Fox News stars have spent the months since President Donald Trump’s election assuring their audiences that Trump’s long-stated promise to pardon what he termed the “J6 hostages” would be limited only to nonviolent offenders who participated in storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. But on his first day in office, Trump pardoned or commuted to time served every person convicted in connection to their actions that day, including those who violently assaulted law enforcement and participated in seditious conspiracies.
Trump’s Tuesday night grant of clemency “to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack” includes pardons for “for violent offenders who went after the police on January 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours, and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade,” The New York Timesnoted. He also pardoned or commuted the sentences of several leaders of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
This is precisely what Fox hosts and loyal Trump propagandists Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters explicitly said should not happen.
Numerous Fox personalities condemned the Trumpist violence at the Capitol in its immediate aftermath and called for the perpetrators to face consequences, even as they avoided assigning Trump culpability for encouraging the mob to come to D.C. and inciting it with lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him.
“Those who truly support President Trump … we do not support those that commit acts of violence,” Hannity said on his show that night, adding that people should not “be vandalizing our nation's Capitol, attacking the brave men and women that keep us safe in law enforcement,” and concluding that “all of today's perpetrators must be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
“I want to speak to the people that think it wasn't that big of a deal,” Watters said on The Five the next day. “Yes, you’re allowed, as a member of the public, to go into the people's house, but you have to go through the front door and you have to pass through a metal detector. You can't smash windows, spray police with chemical agents, assault police officers, loot, and vandalize.”
Over time, as Trumpists led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson challenged the initial consensus around the events of January 6 with a conspiratorial counternarrative that the rioters had been victims, the right came to excuse or downplay their crimes. But as Trump floated pardons for January 6 convicts, Hannity and Watters continued to maintain that violent offenders would not and should not receive clemency.
Asked by a listener on his December 3 radio broadcast about Trump potentially pardoning all January 6 convicts, including violent offenders, Hannity commented that some had received excessive sentences “for trespassing.” But he highlighted “the few people that were involved in violence against police, or whatever,” and said that “the people that are responsible for acting in ways that were absolutely irresponsible and law-breaking, they’ve got to be held accountable.”
“Donald Trump, he has said those people that did not commit acts of violence on January 6, is he's going to pardon them,” Hannity added two days later. “Why were they sentenced to five years in jail? Doesn't it seem, like, a little excessive?”
Watters has likewise repeatedly said that presidential pardons should be limited to nonviolent January 6 offenders. “If I were president, I don’t think I would pardon January 6ers who were slugging cops,” he told his Fox audience last December. In May 2023, he similarly advised Trump “to be careful here. You can't pardon anybody that committed an act of violence.”
How can Trump’s loyal propagandists square the circle between their own explicit statements that Trump should not pardon people convicted of attacking police officers and the reality that he did just that? One option appears to be simply lying about what he did.
“He made it clear, and JD Vance kind of doubled down on it — if you didn't attack officers, if there wasn't any actual violence and you were caught up within the system, you were overcharged, you’ve done enough time,” Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones said on Wednesday morning. “And promises made, promises kept on Day One.”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
