Former Capitol attack prosecutor slams Trump pardons of January 6 defendants

A federal prosecutor who helped lead the US Department of Justice’s investigation into the January 6 attack on Congress has resigned – and, in a new interview, he criticized Donald Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of about 1,500 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack, saying that it “sends a terrible message to the American people”.

Longtime assistant US attorney Greg Rosen, the former chief of the justice department’s Capitol siege section, sat down with CBS News after resigning over the weekend.

In the interview, Rosen said that he was “shocked, if not stunned” by the breadth of the pardons Trump issued to those involved in the 6 January 2021 attack just hours after his second presidential inauguration.

On 20 January, Trump granted “full, complete and unconditional” pardons to those involved in the Capitol attack, including some convicted of violent acts. Trump also issued sentence-shortening commutations for more than a dozen cases while directing the justice department to dismiss all pending indictments against people related to the attack which unsuccessfully tried to keep him in office after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

“I think the message that they send is that political violence towards a political goal is acceptable in a modern democratic society,” Rosen said. “That, from my perspective, is anathema to a constitutional republic.”

Rosen said that the “primary beneficiaries” of the pardons were individuals that “judges across the spectrum, appointed by both political parties, had determined were a danger to society, individuals who were serving real serious jail time”.

“The concept that these defendants were railroaded or mistreated is belied by the actual facts,” Rosen said. “The reality is every single case was treated with the utmost scrutiny, and every single case required the same level of due process, maximal due process afforded by the US constitution.”

The pardons, Rosen said, “sends a terrible message to the American people”.

“Individuals who were duly – and appropriately – convicted of federal crimes ranging in culpability are immediately let loose without any supervision, without any remorse, without any rehabilitation to civil society,” he added.

“The reason those juries convicted – and the reason those judges convicted – individuals was not because of some bug in the due process,” Rosen continued. “It was because the evidence was overwhelming. It was the most videotaped crime in American history.”

Rosen also criticized the Trump administration’s decision to fire or sideline some of the prosecutors who handled the January 6 criminal cases and to disband the Capitol siege section.

“It’s ridiculous,” Rosen said. “To see those talented prosecutors be marginalized or removed from office is an affront to the independence of the department.”

Rosen has joined Rogers Joseph O’Donnell, a private law firm in Washington DC.

In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Rosen said he was “beyond excited” for the “new adventure”.

Speaking to CBS, he added that it felt like “time for a change – and a time to take what I’ve been doing and what I’ve learned over the course of 15 years in state and federal practice – and bring it to the private sector, where I can benefit clients who are being scrutinized by the government”.

In a statement, the law firm said that Rosen would join its white-collar defense and government contract practice groups. It hailed Rosen for being “entrusted with supervising more than 1,000 prosecutions connected with the January 6, 2021 breach and attack of the US Capitol, the largest federal prosecution in American history,” the release added.

In a statement sent to the Guardian in response to Rosen’s comments, a spokesperson for the Trump administration-led justice department said the president “doesn’t need lectures … about his use of pardons”. The spokesperson alluded, in part, to a pardon Biden gave his son, Hunter, who was convicted of federal gun and tax charges.

And the spokesperson also said Trump was “acting reasonably and responsibly within his constitutional authority”.

In late May, one of the pardoned Capitol attackers was arrested on allegations of burglary and vandalism in Virginia in what was believed to be the first instance of new charges – since the president’s clemency – for a person who took part in the uprising against Congress.

The attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters was linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of police officers who were left traumatized after having defended the building.