President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he's planning to issue "major pardons" for the Jan. 6 defendants who breached the U.S. Capitol Building in 2021 as congressional lawmakers gathered to certify President Joe Biden's victory.
"People that didn't even walk into the building are in jail right now," Trump said during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. "So we'll be looking at the whole thing but I'll be making major pardons, yes."
According to the Justice Department, more than 1,500 people have been charged with crimes in connection with the breach and more than 1,000 have pleaded guilty to either felonies or misdemeanors.
Trump's comments came one day after the four-year anniversary of the demonstration in response to a reporter's question about whether he was planning on pardoning individuals who were charged with violent offenses.
According to the Washington Examiner, the president-elect also continued to defend the late Ashli Babbitt, a protester who was fatally shot by Capitol Police during the incident.
"The only one that was killed was a beautiful young lady named Ashli Babbitt," Trump told reporters, adding that Babbitt "should have never been shot."
"In fact, they say that she was trying to hold back the crowd, and the crowd was made up of a lot of different people, so we'll see," he said.
The incoming president also accused the FBI of withholding the identity of the person who planted pipe bombs near both the Republican and Democratic National Committee headquarters the day before the Capitol breach.
"The FBI knows who it is," Trump said, according to the Examiner. "The status of the FBI has gone down."
Under Biden, the bureau's credibility has been damaged, Trump said, and he suggested that his administration would probe to determine whether the FBI was involved in the Capitol Hill clash.
"We're looking at it and other people are there, and 26, 28 people from the FBI came out very quietly, and nobody reported it," Trump said. "But they had people in some form related to the FBI. They had four or five people strongly related to the FBI. We have to find out about that."
This is not the first time that Trump has vowed to pardon the Jan. 6 defendants and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on Monday slammed his pledge to do so.
"Donald Trump wants to whitewash the insurrection that occurred four years ago, but the American people know what they saw with their own eyes," Warren said, according to USA Today.
"And now people who have been convicted of assaulting police officers, people who caused a riot that resulted in the death of police officers, Donald Trump says he wants to go ahead and just … treat it as if they are heroes," she added. "They're not heroes. They're insurrectionists."
Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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