President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed he will begin pardoning January 6th prisoners on his first day in office - a move that is certain to trigger a meltdown from critics in the Democratic party.
During a sit-down interview with NBC, Trump said he would not hesitate to help supporters of his who have spent years languishing in "disgusting" conditions.
"First day, I'm looking first day. These people have been there — how long is it? Three, four years," Trump said. "They’ve been in there for years. And they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open."
Over the course of his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to pardon January 6th participants whom he said were treated harshly by the system.
Of the more than 1,5000 people charged over the riot, over 900 have registered guilty pleas, many of them for non-violent offenses. Trump said that many of those who pled guilty had the deck stacked against them.
"Look. I know the system. The system's a very corrupt system. They say to a guy, 'You're going to go to jail for two years or for 30 years.' And these guys are looking, their whole lives have been destroyed," Trump said.
Trump said he will make "exceptions" for defendants accused of more serious wrongdoing, but he plans to move "very quickly" to free those "living in hell."
"I’m going to look at everything. We’ll look at individual cases," Trump told Welker. "But I’m going to be acting very quickly."
As precedent for his action, Trump pointed to the sweeping dismissal of cases against left-wing rioters in the summer of 2020, including anarchists who attacked a federal court building after the death of George Floyd.
"They took over the police station in Minneapolis. They burned it down," Trump said.
"And yet these people have been in jail, and I hear that jail is a hellhole," he said of his own supporters imprisoned in Washington D.C.
Trump also told Welker that members of the January 6th committee, like Liz Cheney, deserve prison but he would not direct his Justice Department to target anyone over politics.
"I think that they'll have to look at that. But I'm not going to. I'm going to focus on 'Drill, baby, drill,'" he said.
When Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden of federal crimes, Trump reacted by calling it a "miscarriage of justice" while asking if January 6th defendants would also go free. Biden's critics argue he gave Trump an excuse to now pursue his own controversial pardons.
