US Senator Lindsey Graham has said officials investigating the deadly 2021 attack by Donald Trump supporters on the US Capitol should not be jailed – despite what his fellow Republican has argued ahead of his second presidency.
During an interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker asked Graham if he agreed with Trump’s assertion seven days earlier in the program that those involved in the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol “ had to go to prison.”
“No,” said Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator and a ranking member of the chamber’s judiciary and budget committees.
Welker directed the question at Graham during a segment designed to elicit quick answers, which she acknowledged by replying, “OK – that was very clear and concise.”
The exchange offered an example of Graham’s occasional willingness to publicly disagree with Trump while still generally serving as a staunch ally — and it came amid a broader political dialogue about who should be pardoned in connection with an attack on Congress linked to several deaths. including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers.
Trump has pledged to begin his second presidency in January 2025 by pardoning those who carried out the attack, although there may be some exceptions. He spoke to Welker on Dec. 8 about how his supporters were pressured to accept guilty pleas in connection with the violent, desperate effort to keep him in the White House after he lost the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020.
Related: Donald Trump promises to pardon January 6 rioters on ‘day one’
After winning the Oval Office in November in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump denied he would direct his second administration to arrest elected officials investigating the attack on the Capitol, leading to federal criminal charges against him who has been rejected. Nevertheless, he made a point of telling Welker, “Frankly, they should go to jail.”
Bernie Sanders, the liberal U.S. senator, appeared separately on Meet the Press on Sunday and said Biden, in turn, should “very seriously consider” granting preemptive pardons to those who investigated the attack on the Capitol, as others have suggested. Sanders did not mention names, but a week earlier Trump mentioned the names of Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, when the chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the US House of Representatives committee met for that investigation.
“You don’t arrest elected officials … who investigate,” Sanders said, adding that doing so “is what authoritarianism does. [and] dictatorship is all about”.
Sanders also said, “You just heard Lindsey Graham make that statement — I don’t think Trump’s idea goes very far.”
More than 1,250 people have pleaded guilty or otherwise been convicted in the January 6 attack. And at least 645 people have been sentenced to some time in prison, ranging from a few days to 22 years.
During his December 8 interview with Welker, Trump blamed these convictions on “a very corrupt system” that he would rein in with grace, despite criticism of Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter, based on convictions of lying on application forms for gun ownership. as tax evasion.
“I know the system,” said Trump, himself convicted in May in New York on charges of criminally falsifying company records to conceal hush money payments to pornographic film actor Stormy Daniels.
