Gov. Ron DeSantis said that if he were President, he’d consider “pardons and commutations” for Proud Boys and others swept up in investigations of Jan. 6, 2021.
During a Newsmax interview Wednesday, DeSantis said his White House would “look at all these cases” involving Enrique Tarrio and others found guilty in the estimated 1,100 cases regarding what the Governor called a “protest that devolved into a riot.”
DeSantis contended “there are some examples of people that should not have been prosecuted.”
“They just walked into the Capitol,” DeSantis relayed. “If they were (Black Lives Matter) they would not have been prosecuted.
The Governor acknowledged “other examples of people that probably did commit misconduct,” but balked at the idea the violence was a threat to national security.
“They may have been violent, but to say it’s an act of terrorism when it was basically a protest that devolved into a riot, to do excessive sentences,” DeSantis said.
“Maybe they were guilty but 22 years, when other people that did other things got six months,” said DeSantis, a former Navy JAG lawyer.
“So I think we need a single standard of justice and so we’ll use pardons and commutations as appropriate to ensure that everyone is treated equally,” DeSantis said, pivoting to yet another aside about the Black Lives Matter movement, which did not interfere with the certification of a Presidential election.
“And as we know a lot of people with the BLM riots, they didn’t get prosecuted at all,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis has often commented on Jan. 6, 2021, including as a presidential candidate, and has softpedaled the actions of the demonstrators; indeed, he promised “day one” pardons weeks ago.
During a July interview with Russell Brand, DeSantis rejected the idea that the siege of the Capitol to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s election was an “insurrection,” and said that those protesters were not “seditionists,” but hapless folks who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“It was not an insurrection. These are people that were there to attend a rally and then they were there to protest,” DeSantis said.
He noted things went badly despite the benign intent of attendees, but blamed the media for framing the issue badly.
“It devolved into a riot. But the idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true. And it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically, you know, get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and for political aims,” DeSantis said, adding that “a lot of people that were there who were just there and they didn’t have any designs on doing anything.”
The Governor has taken the position also that Donald Trump didn’t do enough to stop it.
“I think it’s been well documented, kind of, his conduct when it first started how he sat there. He could have obviously leaned in harder, I think. I mean, even his own kids were texting saying, you know, he needs to do more, he needs to do more,” DeSantis told Megyn Kelly.
DeSantis admonished Trump during a press conference this summer also.
“I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn’t do anything while things were going on. He should have come out more forcefully,” the Governor said during a press conference in West Columbia, South Carolina.
Even before running for President, DeSantis liked to mock people who took the Capitol riots to be particularly serious.
In February, DeSantis likened protests at the Florida Capitol to the Jan. 6 riot.
“It’s interesting that if they’re doing that from the Left, then the media says that’s ‘democracy in action.’ They don’t say it’s an insurrection if you take over a Capitol because of that, but I think that’s what it’s getting to.”
The Governor commented on Jan. 6 last spring, when he said concern about the riots that delayed congressional certification of the 2020 Presidential Election was a “dead horse” and a “loser” with voters.
On the anniversary of the incident, he offered similar dismissals of the focus of media and Democrats, diminishing the riot.
“This is their Christmas,” he said of the media and Democrats at a January 2022 news conference. He expanded on that take in a subsequent fundraising email, contending “Jan. 6th is like Christmas for the out-of-touch D.C., New York political and media class.”
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