunday that new footage has shown “cops shooting innocent J6 protesters and [Vance] goes on Fox News and tells the world that only non violent protesters should get pardoned … better rethink what you just said JD.”
Vance noted that he donated to a Jan. 6 “political prisoner fund” and was criticized over it during his run for Ohio’s Senate seat.
In a wide-ranging news conference last week at his Florida Mar-a-Lago residence, Trump suggested he would initiate “major pardons” for individuals arrested in the aftermath of Jan. 6.
A reporter asked him, “You said on your first day of office you were going to pardon Jan. 6 defendants. Are you planning to pardon those who were charged with violent offenses?”
“Well, we’re looking at it, and we have other people in there,” Trump said, adding that “people that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now.”
“We’ll be looking at the whole thing. But I’ll be making major pardons, yes,” he added.
The president-elect has said on multiple occasions that he would carry out the pardons quickly after he is sworn into office, on Jan. 20.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Independent Journalism Is Dying
Ever since President Trump’s miraculous victory, we’ve heard an incessant drumbeat about how legacy media is dying. This is true. The people have awakened to the reality that they’re being lied to by the self-proclaimed “Arbiters of Truth” for the sake of political expediency, corporate self-protection, and globalist ambitions.
But even as independent journalism rises to fill the void left by legacy media, there is still a huge challenge. Those at the top of independent media like Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, and Tucker Carlson are thriving and rightly so. They have earned their audience and the financial rewards that come from it. They’ve taken risks and worked hard to get to where they are.
For “the rest of us,” legacy media and their proxies are making it exceptionally difficult to survive, let alone thrive. They still have a stranglehold over the “fact checkers” who have a dramatic impact on readership and viewership. YouTube, Facebook, and Google still stifle us. The freer speech platforms like Rumble and 𝕏 can only reward so many of their popular content creators. For independent journalists on the outside looking in, our only recourse is to rely on affiliates and sponsors.
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Independent media is the future. In many ways, that future is already here. While the phrase, “the more the merrier,” does not apply to this business because there are still some bad actors in the independent media field, there are many great ones that do not get nearly enough attention. We hope to change that one content creator at a time.
Thank you and God Bless,
JD Rucker
