Even before he officially jumped into the 2024 campaign for president, Donald Trump promised he would pardon individuals who had been charged and convicted of crimes related to Jan. 6, 2021.
“If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” promised Trump at a Wisconsin rally in January 2022. “If it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”
It was a promise he renewed on the campaign trail, telling journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists in July that he would “absolutely” pardon those individuals “if they’re innocent.”
But with one week to go until Trump takes the oath of office, Vice President-Elect JD Vance caveated on Fox News Sunday that only peaceful individuals would be pardoned.
“If you protested peacefully on January 6th and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” he said.
Amy Collins, who has defended a number of Jan. 6. defendants, says she has always proceeded cautiously about the idea of a pardon for her clients. “I’m hopeful for my clients — obviously I want the best possible outcome for them,” said Collins. “As a lawyer, I’m inherently skeptical, so it’s part of the nature of my job. I have to prepare my clients for every possible outcome that could come of this.”
Collins declined to speak about any specific cases or clients, but David Dempsey, a Van Nuyes, Calif., man who pled guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in August for assaulting a law enforcement officer with a dangerous weapon and breaching the seat of Congress, is represented by Ms. Collins. She said Vance’s comments over the weekend do not change how she is preparing her clients for what comes next.
“My position from the get go has been consistent,” she explained. “It’s my job to guide them and to say, you know, ‘hey, if I were in your shoes, these are the things I would consider, and this is what I would do. And so we’ve sort of…contemplated that… glimmer of hope might be held might not come to fruition.”
When it comes to outreach to the incoming Trump administration about potential pardons, Collins could not speak to what efforts she may or may not be taking on her cases.
“If there’s anything I could do for my clients, I’m doing what I can to the extent possible,” was all she would say.
Collins did say she knows there are efforts being made by other criminal defense attorneys for their clients. “Until that change [in administration] happens, there’s not really a way to know definitively how things will happen.”
If Trump does make good on his promise to pardon Jan. 6 defendants, Collins says it’s unclear how quickly individuals could be released from custody. If it’s a pardon that needs to be formally accepted, that could lengthen the time it takes to get the defendant released from custody. She also pointed out that because this is such an unconventionally large group of individuals being lumped together, which could blur the timeline further.