CNN Historian Says Biden’s Pardon Of Hunter ‘Helps Justify’ Trump Potentially Pardoning J6 Protesters

CNN Historian Says Biden’s Pardon Of Hunter ‘Helps Justify’ Trump Potentially Pardoning J6 Protesters
CNN Historian Says Biden Pardoning Hunter ‘Helps Justify’ Trump’s Potential Move To Pardon J6 Protesters

CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali said Monday that President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden “helps justify” President-elect Donald Trump’s anticipated pardon of Jan. 6, 2021 protesters.

Following the president’s Sunday move to pardon his son, Trump asked on Truth Social if it would “include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years,” calling their imprisonment “an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” Naftali, on “CNN Newsroom with Pamela Brown,” argued that the president’s pardon makes it more plausible for Trump to follow through on his pledge to pardon Jan. 6 protesters.

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“The scope of the pardon covers activities, for which there are — by the way, there’s no evidence that any wrongdoing was done by either President Biden or his son. But the scope covers a period that President-elect Trump and his supporters have been focused on, indeed, use that period as a reason for disrupting our relations with Ukraine,” Naftali said. “And that of course, led to the first impeachment of President Trump.”

“And so to have covered that area in the pardon gives ammunition in a very difficult and toxic time to people around President-elect Trump and President Trump himself to engage in egregious pardons once January 20th is upon us,” he continued. “So I fear that though President-elect Trump didn’t need an excuse to engage in wide-scale pardoning, for example, of the January 6th — those that have [been] convicted for crimes on January 6th or as a result of January 6th. This just I think, helps justify it for President-elect Trump.”

Trump asserted during a May 2023 CNN town hall that he would pardon a “large portion” of those federally charged for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 “very early on” in his second administration.

“I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them probably they got out of control, but, you know, when you look at Antifa, what they’ve done to Portland, and if you look at Antifa, look at what they’ve done to Minneapolis and so many other – so many other places, look at what they did to Seattle. And BLM — BLM, many people were killed,” Trump said.

“These people – I’m not trying to justify anything, but you have two standards of justice of this country, and … what they’ve done to so many people is nothing — nothing,” he added. “And then what they’ve done to these people — they’ve persecuted these people.”

Over 1,500 defendants have faced charges for their actions on Jan. 6 as of October, according to the Department of Justice. Over 1,000 have already received sentences, including 645 who have been sentenced to jail time and 143 to home confinement.

Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin both criticized the use of solitary confinement for Jan. 6 defendants ahead of their trials, Politico reported in April 2021.