Pam Key(Breirtbart)
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Tuesday on CNN’s “OutFront” that President Donald Trump’s pardoning the January 6 protesters was to create a “reserve army of political foot soldiers.”
Raskin said, “The question is why? Pardons have generally been used when people are actually innocent or there was some procedural miscarriage of justice. Nobody’s claiming that these people were innocent. We’ve got them on tape, you know, hitting the police officers over the head with pipes and bats and Confederate battle flags and all of that’s been established. Most of them pled guilty. The others have been convicted. There was no procedural miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, they’ve had every benefit of due process.”
He continued, “So pardons in that case are reserved for people who are reformed, people who are rehabilitated and no longer constitute a threat to public safety. So that’s what’s missing in this conversation. If President Trump had come forward and said, ‘We’ve spoken to these people, they are not going to be attacking police officers in the future the way that they bloodied and wounded and hospitalized 140 of them in Washington, D.C., they are not going to be attacking the rule of law and democratic institutions, they are not going to be interrupting the peaceful transfer of power, and they’re not going to be a threat to their communities.’ We haven’t heard anything like that.”
Raskin added, “So then the question is, why are they being released? Are they being released as a reserve army of political foot soldiers to act on behalf of MAGA and Donald Trump? I think that’s what’s so profoundly troubling to a majority of the American people who rejected the idea of freeing at least the violent criminals and the ones who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
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