Former Richard Nixon White House Counsel John Dean criticised Donald Trump for suggesting that the 6 January insurrectionists should receive pardons.
“If I run and if I win,” Mr Trump said on Saturday during a rally in Conroe, Texas, referring to a possible 2024 presidential campaign, “we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly”.
More than 700 have been charged with a crime in the sprawling Capitol riot investigation following Trump supporters’ attempt to prevent Congress from certifying his 2020 electoral loss to President Joe Biden. The rioters were urged on by the lie spread by the now-former president that the election had been stolen through fraud.
Seven people died in relation to the violent siege and more than 100 police officers were injured.
Members of the far-right militia the Oath Keepers were present at the attack – 11 people involved in the group have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Mr Trump himself was impeached for a second time as a result of the riot. He was once again acquitted during the Senate trial.
Ten Republicans in the House voted to impeach and seven GOP senators voted to convict. Since the threshold for conviction in the Senate wasn’t reached, Mr Trump is free to stand again following his 2020 loss.
Mr Dean served as the White House Counsel in President Richard Nixon’s administration from 1970 until 1973, but he was detained and disbarred following the Watergate scandal, during which Mr Dean gave vital testimony before Congress. The affair led to Mr Nixon leaving office in 1974.
“This is beyond being a demagogue to the stuff of dictators,” Mr Dean, 83, tweeted about Mr Trump’s suggestion of pardoning rioters. “He is defying the rule of law. Failure to confront a tyrant only encourages bad behaviour. If thinking Americans don’t understand what Trump is doing and what the criminal justice system must do we are all in big trouble!”
Mr Trump doled out a number of pardons before leaving office, including to his Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and his first National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Both of them are now subjects in a House Select Committee investigation into the events of 6 January 2021.
The Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, seen by many as a moderate in Mr Trump’s GOP, was asked on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday if pardons should be given to insurrectionists.
“Of course not,” he said. “Oh, my goodness. No.”
“I don’t want to send any signals that it was okay to defile the Capitol,” South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, told Face the Nation on CBS. “I want to deter what people did on January 6, and those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it.”
Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins, also widely seen as a moderate, told ABC’s This Week, that Mr Trump shouldn’t “have made that pledge to do pardons. We should let the judicial process proceed”.
Ms Collins voted to convict Mr Trump in the impeachment trial after the riot, but didn’t rule out supporting him if he ran again.
“Well certainly it’s not likely given the many other qualified candidates that we have, that have expressed interest in running,” she said. “So it’s very unlikely.”
Mr Trump is by far the most popular 2024 candidate among Republicans, according to polling.
Richard Painter served as White House ethics counsel from 2005 until 2007 during the presidency of George W Bush, but later left the Republican Party and became a Democrat in 2018. He said the suggestion that pardons be handed out should prevent Mr Trump from standing for office again.
“This alone is giving aid or comfort to an insurrection within the meaning of the 14th amendment, section three,” Mr Painter tweeted. “Trump is DISQUALIFIED from public office.”
Mr Trump complained about his legal problems, with investigations looking into both his business and political affairs. Mr Graham, who acted in support of Mr Trump as he tried to overturn the Georgia election results, said he would cooperate with the investigation if he was asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Give me a call.”
But Mr Graham also claimed that there’s an “effort here to use the law, I think inappropriately. So I don’t know what they’re going to do in Fulton County [Georgia]. I don’t know what the January 6 committee is going to do. I expect those who defile the Capitol to be prosecuted. But there’s a political movement using the law to try to knock Trump out of running. And I, particularly, don’t like it or appreciate it”.
“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal,” Mr Trump told supporters in Texas, “I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington DC, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt.”
He claimed that prosecutors are “trying to put me in jail. These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the supreme court or most other courts”.
NBC legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner tweeted: “Trump is not only encouraging his supporters to violence if he’s arrest[ed], he’s also signalling that he’ll pardon them, just as he’ll pardon the [January 6] insurrectionists. Will this finally move prosecutors to hold him accountable for his crimes?”
