Ready. Fire. Aim.
United States AG Pam Bondi at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
January 6 insurrectionists pardoned on the first day of Donald Trump’s second term took a “victory lap” in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of their violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. A few hundred Proud Boys, insurrectionists and supporters prayed outside the U.S. Capitol they defiled.
Not standing with them was Brian Cole Jr. , the man accused after a five-year manhunt of planting pipe bombs at the headquarters of both the nearby RNC and DNC the night before the Capitol riot. He remains in jail awaiting trial.
Maybe (Politico):
But there may be a serious problem on the horizon: Trump may have pardoned Cole last year as part of the sweeping clemency that he gave to Jan. 6 offenders on his first day back in office.
The White House has brushed off questions on the subject, but Justice Department prosecutors should be worried about this, and there were suggestions based off their briefs and statements in court last week that they already are. (The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.)
Trump’s proclamation commuted the sentences of 14 individuals and also granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” This immediately covered roughly 1,500 people, including hundreds of defendants who were charged with assaulting or resisting law enforcement officers.
The wording of Trump’s original pardon comes into play, as does the Department of Justice’s prior extension of Trump’s broad pardon to people whose cases were merely pending at the time he signed it.
Oops
It gets better.
Moreover, the substantive scope of Trump’s pardon language is very broad, as the Justice Department’s own lawyers have maintained in other cases. If Cole is convicted, it is very possible that the presiding judge could ultimately rule (however begrudgingly) that his crimes were, in the language of Trump’s pardon, “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Last week, the Justice Department went out of its way during the court hearing to avoid using any phrases that might immediately connect Cole’s alleged crimes to Jan. 6, but prosecutors’ efforts were so obvious, that they had the effect of drawing more attention to it. The government’s pre-hearing brief also appears to have been designed to skirt this issue and put the most Trump-friendly spin on Cole’s motive for his alleged crimes — though ultimately not very convincingly.
This is the same Pamela Jo Bondi-run DOJ that last fall unlawfully appointed former Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan as lead federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia. An insurance lawyer described as “a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience,” Halligan signed off on charges Trump demanded against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie in November agreed with Comey’s lawyer that the charges must be dismissed (NBC News):
“Because Ms. Halligan had no lawful authority to present the indictment, I will grant Mr. Comey’s motion and dismiss the indictment,” Currie wrote in finding that Halligan lacked the authority to present a case to a grand jury.
“All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr. Comey’s indictment, were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,” the judge wrote, describing the insurance lawyer as “a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience.”
She issued a separate, similar ruling dismissing the James case.
The statute of limitations on bringing the same charges expired in the interim.
Halligan is once again in the news (Daily Beast):
More than six weeks after a judge threw out Halligan’s indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James on the grounds that she was illegally serving as interim U.S. Attorney, Halligan is still signing indictments as the office’s lead prosecutor, according to a bombshell court filing.
Federal Judge David Novak, who was appointed by Trump, issued an order Tuesday demanding that Halligan “explain why her identification does not constitute a false or misleading statement.”
Novak wrote that although the government had appealed the ruling that nullified Halligan’s appointment, the appeals court had not issued a stay in the case, meaning the original decision remained “binding precedent in this district” while the appeals process played out.
The Richmond-area judge also noted that he had issued the order of his own initiative, as opposed to at the request of a defense counsel, and gave Halligan seven days to respond.
These people expect to rule the entire Western Hemisphere.