Ron DeSantis argues Donald Trump should have done more for ‘railroaded’ J6 demonstrators

Ron DeSantis is getting to the right of Donald Trump on issues relating to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

During an interview on “Morning Joe,” the Florida Governor said the former President didn’t offer “clemency” to “protesters” before he left office later that month because he was trying to save himself.

“He called that rally knowing that that was going to be in D.C. where things could get potentially out of hand, and he’s now saying he would do clemency for the nonviolent. But he could have done that when he was President,” DeSantis said.

“He could have taken responsibility. He could have said that the — not the violent people, obviously that’s a bird of a different feather — but on the people that were there just as protesters and kind of got caught up in it, he could have granted clemency to them and he chose not to because I think he was told that if he did that, he could potentially risk being convicted at his Senate impeachment trial. So the idea that now he’s going to help people that were railroaded, he could have done that before he left office.”

DeSantis painted some of those who attended as little more than sightseers caught up in the drama of others who saw the march on the Capitol as a way of subverting election results.

“I think there are people that came because he said to protest the election. I don’t think that they intended to do it. Some of the people that were convicted of things like trespassing, you see videos where you have police officers actually motioning for people to go in. You’ll see that, where they were just taking pictures in Statuary Hall,” DeSantis argued.

“And so the issue with that is obviously they would not have been there but for the Trump rally. And those were his people. And so the question is somebody that was there (and) nonviolent probably didn’t have intent to do anything when they showed up that day. He could have done things to potentially alleviate burdens on them and he didn’t do (them). Now, he says he’s going to do it, but he didn’t when he was President.”

DeSantis has previously floated “clemency” for J6 demonstrators. He also has suggested “Day 1” pardons of the former President and those who participated in storming the Capitol when Congress was certifying the Presidential Election results.

He previously told Fox News viewers that Washington, D.C., residents would convict a “ham sandwich” if it were Republican, adding that one potential cure would be to import jurors from across the country in cases where the Nation’s Capital were a trial venue, as will be the case when Trump faces charges related to the 2020 election conspiracy theories.

During a Newsmax interview in September, DeSantis said his White House would “look at all these cases” involving Enrique Tarrio and others found guilty in the estimated 1,100 cases regarding what the Governor called a “protest that devolved into a riot,” floating potential “pardons and commutations.”

During a July interview with Russell Brand, DeSantis rejected the idea that the siege of the Capitol to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s election was an “insurrection,” and said that those protesters were not “seditionists,” but hapless folks who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“It was not an insurrection. These are people that were there to attend a rally and then they were there to protest,” DeSantis said.

He noted things went badly despite the benign intent of attendees, but blamed the media for framing the issue badly.

“It devolved into a riot. But the idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true. And it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically, you know, get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and for political aims,” DeSantis said, adding that “a lot of people that were there who were just there and they didn’t have any designs on doing anything.”

Even before running for President, DeSantis liked to mock people who took the Capitol riots to be particularly serious.

In February, DeSantis likened protests at the Florida Capitol to the Jan. 6 riot.

“It’s interesting that if they’re doing that from the Left, then the media says that’s ‘democracy in action.’ They don’t say it’s an insurrection if you take over a Capitol because of that, but I think that’s what it’s getting to.”

The Governor commented on Jan. 6 last Spring, when he said concern about the riots that delayed congressional certification of the 2020 Presidential Election was a “dead horse” and a “loser” with voters.

On the anniversary of the incident, he offered similar dismissals of the focus of media and Democrats, diminishing the riot.

“This is their Christmas,” he said of the media and Democrats at a January 2022 news conference. He expanded on that take in a subsequent fundraising email, contending “Jan. 6th is like Christmas for the out-of-touch D.C., New York political and media class.”