President-elect Donald Trump plans to pardon Jan. 6 rioters on his first day back in the White House, according to a new exclusive interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker.
The Meet the Press host sat down with the former and future president on Friday, before he traveled to Paris to meet with other world leaders. In the interview, which aired Sunday morning, Trump said he would “be acting very quickly” for the hundreds of individuals who participated in the United States Capitol attack in 2021.
“I’m looking first day,” Trump said when Welker asked when he planned on granting clemency to the more than 900 people who pleaded guilty to crimes. “These people have been there, how long has it been, three or four years, you know, by the way, they’ve been in there for years. And they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump has previously referred to some Jan. 6 rioters as “hostages” being mistreated by the Justice Department—though it’s unclear exactly who he is speaking about.
According to reporting from NBC News, “More than 1,350 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, and prosecutors have secured more than 950 convictions.” Low-level defendants, the network found, “routinely receive sentences of probation, but about 500 have received periods of incarceration. The overwhelming majority of those charged have been released before trial.” NBC News identified just 15 defendants who have not been convicted or entered a plea and are currently incarcerated.
A bipartisan Senate report released in June of 2021 found that at least seven people died in connection with the insurrection at the Capitol. A month after that report was released, two Metropolitan Police officers—Gunther Hashida and Kyle DeFreytag—died by suicide in July. “About 150 officers from the Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department, and local agencies were injured, and hundreds of workers were traumatized by the mob,” per reporting from the New York Times. The attack caused, according to a report from October of 2022, an estimated 2.8 million dollars in damages to the Capitol building and its grounds, along with costs borne by the Capitol police.
During their interview, Welker also asked the president-elect about the Jan. 6 Committee, the bipartisan panel tasked with investigating the events that took place that day. Their final 845-page report called on Congress to ban Trump from holding public office ever again and noted, on the top of the executive summary, that “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”
