After President Donald Trump ordered late-night pardons and commuted sentences for all 1,600 rioters who violently attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and police officers who were there that day and their loved ones are calling out Trump’s betrayal.
Earlier this month, Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant, said: new york times “I was beaten and beaten all over my body with multiple weapons until I was covered in my own blood,” reads the essay posted on X on Sunday. “Law and order officials will soon grant pardon to those who assaulted police officers. A total of more than 40 rioters attacked me that day.”
Testifying before a House select committee investigating the attack, Gornell said he and his colleagues were “punched, pushed, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical irritants, and even blinded them with eye-damaging lasers. Ironically, they attempted to mutiny.” “America’s law enforcement officers dedicated to protecting the obstacles that stand in their way.” He added that he suffered injuries to his entire body that required surgery.
Michael Fanone, a former D.C. police officer who testified on Jan. 6 that he was “caught, beaten, tasered and branded a traitor to my country,” told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night. I supported Donald Trump. “Whether you voted for him because he promised these amnesties, or for some other reason, you knew this was coming and here we are.”
He added that Trump’s pardon will free six of the men who attacked him on Jan. 6. “My family, my children, and myself are less safe today because of Donald Trump and his supporters,” Fanone told Cooper. Echoing the concerns of those who reported their attackers to law enforcement, they now worry that Trump’s pardon will trigger retaliation against them.
"I was betrayed by my country": Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone speaks with Anderson after President Trump pardoned more than 1,000 people convicted of crimes during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/fhN3dhqbPz
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) January 21, 2025
“I think Republicans have a monopoly on hypocrisy when they support law enforcement or assume they support it,” Fanon said. “Because tonight the leader of the Republican Party pardoned hundreds of violent police assaulters.”
And Craig Sicknick, the brother of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who reportedly died of natural causes a day after the Jan. 6 attack, told ABC News that the pardon was a “betrayal of decency.”
“I don’t understand that person. Another person’s pain or suffering. He can’t understand other people’s emotions,” Sicknick told ABC. “Now we have no rule of law,” he added. (The Capitol Police said Brian Sicknick was assaulted by rioters, including a pepper spray attack.) A medical examiner’s office, which confirmed his cause of death, later confirmed washington post“Everything that happened affected his condition.”)
Trump’s pardons and the law enforcement condemnation of him are especially rich considering that Trump has claimed to be the “candidate of law and order.” According to the Justice Department, on January 6, 2021, insurrectionists injured approximately 140 law enforcement officers, including about 80 from the Capitol Police Department and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department. and 5 police officers Four people at the Capitol died, four of them committing suicide within days and months.
A Trump spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. mother jones On Tuesday.
