Donald Trump signed the pardon decree at the White House on Monday evening in favor of hundreds of people convicted for their participation in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, once again calling them “hostages”.
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Shortly before, the new American president had announced that he would exercise his power of pardon from the first day of his mandate, as he had promised during his campaign.
“It is for January 6, for the hostages, around 1,500 people who will be completely pardoned,” he said while signing the decree in the Oval Office, adding that it included sentence commutations.
Donald Trump has regularly downplayed the seriousness of the attack on January 6, 2021, describing this date as a “day of love” and “overflow of affection” towards him.
That day, hundreds of his supporters, heated by his baseless accusations of electoral fraud, stormed the Capitol, the sanctuary of American democracy, to try to prevent the certification of the victory of his opponent Joe. Biden.
Since then, some 1,600 people have been arrested and charged, with more than 1,270 convicted.
Parliamentary commission of inquiry
Arrests and trials continued until recent days.
-A resident of the state of Virginia, near Washington, Lewis Wayne Snoots, 59, was sentenced Friday to nearly six years in prison for assaulting and resisting police officers.
The nominal list of beneficiaries of the presidential pardon was not immediately available.
But the mother of the leader of the former American far-right group Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, sentenced in September 2023 to 22 years in prison, affirmed in the evening on X that her son was “finally free!”
This is the heaviest sentence handed down for the assault on the Capitol.
Donald Trump was not directly concerned by the courts for these events, although the parliamentary commission of inquiry into January 6, 2021 recommended criminal proceedings against him in December 2022, in particular for calling for rebellion and plotting against American institutions.
In order to prevent the members of this commission from reprisals from Donald Trump returning to power, Joe Biden himself signed a presidential pardon decree a few hours before ceding power to him.
Former Republican parliamentarian Liz Cheney will benefit from it, as will all the elected officials and civil servants who participated in the commission of inquiry into the assault on the Capitol, as well as the police officers who testified before this commission.
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