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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack" data-source="post: 1061277" data-attributes="member: 43">Analysts warned that while pardons after violent moments in U.S. history — such as those offered to Confederate soldiers after the Civil War — were meant to be part of a process of reconstructing the country, Trump’s pardons seemed different. They said Trump’s decision appeared to be based on rewarding personal loyalty to himself and to validate his baseless claims that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by fraud. “It is not clear from Trump’s statements that his interest in the January 6th convicts incorporates a larger vision about reconciliation or domestic tranquility after conflict or about the best path forward for American democracy,” said political scientist Julie Novkov, dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. Rather, they may align with “his pledges to pursue his perceived opponents and enemies.” Novkov cautioned that if Trump reinforces his claims of election denialism and justification for violent popular resistance to the transfer of power, it might encourage other actors to take further measures in the hopes of winning his support. How Jan. 6 will be viewed by historians “depends mostly on what happens next,” said Columbia University historian Eric Foner, one of the country’s leading experts on the Civil War and the Reconstruction. “If Trump’s second term now turns out to be fairly normal — although Trump is not a normal character — then maybe the memory of Jan. 6 will just fade away,” Foner said.  But the idea of interfering in the electoral process — the peaceful transfer of power that had been the American experiment’s contribution to posterity — “is alive and well,” Foner said, “and if that continues and grows, that will be an unfortunate feature of American democracy going forward.” In an opinion Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell dismissed cases against two pardoned Proud Boys members but declined to go along with a Trump Justice Department request to do so “with prejudice,” which would keep them from being charged again. The distinction has little practical effect. The five-year statute of limitations on such charges ends Jan. 6, 2026, in less than a year, well before Trump’s term ends. Howell’s point was that prosecutors in citing Trump’s pardon declaration failed to provide any factual basis to contradict evidence the men submitted in plea papers. Howell defended the work of the courts, prosecutors, defenders and other public servants in the criminal justice system, saying they had afforded “those charged every protection guaranteed by our Constitution.” And she rejected “the revisionist myth” in Trump’s pardon proclamation, which stated that it “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years” and “begins a process of national reconciliation.”“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Howell concluded. “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity.”</blockquote>

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