The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which supported President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, 2020, and 2024, yesterday criticized his blanket pardon for individuals charged in reference to the January 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol. The FOP, the nation’s largest police union, is troubled by the president’s clemency for Trump supporters who assaulted law enforcement officials whereas expressing their outrage at a supposedly stolen election.
“Crimes in opposition to regulation enforcement usually are not simply assaults on people or public security,” the FOP said in a joint assertion with the Worldwide Affiliation of Chiefs of Police (IACP). “They’re assaults on society and undermine the rule of regulation. Permitting these convicted of those crimes to be launched early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by brave regulation enforcement officers and their households. When perpetrators of crimes, particularly severe crimes, usually are not held absolutely accountable, it sends a harmful message that the implications for attacking regulation enforcement usually are not extreme, doubtlessly emboldening others to commit comparable acts of violence.”
Spreading the blame round, the FOP and the IACP roped former President Joe Biden into their critique of misguided clemency for individuals convicted of violence in opposition to law enforcement officials. The organizations cited “lengthy standing and optimistic relationships with each President Trump and President Biden,” thanking them for “their help of the policing occupation.” However they added that they’re “deeply discouraged by the latest pardons and commutations granted by each the Biden and Trump Administrations to people convicted of killing or assaulting regulation enforcement officers.”
The teams’ beef with Biden presumably entails his last-minute commutation for Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted of murdering two FBI brokers throughout a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Peltier, who’s now 80 and ailing, served half a century for these crimes earlier than Biden commuted his life sentence to residence confinement on Monday.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray described Peltier as “a remorseless killer” in a letter urging Biden to maintain him in jail. However Biden noted that “Tribal Nations, Nobel Peace laureates, former regulation enforcement officers (together with the previous U.S. Lawyer whose workplace oversaw Mr. Peltier’s prosecution and attraction), dozens of lawmakers, and human rights organizations strongly help granting Mr. Peltier clemency, citing his superior age, sicknesses, his shut ties to and management within the Native American neighborhood, and the substantial size of time he has already spent in jail.”
No matter you consider Peltier’s commutation, it’s totally different in type and scale from Trump’s pardons for Capitol rioters.
First, though Biden confirmed he’s in no way averse to self-interested acts of clemency, he has no private stake on this specific case. Trump, in contrast, has a powerful curiosity in minimizing the crimes dedicated by his supporters, who had been impressed by his baseless declare that huge election fraud had disadvantaged him of his rightful victory. That curiosity explains why Trump, who in 2021 described the riot as “a heinous assault on the USA Capitol,” now portrays it as “a day of affection.”
Second, permitting an aged assassin to die at residence after spending most of his life in jail will not be fairly the identical as granting pardons to “heroes” and “patriots” who assaulted police throughout the Capitol riot. The previous doesn’t indicate that Peltier is harmless or undeserving of punishment, whereas the latter means that the January 6 defendants had been all victims of “a grave nationwide injustice,” as Trump put it.
Third, Biden’s commutation entails one sick outdated man who poses no believable menace to public security, whereas Trump’s pardons included about 600 individuals who had been charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding regulation enforcement brokers or officers or obstructing these officers” throughout the riot. As of final November, the Justice Division reported, that group included 169 defendants “charged with utilizing a lethal or harmful weapon or inflicting severe bodily harm to an officer.”
Trump’s pardons, in contrast to Biden’s commutation, implicitly excuse political violence, so long as it’s dedicated by individuals who love the president and acted primarily based on his phony grievance. Trump exhibits no such lenience when left-leaning protesters who hate him tangle with the police. These “thugs” clearly belong in jail, he thinks.
Extra usually, Trump’s authoritarian “regulation and order” instincts lead him to oppose accountability for law enforcement officials who violate individuals’s constitutional rights. However when his supporters assault law enforcement officials who’re merely doing their jobs, as occurred throughout the Capitol riot, he sees no crime worthy of punishment.
The one believable rationalization for this blatant inconsistency is that Trump sees every part by means of a narcissistic lens, which is obvious even when he manages to do the proper factor. When he pardoned Ross Ulbricht on Tuesday, Trump noted that the Silk Highway founder “was given two life sentences, plus 40 years,” for creating a web site that linked drug consumers with drug sellers, which the president rightly described as “ridiculous.” Trump sympathized with Ulbricht, he mentioned, as a result of “the scum that labored to convict him”—prosecutors on the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for the Southern District of New York—”had been among the similar lunatics who had been concerned within the modern-day weaponization of presidency in opposition to me.”
Trump perceived no contradiction between his sympathy for Ulbricht and his oft-repeated place that drug sellers must be executed. That tough-line angle likewise didn’t cease him from condemning “very unfair” drug penalties, liberating drug offenders equivalent to Alice Johnson in response to movie star appeals, or supporting drug sentencing reform—a trigger he embraced primarily based on a political wager that he later complained didn’t repay. “Did it for African Individuals,” he told a New York Occasions reporter in 2022. “No person else might have gotten it carried out. Acquired zero credit score.”
Trump’s in any other case puzzling incoherence on felony justice and drug coverage is comprehensible provided that you acknowledge that his self-interest overrides any rules he claims to help. That features the precept that individuals who assault law enforcement officials should be punished.
When the FOP endorsed Trump in September, its president, Patrick Yoes, mentioned the Republican nominee “has proven time after time that he helps our regulation enforcement officers and understands the problems our members face each day.” Throughout his first time period, Yoes mentioned, Trump “made it crystal clear that he has our backs.” If the FOP’s leaders at the moment are stunned that Trump deserted that dedication when it conflicted together with his private pursuits, they haven’t been paying consideration.
