Mitch McConnell At Odds With Trump: Opposes Pardons For January 6 Rioters

Posted on February 2, 2022 by Rusty Weiss

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell opposes Donald Trump’s pledge to possibly pardon some individuals who have been arrested for the January 6 riot at the Capitol, saying he’s not in favor of shortening any sentences for those who pled guilty.

McConnell (R-KY) made the comments after being prompted by a reporter who inquired about Trump’s statement.

“One hundred and sixty-five people have pleaded guilty to criminal behavior,” he said. “None of the trials have been finished yet, but 165 have pleaded guilty to criminal behavior.”

“My view is, I would not be in favor of shortening any of the sentences for any of the people who pleaded guilty to crimes,” added McConnell.

REPORTER: How concerned are you about the former president offering pardons to people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6…?

MCCONNELL: …I would not be in favor of shortening any of the sentences for any of the people who pleaded guilty to crimes. pic.twitter.com/QBhajP50LV

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) February 1, 2022

McConnell Objects

Former President Donald Trump said that he would consider pardons for January 6 rioters should he run for and win the presidential election in 2024.

“If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” he vowed. “If that requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”

BREAKING: President Trump promises to PARDON Jan. 6 prisoners if he runs and wins in 2024 pic.twitter.com/teYbYNBcuB

— RSBN (@RSBNetwork) January 30, 2022

Senator Lindsey Graham, like McConnell, almost immediately objected to the idea of issuing pardons for the Capitol rioters.

“No, I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol,” Graham said. “I think it’s inappropriate … I don’t want to do anything that would make this more likely in the future.”

“I think it is inappropriate” — Lindsey Graham on Trump promising pardons to those convicted of crimes connected to the January 6 attack on Congress

Realizing what he just did, Graham tried to appease MAGA by bringing up Kamala Harris.

Lindsey is such a POS.#DemVoice1 pic.twitter.com/mg2yIO86Qz

— The Jewish Ginger Resister (@JewishResister) January 30, 2022

Peaceful Transition Of Power

McConnell also stated that those involved in the January 6 riot should not be pardoned because they interfered in the election process.

The 2020 election was “decided on December 14 of 2020 when the Electoral College certified the winner of the election,” he said.

McConnell added that the Capitol rioters had engaged in “an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another” something that had “never happened before in our country.”

McConnell breaks with Trump on Jan. 6 pardons https://t.co/QkWA2kqPa9 pic.twitter.com/E0kYE0r0QN

— The Hill (@thehill) February 2, 2022

McConnell, following the Capitol riot, joined Democrats in calls for impeachment according to a Fox News report at the time, telling associates that the move “will help rid the Republican Party of Trump and his movement.”

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Trump ravaged the GOP leader in response, issuing a statement saying McConnell is “a dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack.”

I led ten of my colleagues in writing a letter to AG Merrick Garland asking him to address the treatment of these Americans versus the treatment of those who rioted in cities during BLM protests.

We need to have a justice system that treats all people equally before the law.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) July 21, 2021

In July, Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and ten House Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding to know why protesters at the Capitol had been arrested and jailed while many BLM protesters were not for their role in the race riots across America.

The letter asked Garland to explain an “inconsistent application of the law with respect to rioters across the country.”

The post Mitch McConnell At Odds With Trump: Opposes Pardons For January 6 Rioters appeared first on The Political Insider.

GOP Rep Says Impeachment Was Really About Dems Trying To Frame 74 Million Trump Voters As Capitol Rioters

Posted on February 15, 2021 by LifeZette

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) spoke out over the weekend to say that the last impeachment effort against former President Donald Trump was really about Democrats trying to “equate” the 74 million Americans who voted for him with “the couple hundred criminals who came in an ransacked the Capitol.”

Johnson Reveals What Impeachment Was Really About

Johnson explained that he feels that the “ultimate goal” for Democrats with this impeachment was to frame Trump’s supporters as indistinguishable from Capitol rioters.

“They really wanted to use impeachment as a vehicle because they wanted to equate all those tens of millions of Trump’s voters and all of his supporters and everybody who came to the rally, they wanted to equate all of those people with the couple hundred criminals who came in and ransacked the Capitol,” Johnson told Breitbart News.

