President Donald Trump has suggested that far-right militias such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers may have a role to play in public life.
Trump was asked during a press conference in the Roosevelt Room on Tuesday if there’s room for the leaders of such groups in the political conversation.
“We’ll have to see,” Trump said.
“I thought the sentences for them were ridiculous and excessive,” he added. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was just released from his 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy following Trump’s pardons and commutations for January 6 rioters.
“At least [in] the cases we looked at, these were people that actually love our country,” Trump added.
Tarrio appeared on Alex Jones’s InfoWars last night, just hours after leaving prison.
“We went through hell — and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it,” said Tarrio. “Because what we stood for … was what we’ve been fighting for, and what we saw yesterday on the inauguration stage.”
He suggested that “people like” Pam Bondi, the nominee for attorney general, and Kash Patel, the nominee to lead the FBI, and the “rest of Trump’s cabinet” should “right all these wrongs … The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars.”
Several Republican senators attempted to avoid answering questions about the January 6 pardons and blamed former President Joe Biden for using the pardon power excessively.
“We’re not looking backward we’re looking forwards,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, according to CBS. “I’ve said this before — Biden laid forth the most massive use of the pardon power that we’ve seen in history.”
Both Biden’s and Trump’s use of the clemency power has done significant damage to public trust.
“I think the expectation now is that a departing president in the last hour of serving in office pardons every family member, hanger-on, et cetera, for whatever they did,” St. John’s University constitutional scholar John Barrett told Politico. “This kind of green-lights going for it as a crook.”
Trump issued pardons on Monday for almost all of the defendants charged with taking part in the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump issued about 1,500 pardons and commuted the sentences of 14 defendants.
The president faced an indictment for his role in the riot as part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. However, the case was dismissed after Trump won the election.
Smith stated in his final report that Trump had “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence.”
Tarrio was one of the most well-known figures to be pardoned on Monday. The former leader of the right-wing extremist group, the Proud Boys, received the longest sentence in the January 6 cases.
Tarrio wasn’t at the Capitol, but prosecutors argued that he retained control over the Proud Boys at the time and that he took credit for what they did.
Meanwhile, Trump commuted the sentence of the founder of the far-right militia the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2023 for seditious conspiracy following his actions helping to lead a plot to stop the certification of the 2020 election results.
