By Maya C. Miller
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a key ally of President Donald Trump, spoke out Sunday against Trump’s pardoning of violent rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, several of whom were convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers.
“I’ve always said that when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large,” Graham told CNN’s Dana Bash. “And that’s not what you want to do to protect cops.”
“But he has that power,” he added.
Graham also criticized former President Joe Biden’s use of pardons for his family members and a last-minute commutation for Leonard Peltier, an Indigenous-rights activist who spent nearly 50 years in prison in connection with a shootout that killed two FBI agents.
“I don’t like it on either side, and I don’t think the public likes it either,” said Graham, who told CNN that he had not spoken to Trump about his opposition to the pardons of violent rioters. Trump also pardoned rioters accused of nonviolent offenses, granting clemency to nearly all 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.
Graham suggested that if presidents continued to use the pardon power to send “the wrong signals” to the public, then he would be open to curtailing its usage. “If you’ve got an idea about how to rein in the pardon power of a president that goes too far, give me a call,” he said.
Graham wasn’t the only senator to criticize both the current and former president for using the presidential pardon broadly.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., called it “appalling” that Biden commuted the federal drug sentence of a Connecticut man who had previously finished a 20-year state sentence related to the killings of a boy and his mother. During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” he was also critical of Trump’s sweeping grant of pardons at the start of his term.
Another Democrat, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Trump’s use of pardons for violent Jan. 6 rioters set a “destructive precedent” and sent the message that people can attack law enforcement if it’s in the name and interest of the president.
Schiff also denounced the blanket pardons Biden granted to members of his family, saying they suggested to the Trump family that they had free license to “engage in any kind of malfeasance, criminality” and then “expect a pardon on the way out the door.”
“That is not a message you want to send to this family or really any family occupying the White House,” Schiff said.
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