‘An outrageous mistake’: A former U.S. Capitol police officer warns Trump over January 6th pardons
Nearly 1600 people have been charged with crimes for their participation in the January 6th attack on the Capitol building. Donald Trump wants to pardon them all.
According to former Capitol police sergeant Aquilino Gonell, Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6th rioters is an “outrageous mistake.” Gonell quit the police force due to the mental and physical scars he suffered while responding to the attack. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Gonell wrote that the mob left him “covered in [his] own blood” and fearful that he was “going to die and never make it home to see my wife and young son.” After being “beaten with multiple weapons,” he sustained injuries to his hand, foot and shoulder which required “multiple surgeries” to heal. His emotional injuries still haunt him to this day, and he has since undergone years of rehab for “recurrences of the post-traumatic stress disorder [he] was diagnosed with in the Army.” He wrote that what he endured on January 6th was “worse than the combat [he] saw in Iraq.”
Gonell called Trump’s promise to overturn the convictions of Capitol rioters “devastating,” is disturbed by Trump’s lie that the attackers were “peaceful protestors” who have been made “hostages” by a corrupt justice system. Gonnel has testified in court that this is wholly untrue, and that he and his fellow officers were victims of assault. His words are supported by the Department of Justice itself, which has issued a statement maintaining that 608 people were charged with “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents” and that 174 of these defendants were accused of “using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”
Gonell fears that the damage is far from done, and that if released, “800 convicted criminals will be back on the street” and he himself could be in “danger” because of it, as his court testimonies could make him the target of revenge for vindictive participants in the riot and their supporters. He wrote that some of his colleagues have endured “constant harassment” at the hands of Trump supporters, many of whom believe that the riot was a “false flag” operation staged by the federal government in order to discredit Trump and the Republican Party.
Despite his extensive injuries, Gonell writes that he was “one of the fortunate ones” that day. He goes on to mention the death of his colleague, who suffered two strokes in the hours following the attack due to injuries sustained from being sprayed with a chemical irritant. One of Sicknick’s attackers was sentenced to 6 years in jail, but could be one of the many convicted criminals released back into public life should Trump decide to follow through on his promise of a mass pardon. Meanwhile, 4 other officers there at the scene committed suicide in the weeks and months following the attack.
Swords, axes, knives, hockey sticks, improvised brass knuckles, all these weapons and more were used against Gonell and his colleagues on January 6th. “Releasing those who assaulted us from blame would be a desecration of justice,” Gonell writes. “If Mr. Trump wants to heal our divided nation, he’ll let their convictions stand.”
Despite Donald Trump’s post-election victory claim to the contrary, healing likely the last thing the president-elect has in mind when he returns to office. Aside from issuing a pardon to January 6th rioters, Trump has also declared his intent to enact his sweeping plan for the mass deportation of millions of migrants on his first day in office. The damage from January 6th was only the beginning.
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