“If [Democrats’] new impeachment standard is to take hold, most of the party leadership in the Democrats will have to be censured or impeached themselves,” he added. “I thought Trump’s attorneys did such a great job with their video montage where they showed all these guys — even the impeachment managers themselves — using the exact same language that they were trying to incriminate the president by using.”

“[Trump] has always stood for law and order and defense of the Constitution,” Johnson said emphatically. “He’s always opposed mob violence.”

Johnson Doubles Down

Later in the interview, Johnson predicted that congressional majorities will be using impeachment as political tools more often in the future.

“You are lowering the bar [for impeachment] now. You weaponized this,” he said. “You turned it into a political weapon to be used by the majority party against a president they don’t like. You opened a Pandora’s box that we may never be able to close again.”

Johnson added that he does not believe that the impeachment effort that Democrats just carried out was what the founding fathers had in mind when they framed the Constitution.

“What the Founders had in mind when they set up this impeachment article and the idea behind it was that it would be so serious that the decorum would be so appropriate for the weight of a moment like that,” Johnson explained.

“It was sort of presupposed,” he added. “It was understood, of course, that you would afford due process. They didn’t need to spell out the federal rules of the civil procedure in the Constitution for something like this because they thought that everyone would be acting like adults.”

“This was not a constitutional exercise,” Johnson concluded. “What [Democrats] tried to do [is] to raise ‘cancel culture’ now to a constitutional level.”

This piece was written by James Samson on February 15, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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Marco Rubio Says It’s Time For ‘Honest Reflection’ Among Conservatives Following Capitol Riots

Posted on January 8, 2021 by LifeZette

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) spoke out on Friday to call for a time of “honest reflection” in the conservative moment in the wake the riots that saw supporters of President Donald Trump storm the Capitol on Wednesday.

Rubio Calls For ‘Reflection’ In GOP

“For those of us on the center-right of American politics, now is the time that calls for honest reflection,” Rubio said in a video that he posted to social media.

He went on to remind the president’s supporters that while Republicans had won the House, the Senate, and the White House in 2016, they lost all of these majorities in the last election.

“We need to reflect on why this has happened because this country needs a viable, attractive alternative to the agenda of the radical left,” Rubio said.

He added that he does not want to see the GOP return to the way it was in 2012, a time when he said it was “out of touch” with the working Americans. He explained that it was these Americans who rejected the establishment and ultimately backed President Trump.

Rubio Calls For Improving Elections

Rubio then touched on the need to improve America’s elections.

“We have to investigate what went wrong in the last election and fix our elections laws, so people can have faith and confidence in them,” he said.

Rubio also stressed the importance of calling out the corporate media bias and the hypocrisy of the left.

“We must continue to call out the media bias instead of being bullied by it,” he said. “And we must oppose political correctness, social media censorship, identity politics, and this cult of wokeness.”

“We can do all these things without indulging the darkest instincts or inciting the most destructive impulses — and without the rhetoric or behavior that keep the millions of Americans who agree with us from joining us in this fight,” he added, appearing to be chastising some of Trump’s behavior.

Rubio Calls Out Liberal Hypocrisy

Though he condemned the Capitol rioters, he also expressed sympathy for the Americans who see the left’s double standards when it comes to these protests.

“Now, are the Left hypocrites? Absolutely,” he said. “I remember, what they now are calling insurrection, they were justifying just this summer. They were called it the ‘language of the unheard’ when rioters were burning cities.”

Rubio specifically called out CNN and MSNBC, bringing up comments that host Chris Cuomo made in June, when he said, “Show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”

“This kind of blatant bias and double standard is one of the reasons that so many Americans have sought political shelter in divisive political movements and in conspiracy theories that offer the promise of fighting back against it,” the Florida Republican said

Rubio Addresses Trump Supporters

Rubio concluded by urging Trump supporters to not let their anger make them violent.

“Here is what I want you to hear right now: We can’t allow our anger about all that stuff to turn ourselves into them,” he said.

The video ended with Rubio quoting former President Richard Nixon.

“He said, ‘Others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself,’” Rubio said. “We can’t destroy ourselves.”

This piece was written by James Samson on January 8, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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