In the wake of President Donald Trump’s pardoning of 1,500 people charged with crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, corporate media outlets are suggesting Vice President JD Vance was out of step with Trump when he said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously, you shouldn’t be pardoned” in a recent interview with Fox News.
Nevertheless, the vice president qualified his statement in the interview: “There’s a little bit of a grey area there, but we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law, and there’s a lot of people, we think, in the wake of January the 6th who were prosecuted unfairly. We need to rectify that.”
MSNBC’s Steve Benen was quick to portray these events as an example of a rift between Trump and Vance in an article Tuesday morning.
“Whatever the explanation, just hours into the Trump-Vance era, the new president hung his vice president out to dry,” wrote Benen, who argues that Vance’s “unambiguous phrasing” in the Fox appearance is evidence of the two not being on the same page.
“Weaseling out of these comments won’t be easy, but since the alternative is criticizing their party’s new president, they’ll have to think of something.”
Several other outlets joined the chorus, too, with The Daily Beast releasing an article entitled “Vance Breaks With Trump on ‘Day One’ Promise,” and Mediaite also republishing the Fox News clip.
Even former Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined in the chorus, telling the press, “Well, I think I agree with the vice president… No one should excuse violence. And particularly violence against police officers.”
But these media outlets have overlooked Vance’s mention of a “grey area” when considering Jan. 6th pardons.
And Vance’s team is arguing that the vice president has been misquoted or taken out of context.
“As Vice President Vance said on Fox News Sunday, pardoning the January 6 protesters would be handled on a case by case basis, which of course meant there was always going to be a large degree of gray area. Due to the corrupt process of these prosecutions, President Trump rightly decided to grant a broad pardon to all wrongfully convicted January 6 protestors,” said Vance’s press secretary, Taylor Van Kirk, in a statement.
The Vance team also suggested that criticism of Trump’s pardons is hypocritical in the face of Biden’s preemptive pardons for his family members which were revealed just minutes before Trump’s swearing-in.
“Despite the mainstream media’s obsession with January 6, the outgoing administration’s application of presidential pardons for members of the Biden family are far more deserving of additional media scrutiny,” said Van Kirk.
Vance’s statements do not qualify as a full-on disagreement with the president, as from the beginning, he promised a stream of pardons to those who had been treated unfairly by Biden’s Justice Department and challenged the validity of their prosecution.
“If you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” he said in the Fox interview. “There’s a lot of people, we think, in the wake of January the 6th who were prosecuted unfairly.”
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
