“I think it’s very simple,” Vice President JD Vance told Fox’s Shannon Bream on Jan. 12. “If you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

Just 14 days later, Vance went to bat for President Donald Trump issuing a blanket pardon for those brought up on Jan. 6-related charges.

In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, Margaret Brennan confronted Vance about his pre-pardon comments.

“Did you counsel the president against these blanket pardons for 1,500 people, including those who committed violence?” Brennan asked.

“Margaret, I noticed that you cut off the thing that I said immediately after that,” “Vance replied. “The full quote is that, ‘of course, there are gray areas.’ And here’s the nature of the gray area. Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice denied constitutional protections in the prosecutions. There were double standards in how sentences were applied to the J6 protesters versus other groups. What the president said consistently on the campaign is that he was going to look at it on a case-by-case basis.”

“This is blanket,” Brennan said, interjected.

“We looked at 1,600 cases,” Vance said. “And the thing that came out of it, Margaret, is that there was a massive denial of due process of liberty, and a lot of people were denied their constitutional rights. The president believes that. I believe that, and I think he made the right decision.”

Brennan went on to grill Vance about the violence against law enforcement officers who were the victims of violence on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Daniel Rodriguez used an electro-shock weapon against a policeman who was dragged out of the defensive line by plunging it into the officer’s neck,” Brennan said. “He was in prison, sentenced to 12 years, 7 months. He got a pardon. Ronald McAbee hit a cop while wearing reinforced brass knuckle gloves, and he held one down on the ground as other rioters assailed the officer for over 20 seconds, causing a concussion. If you stand with law enforcement, how can you call these people unjustly imprisoned?”

“Margaret, you’re separating … there’s an important issue here,” Vance said. “There’s what the people actually did on January the 6th, and we’re not saying that everybody did everything perfectly. And then what did Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice do in unjustly prosecuting well over a thousand Americans in a way that was politically motivated.”

“Is violence like that against a police officer ever justified?” Brennan asked.

“Violence against a police officer is not justified,” Vance responded. “But that doesn’t mean that you should have Merrick Garland’s weaponized Department of Justice expose you to incredibly unfair process, to denial of constitutional rights, and frankly, to a double standard that was not applied to many people, including, of course, the Black Lives Matter rioters who killed over two dozen people and never had the weight of a weaponized Department of Justice come against them. The pardon power is not just for people who are angels or people who are perfect. And of course, we love our law enforcement and want people to be peaceful, with everybody, but especially with our good cops. That’s a separate issue from what Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice did. We rectified a wrong, and I stand by it.”

Watch above, via CBS.

The post JD Vance Goes to the Mat for Trump’s Blanket Jan. 6 Pardons — Just Days After He Insisted Violent Rioters ‘Obviously’ Wouldn’t Be Pardoned first appeared on Mediaite.

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