As one of his many actions taken on his first day in office, President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of 14 defendants and pardoned every other defendant who was found guilty of crimes – including violent acts – related to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. That move has been celebrated by defendants and their supporters, but denounced by officers who were injured defending the Capitol that day and say they felt betrayed by the American people for voting for Trump.
Local political reaction was also mixed. Several Pittsburgh-area Democrats condemned Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of every single January 6 defendant on Monday, while Republicans and some other Democrats, including Sen. John Fetterman, were silent.
Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters afterward that Trump’s focus on these pardons was troubling. “The President, in his first few hours as the leader of the free world, made a conscious decision to pardon people who assaulted cops, to pardon people that destroyed pieces of the Capitol, to pardon people that did not respect law enforcement,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee said Trump’s decision was hypocritical. "In the same breath that he calls for ‘law and order’ and reinstating and expanding the death penalty, Donald Trump is pardoning his supporters who violently launched an assault on our democracy on January 6th,” Lee told WESA.
Trump’s decision will impact around 90 Pennsylvania residents, including at least eight in Pittsburgh, according to a Department of Justice database of Jan. 6 defendants. Some of the 90 were convicted of violent offenses, such as hitting officers with chairs or spraying police officers with pepper spray. Many pleaded guilty to lesser, offenses such as entering the Capitol without permission. Some were sentenced to several years in prison while others just paid fines and served probation. Zack Rehl, a leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys, had been sentenced to 15 years in prison but was released early Tuesday morning.
Pennsylvania state Rep. Lindsay Powell said Trump’s treatment of the January 6 felons as political prisoners was a way of gaslighting the American people. “Anyone with eyes can see very clearly what January 6th was,” she said. “This rewriting of history is disingenuous and frankly insulting to the American public, telling us that it was a peaceful display of love.”
State Sen. Jay Costa said the move by Trump sends the wrong message about how people should be allowed to treat law enforcement. “As a former law enforcement officer myself, I’m appalled at the message the President is sending to the families of the police injured and killed at the hands of these violent rioters in our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021,” he said. “These were not peaceful people. They were violent insurrectionists.”
At the federal level, U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio has repeatedly criticized the Jan. 6 attacks, including a statement on X Monday where he declared, “The criminals who stormed our Capitol and beat the crap out of cops should be serving time, not being served pardons on Day One of Trump’s presidency.”
Republican Sen. Dave McCormick and Rep. Mike Kelly, didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor do they appear to have spoken out publicly about the pardons.
Kelly voted against certifying the election results even after the Jan. 6 attack and one of his top staff members was involved in an effort to alert the election certification results.
According to one media account at the time, on the day of the attack itself McCormick said he watched the events with “disgust” and called the actions “seditious." Several Republican Senators criticized Trump’s decision to pardon violent criminals on Tuesday but on Tuesday McCormick didn’t make any public comments about Trump’s pardons. On Monday, however, he did criticize pardons given out by President Joe Biden for some of his family members and politicians that Trump had threatened with retribution.
“Biden’s pardoning of his family minutes before President Trump was inaugurated is a dangerous abuse of presidential power,” McCormick said on the social media site X.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack Sen. John Fetterman blamed several Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania for spreading lies. On Tuesday Fetterman didn’t respond to an email from WESA about the pardons and equivocated in an interview with ABC News.
"There were a lot of those pardons that day that I don't agree with, any more [than] some of the pardons that President Biden dropped," Fetterman said.
Pardoned but not saved
Jennifer Heinl, of Ross, had already served 14 days behind bars, a year of probation, community service and a $500 fine for entering the Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump’s pardon doesn’t expunge her conviction from court records, she told WESA, so “the pardon at this point really doesn't help me as much as the other J-6ers that are still under probation or were in the ‘gulags’ across the country,” she said. “But it did give me a sense of relief that President Trump did keep his word.”
Over the past four years, Heinl has suffered, she said, more than just through the court system. She was fired from her job at a Veterans Affairs hospital and her husband divorced her. And during the legal wrangling, she said, a son who was suffering from an autoimmune disease passed away.
“Most people couldn't survive what I survived and be able to walk around and smile and actually be okay,” she said. “I have to get my youngest son going and make sure his life is as uncomplicated as it can be because the last four years of his life has been very complicated.”
Heinl said she built up her own real estate and home cleaning businesses, because she was worried people would Google her name and not hire her. She said she’s rebuilt her life enough to move out of her apartment and back into a house. Her younger son plays hockey for a prep school in Ohio. She volunteered for Trump in Pittsburgh and attended his inauguration ceremony, where she sent pictures to other Jan. 6 defendants in a Telegram channel.
Because her life was upended by what happened to her, Heinl said, she hasn’t had time to consider whether any of the other people who participated in the insurrection deserved their punishment.
“I feel bad about people that got hurt that day, on both sides of the aisle. I really do,” she said. “But I can't dwell on that right now because I've been trying to rebuild my whole life for four years. Maybe since this is kind of over, I can kind of get a different perspective on it.”
