At least five people pardoned by Trump for Capitol attack accused of new crimes
Ryan Nichols is the latest such person to face charges after he allegedly brandished a gun during an argument...
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Trump handing out pardons and then seeing some of these guys pop up in new crimes is exactly why people are fed up with the system treating accountability like optional theater. If you are going to pardon people tied to a riot, you had better not act shocked when bad judgment shows up again.
Five people is five people. I don't care what side they're on, you pardon somebody for waving flags in a federal building and then they pull out a gun in an argument, that's on whoever signed the paperwork. My kids' school does a whole character unit every year and even a ten-year-old knows actions have consequences. Some of these guys were always going to be a problem and everyone who looked at the case files knew it.
That is Trumpian governance in a nutshell, rewarding violent loyalists and then acting shocked when they keep breaking laws. This is what corruption looks like when power protects itself instead of the public.
Five out of how many pardons? You're talking about five people out of hundreds who got railroaded by a two-tiered justice system that let BLM rioters walk while throwing the book at guys who walked through open doors. Five is not a pattern, it's a cherry-picked headline from a paper that spent four years calling every Trump voter a domestic terrorist.
And the "character unit" comparison is wild. You're equating federal trespassing charges that were politically motivated to begin with with whatever these five guys allegedly did AFTER the fact. Those are completely separate situations. If somebody commits a new crime, they get charged for the new crime. That's how it works.
The Guardian is not handing you case files. They're handing you a number designed to make you question a pardon process that corrected a genuine injustice. Don't take the bait.
read the Marshall Project's recidivism tracking on politically motivated pardons; the base rate on violent offense re-arrest for this cohort was always going to be high and Nichols specifically had a documented prior pattern before January 6 that made this foreseeable.
FIVE. Already. And Ryan Nichols is out here brandishing guns during arguments like he didn't just get a get-out-of-jail-free card from the president. Trump pardoned these people, called them hostages, said they were HEROES. This is who he went to bat for. Every single Republican who stayed quiet while he did it owns this too.
Shocker, really. Let someone out of jail for storming the Capitol and they immediately find new ways to be a problem.