By The Editorial Board
On January 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a past Republican district leader in Queens, leaped through a shattered window at the U.S. Capitol wielding a megaphone. He forced his way through a line of Capitol Police officers and flung open the exterior doors of the Rotunda to permit other rioters to invade the building and wreak havoc. “We stormed the Capitol!” he celebrated on video, while smoking marijuana and high-fiving fellow Donald Trump supporters as they clashed with law enforcement. “We shut it down! We did it!”
Nearly three years later, Grillo faced conviction from a federal jury for a range of offenses. Yet, undeterred, last month he received a one-year prison sentence and had a distinct provocation for the federal district judge, Royce Lamberth, who sentenced him.
“Trump’s going to pardon me anyways,” he shouted at the judge moments before he was handcuffed and taken away.
He was correct. On Monday evening, just hours after Trump was inaugurated, he made good on a promise frequently repeated to forgive nearly all the rioters who breached and vandalized the Capitol in 2021 to obstruct the ratification of Joe Biden’s victory. Grillo, along with approximately 1,500 other rioters, received full pardons from Trump, while another 14 had their sentences commuted.
A presidential pardon for Grillo not only ridicules the jury’s decision and Lamberth’s judiciary sentence, but Trump’s sweeping pardon essentially mocks a justice system that has worked for four years to prosecute nearly 1,600 individuals who endeavored to derail the Constitution, a system that convicted 1,100 of them and imprisoned over 600.
Most notably, this mass pardon conveys a message to both the nation and the world that illegal actions in favor of Trump and his agenda will be rewarded, especially when considered alongside his earlier pardons of associates. It loudly declares from the nation’s highest office that the rioters acted without wrongdoing, that violence is an entirely valid form of political expression, and that those who aim to disrupt a sacred constitutional transition of power will not face consequences.
Presidential pardons are typically misused in modern times by outgoing presidents offering a final benefaction to associates, contributors, or relatives, and those breaches of trust were already troubling. Biden granted questionable pardons to his son and, just before leaving office, several other family members, along with preemptive pardons to a group of current and former government officials for non-criminal actions, all to shield them from possible Republican backlash — a broad misuse of pardon authority that distorts its intended purpose even further.
However, what Trump enacted on Monday represents a vastly different magnitude. He utilized a mass pardon at the commencement of his term to compose a false narrative of American history, attempting to erase a crime against the core of American democracy.
Launching his term with such contempt for the legal system is brazen, even for Trump, and should raise urgent alarms for members of both parties. Officials from both camps had to defend themselves that day against the mob, which made scant distinction regarding political affiliation or ideology as they called for the execution of Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House. Through this pardon, Trump absolved and thereby encouraged domestic terrorists who jeopardized the lives of Congress members; the long-term repercussions will affect the entire political system, not solely his adversaries.
For four years, he has attempted to orchestrate the denial of his role in provoking the assault. It was mere hours post-attack when his allies in the House and on Fox News began casting doubt on the motivations behind the rioters, alleging it was a leftist conspiracy disguised as Trump supporters. By 2022, during an investigation by the House Jan. 6 committee, he started labeling the rioters as “political prisoners” victimized by Democrats and openly insinuated that the FBI had colluded in staging the attack. By last year, as his presidential campaign gathered momentum, he had entirely reframed the day’s horrific violence into what he dubbed a “day of love,” falsely asserting that none of his supporters had brought weapons to the Capitol.
Yet, Trump’s thick veil of misinformation cannot alter the reality of that fateful day, which, as The New York Times editorial board noted at the time, “touched the darkest memories and fears of democracies worldwide.” This sentiment was shared in the immediate aftermath of the attack by several senior Republicans, some of whom eventually voted to impeach Trump for his role in igniting it.
At least 20 individuals who participated in the assault did indeed carry firearms onto Capitol grounds, including Christopher Alberts, who donned body armor with metal plates and possessed a 9 mm pistol loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition, along with an additional holster containing hollow-point bullets. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison after being found guilty on nine counts, including assaulting law enforcement, yet received a full pardon on Monday. Over 140 police officers faced assaults that day; Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer, lost his life, and other officers were struck on the head with weapons; they suffered bruises, burns, and cuts; four later took their own lives.
“My worry is that people think they can physically attack me or my family and that Donald Trump will excuse their actions,” Michael Fanone, a former officer who was assaulted by the mob on January 6, disclosed to the Times. “And who can say he wouldn’t?”
For many officers who endured pepper spray, assaults with two-by-fours, or severe beatings that day, the notion that the nation’s leader would pardon such actions is abhorrent. “Releasing those who attacked us from responsibility would be an affront to justice,” Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant injured during the riot, stated in a Times Opinion guest piece this month. “If Mr. Trump wishes to mend our divided nation, he will allow their convictions to remain.”
Lamberth, a senior federal judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the D.C. District Court, has been on the bench since 1987 and has witnessed it all, having served with the Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps in Vietnam and as a federal prosecutor in Washington during the 1970s. However, while delivering a sentence against a rioter last January, he remarked that he had never encountered such a level of “baseless rationalizations for criminal behavior” in the political arena.
“I have been troubled to see distortions and outright lies permeate public perception,” he stated. “I have been appalled to observe some public figures attempting to rewrite history, asserting that rioters acted ‘in an orderly manner’ like ordinary tourists or portraying convicted Jan. 6 defendants as ‘political prisoners’ or even, astonishingly, ‘hostages.’ That is utterly absurd. Yet, the court fears that such harmful, misguided rhetoric could herald further threats to our nation.”
On his first day back in public office, Trump ignited the peril that the judge warned against, releasing hundreds of individuals found guilty of engaging in a violent onslaught against the nation’s Capitol — not because they were innocent of crimes, but because they committed those crimes in his name. In doing so, he beckons such actions to occur once more.
