Ron DeSantis & Jan. 6

From Lauren Sforza's 5-25-23 THE HILL article entitled "DeSantis Says He’ll Consider Pardoning Jan. 6 Defendants, Including Trump":

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday that if elected president, he will consider pardoning all the Jan. 6 defendants — including former President Trump — on his first day in office.

“On day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive in issuing pardons,” DeSantis said on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” podcast when asked about whether he will consider pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, including Trump, who is currently facing a federal investigation over his role on Jan. 6.

If you want to read the entire article, click HERE. 

From Zeeshan Aleem's 5-26-23 MSNBC article entitled "Ron DeSantis’ Openness to Pardoning Jan. 6 Defendants Is a Dark Sign":

DeSantis’ posture rests upon the unfounded assumption that federal prosecutors are part of a political conspiracy rather than agents of the law. And naturally he tossed in his obsession with "wokeness" into his reasoning. “Some of these cases, some people may have a technical violation of the law. But if there are three other people who did the same thing, but just in a context like Black Lives Matter, and they don’t get prosecuted at all, that is uneven application of justice,” DeSantis said, referring to Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. “And so we’re going to find ways where that did not happen and then we will use the pardon power, and I will do that at the front end.”

DeSantis was trotting out a common right-wing narrative that Jan. 6 protesters faced an unfair double standard compared with people who broke the law during BLM protests the summer after police killed George Floyd. But as U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan pointed out during a sentencing hearing in 2021, the BLM demonstrators were protesting for civil rights while the latter group was “trying to overthrow the government. … That is no mere protest.” Black Lives Matter advocates have also collected data showing that federal prosecutors were far from gentle in their approach to charging Black Lives Matter protesters, and an Associated Press analysis in 2021 showed scores of BLM defendants getting serious prison sentences, shattering the myth that prosecutors were exceptionally lenient with them.

If you want to read the entire article, click HERE.