5 years of whitewashing the Insurrection
“In the first hours of his second administration, President Trump sought to wipe away all trace of the attack on the Capitol by granting amnesty to nearly 1,600 people implicated in the riot stoked by his lies about a stolen election.
They answered with a collective cry of gratitude. And why not?
The pardon proclamation saved them, opening prison doors and ending all of the criminal prosecutions related to the Capitol attack. Even more, it gave a presidential stamp of approval to their inverted vision of Jan. 6, 2021: that those who assaulted the police and vandalized the historic building that day were victims, and those who spent the next four years using the criminal justice system to hold them accountable were villains.
But nearly a year after Mr. Trump’s sweeping proclamation asserted that he had cleared the way for “a process of national reconciliation,” many recipients of his clemency remain consumed by conspiracy theories, angry at the Trump administration for not validating their insistence that the Capitol attack was a deep-state setup and haunted by problems from both before and after the riot.
“Being pardoned doesn’t make these families whole,” Cynthia Hughes, a prominent advocate for the Jan. 6 defendants, wrote on social media recently. “Many are barely holding on mentally, emotionally, and financially. To pretend otherwise is a lie.”
In the five years since the Capitol was stormed, no new facts have emerged to undermine the basic findings of congressional and Justice Department investigators that many of the rioters acted in the misguided belief, pushed relentlessly by Mr. Trump, that he had been robbed of victory in 2020 — and that in attacking the Capitol they not only injured about 140 police officers but also struck at a cornerstone of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.“
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