These paragraphs might be the most satisfying to read for a long time in an NBC News story: President Donald Trump's pardons gutted the prosecutorial unit at the Department of Justice responsible for the January 6 cases. Some described it as being part of the worst days of their careers. We don’t care. Others have already left the DOJ since last summer, joining the Kamala Harris campaign with the explicit hope that their work could help prevent Trump from killing the January 6 cases (via NBC News):
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA CRY MORE pic.twitter.com/SJeutB7PIY
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) January 26, 2025
Federal prosecutors in the now-disbanded Capitol Siege Section of the D.C. U.S. attorney's office spent much of the last four years prosecuting cases against Jan. 6 rioters. Suddenly, a single signature erased the end results — though not the public record — of that work.
Three prosecutors who worked in the section described the week to NBC News, with one calling it the worst of their professional lives. It started with President Donald Trump’s signing of the pardons. Soon, prosecutors were dismissing the active cases that remained and putting aside evidence they hoped would have led to more charges.
[…]
Ashley Akers, who worked on Jan. 6 cases and left the Justice Department on Friday, called the pardons “shocking” and said she had a “guttural” reaction to having to file motions to dismiss cases when she felt she had evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that showed assaults against law enforcement. Many in the office had developed close relationships with the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6, 2021, which had kept them dedicated to the work.
“It really undermines not only the sacrifices that all these officers made, but the experiences that they went through,” said Akers, who spoke to NBC News after she turned in her computers and left the department. “The public record — which is very clear and borne out in hundreds of trials — has shown that these officers are victims.”
The prosecutors acknowledged that while the Constitution gives the president extraordinary pardon power, they still found it extremely difficult to file the motions, under orders from new bosses, dismissing cases they had brought.
“It goes against every instinct that I have,” one federal prosecutor previously assigned to the Capitol Siege Section told NBC News. This person is still working for the Justice Department and spoke anonymously because their employment would be in jeopardy if they spoke on the record.
[…]
Some prosecutors decided to leave even before Trump was elected. Jason Manning, a former federal prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases, left the Justice Department over the summer, joining Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. He said he hadn’t previously been a really political person, but he heard Trump’s pledges to pardon Jan. 6 offenders on the campaign trail and he knew the Justice Department’s work against rioters would “grind to a halt” if Trump was elected.
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I’m here to tell these people one thing: no one cares. They haven’t cared for years. It’s why January 6 was never a top issue among voters, except the far left and the Trump deranged. The House Select Committee was viewed with derision, as it was a political circus. And the true figure showing the Democrats’ messaging failure is that more voters began to view Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, as ‘a threat to our democracy.’
All your shoddy, politically motivated work got burned to ash. Meanwhile, you throw a tantrum over these pardons but not the ones issued by Joe Biden, where he pardoned his son Hunter and his entire crime family before he got wheeled out of Washington? Because of that, Trump can and should pardon whomever he wants.
Meanwhile, if the violent and rowdier J6 defendants got charged, this whole thing would’ve had a different ending. The Blaze’s Steve Baker, who got wrapped up in a legal nightmare over his footage, said that the DOJ’s overreach played a significant role in shifting the tide on J6:
Former Jan. 6 defendant Steve Baker — a libertarian writer who entered the Capitol during the attack, licensed his footage to media outlets, and then became a reporter for Glenn Beck’s outlet, The Blaze — told NBC News that he believed that federal prosecutors’ cases against misdemeanor defendants, and what he sees as overreach against other nonviolent participants, gave the right leverage in the battle over the story of Jan. 6.
“I can guarantee you this, I would bet a year’s salary on this,” Baker said. “Had the DOJ focused on the violent offenders only, we would have never heard the word ‘pardon’ in a campaign promise from President Trump.”
Anyways, the January 6 theater is over by order of President Donald J. Trump.
At long last.
Excellent explanation of the January 6th pardons from @JoeBorelliNYC pic.twitter.com/8zwXuWXObp
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 24, 2025
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