After Trump pardons Jan. 6 rioters, some of his Northwest supporters disagree

WASHINGTON – A little more than four years before President Donald Trump took the oath of office at the Capitol on Monday, some of his most fervent supporters forced their way into the same building in an attempt to stop his presidency from ending, spurred on by Trump’s insistence that he was the rightful winner of an election he had lost.

Some of the rioters smashed windows and beat outnumbered police with blunt weapons, leaving officers with broken ribs and bloodied faces. Others walked in through open doors and strolled through the building taking pictures after police, under-equipped and overwhelmed by the mob, lost control of the crowd and fell back.

In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, many congressional Republicans decried the rioters’ actions, although fewer ascribed the violence to Trump. In the years that followed, the biggest investigation in Justice Department history resulted in charges against nearly 1,600 people for what they did that day, ranging from trespassing and disrupting official proceedings to assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy.

With the stroke of a pen on Monday night, Trump reversed that work and fulfilled one of his signature campaign promises by commuting the sentences of the rioters convicted of the most serious charges and issuing full pardons to the rest.

Former President Joe Biden, in the final days and hours of his presidency, issued a flurry of his own pardons and commutations. In addition to the more traditional grants of clemency for people who had repented after serving long prison terms, the outgoing president also issued pre-emptive pardons to several of his own family members and to the members, staff and witnesses of the House committee that investigated the Capitol riot, who have been threatened with retribution by Trump and his allies.

At the Capitol on Tuesday, some Trump supporters who had traveled from the Inland Northwest to witness his inauguration were enthusiastic about many of the new president’s Day 1 actions but said they were conflicted about the pardons. Several of the roughly 80 people on a tour of the Capitol led by Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, said they saw a clear distinction between violent and nonviolent crimes.

“I am a God-fearing, law-abiding citizen,” said Adrian Lawrence, of Elk. “And I feel like if you actually broke the law – if you came up and broke a window or you destroyed something – you should be held accountable for that. You shouldn’t get a pardon.”

Lawrence said he traveled to D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, and marched to the Capitol after listening to Trump deliver a speech outside the White House in which he repeated his claim that the 2020 election was rigged and told his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and demand that Congress reject the election results.

“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said at the time, before adding that they should make their voices heard “peacefully and patriotically.”

Lawrence said he didn’t enter the Capitol on that day, but when he arrived, he saw protesters walking in through open doors. He sees a clear distinction between those people and the rioters who climbed through smashed windows and attacked police.

“We made doors different than windows,” he said. “Those guys in blue do their very, very best, and we should have respect for them.”

Keith Scribner, of Spokane, who traveled to D.C. with his family and watched the inauguration from the Museum of the Bible after it was moved indoors due to dangerously cold weather, said he was surprised to see Trump grant such sweeping clemency.

“I don’t know enough about it, but it doesn’t seem like they did much wrong by just walking into the Capitol,” Scribner said. “But if they did something wrong, they need to have consequences for that.”

Attacking police officers, he added, is “completely intolerable.”

Baumgartner, who was elected to Congress for the first time in November and was serving as Spokane County treasurer in 2021, agreed.

“In general, my preference would have been that the folks who used violence were not pardoned,” he said in a brief interview after the tour.

Not all Northwest Republicans were willing to go that far. In an interview on Monday, before Trump issued the pardons, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho said he couldn’t comment on Trump’s repeated pledge to pardon convicted rioters because he didn’t know what the president had said, but he said the pardons issued by Biden were “unnecessary and potentially just part of a political attack.”

“I haven’t followed closely what President Trump has said that he may do or not do in terms of pardons,” Crapo said. “So I guess I just have to defer right now responding to that, because I don’t know exactly what he may have said or may be thinking of.”

Through a spokeswoman, Crapo declined to comment on the pardons on Tuesday.

After watching Trump address an overflow crowd at the Capitol following his inauguration, Gov. Brad Little of Idaho said in a brief interview that his opinion on pardons for convicted rioters “depends on what the crime is, obviously.”

When asked if he would be in favor of pardons for certain crimes committed during the Capitol riot, Little declined to weigh in on the president’s decisions.

“Well, I mean, we pardon people all the time for a variety of reasons, so you’ve just got to look at the reasons,” he said. “We’ve got a lot bigger fish to fry than that.”

Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, whose Capitol office was ransacked by rioters, took a similar approach. When asked before the inauguration about Trump’s promise to pardon the rioters, Risch said, “I don’t want to go there. He’s going to do what he’s going to do, and we’ll talk again if he does.”

At the Capitol on Tuesday, Risch said he wouldn’t talk about Trump’s pardons. When asked about Biden’s clemency orders, the senator invoked his past as a county prosecutor.

“If you look at that list of people that he pardoned, I mean, it was stomach-turning when you read what these people did,” he said of Biden’s actions. “There were cop killers in there, and rapists and murders.”

When asked if he had similar feelings about the people convicted of attacking police officers at the Capitol, Risch abruptly ended the interview.

“You’re going where I told you not to go,” he said.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, who sat next to Risch during the inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda, said in an interview Tuesday that Republicans and Democrats alike should remain clear-eyed about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

“He’s pardoning people who did serious damage to our Capitol, to our country, and physical harm to police officers,” she said. “So I couldn’t disagree more.”

Referring to Baumgartner’s statement on Monday that Biden’s pardons were the behavior of “a banana republic dictator,” Cantwell recalled how she and other senators were escorted back to the House chamber to certify the election after the riot and said, “That turned us into a banana republic.”

Rep. Adam Smith, a Bellevue Democrat who was one of the most vocal critics of Biden’s initial decision to stay in the presidential race after a disastrous debate performance, said in an interview Monday that Biden had no choice but to pre-emptively pardon people whom Trump and his allies, including FBI Director-designee Kash Patel, have promised to target for retribution.

Rep. Kim Schrier, a physician and Democrat whose district spans the Cascades from Wenatchee to the Seattle suburbs, recalled in an interview how she sheltered in an office during the riot with Rep. Sharice Davids, a Kansas Democrat and former mixed martial arts fighter, preparing to fight their way out and render first aid.

“It was a terrible day with a violent mob with the worst intentions,” she said. “And I’m deeply frustrated that one of President Trump’s first actions in office was to forgive violent offenders that attacked police. I think it’s a terrible statement, and it really sends a message that political violence is OK, as long as it is in support of him.”