Vice President-elect JD Vance drew a line in the sand for the incoming Trump administration’s pardon strategy during an interview with Fox News on Sunday.
Vance was aked how Donald Trump would handle his promise to pardon some of those Americans convicted or charged with crimes resulting from the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. During his bid for the White House, Trump pledged to grant clemency to his supporters who caused lawmakers and Capitol staff to hide in fear for their lives while a violent mob battled with police inside and outside the main building for hours.
Vance appeared to confirm that Trump’s issuance of pardons would not extend to any participant in the riot charged or convicted of committing a violent act.
“If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Justice Department treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” said the vice president-elect.
“And there’s a little bit of a grey area there, but we’re committed to seeing the equal administration of law. And there are a lot of people, we think, in the wake of January 6 who were prosecuted unfairly,” he said.
Nearly 1,600 people have been charged with or convicted of crimes linked to the riot, according to the Department of Justice.
Vance spoke with Fox’s Shannon Bream Trump just a little more than a week before assuming power in Washington, D.C. — and as Joe Biden is somberly attempting to define his own legacy amid the noise resulting from unified GOP control of the federal government.
The incoming vice president took aim at the outgoing president, shuffling into his post-presidency a week from Monday, and accused the outgoing president of leaving the Republican team a “dumpster fire.”
The Trump team is set to inherit a recovering economy with inflation on the descent but one plagued by other problems — a historically-high rate of homelessness, as well as climbing costs of education, housing, childcare, and healthcare.
“I wish Joe Biden all the best but the fact is he has left us at dumpster fire. Not just at the border but with the economy,” said Vance. For evidence, he pointed to some of those persistently high costs of living which have outpaced wage growth for most Americans.
“We know that prices are way too high for many Americans. We have to work every day to stabilize prices for American families,” he continued.
Vance then went on to attack the Biden administration for adding trillions to the federal debt. Partisan analysts have bickered over responsibility for the national debt, but most agree that both Trump and Biden have contributed to it to the tune of trilloins of dollars. The debt currently sits at $36 trillion.
His comments came as the departing Biden administration is facing a literal fire in California, where an outbreak of several wildfires in windy, dry conditions has ravaged entire communities, killed several people, and left thousands uprooted as their homes burned.
During the 2024 election, Republicans successfully depicted the Biden administration and its aging commander-in-chief as unable to manage serious global issues, taking advantage of voter frustration resulting from COVID-19 pandemic-era price hikes and other underlying (and long-developing) issues of economic inequality and pain. The party’s message was an evolved form of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which fed into anger against incumbents especially in regions like the Rust Belt where entire industries had collapsed and led to widespread economic ruin.
That line of attack has made it especially difficult for Biden, no longer the fiery speaker he was during the Obama administration or even at points in 2020, to cap off a political legacy which at this time last year he thought was going to extend for another four years in the White House. His replacement on the Democratic ticket and Kamala Harris’s defeat in November significantly eroded the image he was building; he now has one more week to complete it.
As part of that effort, the president will speak Monday at the State Department to define his foreign policy legacy — one tarred by a bloody and defeat-tinged withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as the outbreak of bloody conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
On Wednesday, Biden will deliver his final prime-time address to the nation as president, and likely ever.
