Vice President-elect JD Vance has shed light on the straightforward approach President-elect Donald Trump will handle January 6 pardons.
With just over a week until Trump takes office, Vance targeted the Department of Justice (DOJ), helmed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, during a conversation on “Fox News Sunday” with Shannon Bream.
Bream asked, “January 6th pardons: President Trump says there’s a process. Where is the line drawn? And who will and wouldn’t be considered for a pardon?”
“It’s very simple,” Vance responded. “Look, if you protested peacefully on January the 6th, and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
He added, “And there’s a little bit of a gray area there. But we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law. And there are a lot of people, we think in the wake of January the 6th, who were prosecuted unfairly. We need to rectify that.”
The DOJ has prosecuted over 1,500 individuals in connection with the Capitol riot that took place four years ago.
Among them, many pleaded guilty or faced convictions, with several hundred receiving prison sentences.
During a December interview with NBC News, Trump mentioned his team is considering issuing pardons for January 6 defendants on his first day in office.
“Those people have suffered long and hard,” he stated, though he clarified “there may be some exceptions” in the clemency process.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Vance criticized what he labeled a deficit in “competent governance” in California. His comments came as firefighters battled devastating wildfires in areas surrounding Los Angeles.
Bream questioned him about the situation, asking, “Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has written to President Trump saying, ‘let’s not be divisive right now, come out and visit, let people see us working together.’ Any indication the president-elect may do that?”
Vance said that Trump would “love” to visit California, and that both he and Trump are “heartbroken” to see “fellow Americans who are going through a very tough time,” but noted that “the federal government has to do a better job.”
“President Trump is committed to doing a better job when it comes to disaster relief,” he added.
“That’s true for the hurricane victims and flood victims in North Carolina. It’s true for the fire victims in California. We just — we have to do a better job. We need competent good governance,” Vance continued.
“Now that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize the governor of California for, I think, some very bad decisions over a very long period of time,” he added.
Vance went on to point toward state-level mismanagement as a key issue, stating, “Some of these reservoirs have been dry for 15, 20 years. The fire hydrants are being reported as going dry while the firefighters are trying to put out these fires.”
He pointed out the “serious lack of competent governance,” with the Vice President-elect pointed to as a reason the fires are burning out of control.
On Sunday’s NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Newsom claimed Trump wasn’t above withholding federal aid from the Blue state.
“He’s done it in Utah. He’s done it in Michigan, did it in Puerto Rico,” he commented. “He did it to California back before I was even governor in 2018, until he found out folks in Orange County voted for him and then he decided to give the money. So he’s been at this for years and years and years.”
“He said I’m not going to support the fire-fighting efforts,” Newsom added. “I’m not going to support the state of California as it relates to its emergency management, he made this pretty clear during the election, unless they do my bidding.”
Vance dismissed the allegation, reassuring viewers about Trump’s priorities. “Hey, look, President Trump cares about all Americans, right? He is the president for all Americans,” Vance said. “And I think that he intends to have FEMA and other federal responses much, much better and much more clued in to what’s going on there on the ground.”
“You know, President Biden has been asleep at the wheel for a number of different crises. And I think this — this the final California fire, as it’s really going — getting out of control in Biden’s last week and a half, I do think it drives home, just again, we’ve had incompetent governance for so long,” he concluded.
