In September 2024, the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police organization in the United States, endorsed Donald Trump for president. Even at the time, this was a dumb move, given Trump’s felony conviction four months earlier and his stated intent to use the criminal justice system to prosecute Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Liz Cheney, and other political enemies.
Yet Patrick Yoes, the FOP’s national president, said that among the group’s 377,000 members “there was no doubt—zero doubt—as to who they want as our president for the next four years: Donald J. Trump.” To the FOP rank and file, all that mattered was that “in the summer of 2020,” when the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sent protesters out into the streets, “he stood with us when very few would.”
The downside to a president who tolerates the police beating up Black people, it turns out, is that he also tolerates white people beating up police. On January 6, 2020, as rioters attacked the Capitol to prevent its certification of an election Trump lost—assaulting more than 140 police officers in the process—Trump waited more than three hours before urging these supporters to go home. By the start of this year, 89 people had pleaded guilty to felony assault of a police officer, and 76 had been tried and convicted of assaulting, resisting, impeding, and/or obstructing officers during a civil disorder. Trump granted all these people clemency Monday, along with every other January 6 defendant, and issued pardons for nearly everybody.
Let’s meet some of these “hostages,” as Trump calls them.
Julian Khater sprayed bear spray at three police officers, one of whom, Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed after returning to his district office and was taken to the hospital. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died the next day. The only reason Khater wasn’t charged with murder was that the D.C. medical examiner for some reason concluded Sicknick died of natural causes (even as he conceded that “all that transpired played a role in his condition”). Khater pleaded guilty and got six years.
Daniel “D.J.” Rodriguez was caught on camera shocking District Metropolitan police officer Michael Fanone with a stun gun (video here). Fanone lost consciousness and was taken by a fellow officer to the hospital, where he was told he’d suffered a heart attack, a concussion, and a traumatic brain injury. The day before Rodriguez had written on Telegram: “There will be blood. Welcome to the revolution.” But when FBI agents asked him why he did it, Rodriguez wept and apologized, as January 6 defendants tend to when they get caught. (See my November 2021 piece, “The January 6 Defendants Are the Most Pathetic Revolutionaries I Ever Saw.”) “I don’t know,” Rodriguez said. “I’m a piece of shit. I’m sorry… I didn’t know that we were doing the wrong thing.” Rodriguez pleaded guilty and got 12 years.
Robert Scott Palmer sprayed police with a fire extinguisher, then pitched the empty canister at them. He also picked up a wooden plank and threw it at the cops. “I’m so ashamed that I was a part of it,” he told the judge. “Very, very ashamed.” Palmer pleaded guilty and got fire years.
Steven Chase Randolph was sentenced to eight years for striking a Capitol Police officer named Caroline Edwards in the face with a metal crowd control barrier. Ryan Samsel was convicted of the same thing but hadn’t yet been sentenced and now won’t be. Samsel was the first rioter to breach the police perimeter on January 6. A Justice Department sentencing memo recommended that he get 20 years, in part because he was still justifying his actions years later.
Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, the leaders, respectively, of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, were sentenced to 22 years and 18 years, respectively, for seditious conspiracy in organizing the January 6 assault. “Make no mistake,” Tarrio said on social media. “We did this.”
All of these people will now go free—Tarrio and Rhodes are already out—and all but Rhodes received pardons, too. Also sprung is Brent “Zeeker” Bozell IV, scion of a leading conservative family and my favorite January 6 felon. Zeeker was sentenced to 45 months, for assaulting police (among other offenses), but mostly, I suspect, for telling such idiotically transparent lies during his trial, as I documented here. The Bozell dynasty lives to fight another day.
I emailed the FOP seeking comment on Trump’s act of mercy for cop-beaters, and got no reply. Later in the day, they told S.V. Dáte of The Huffington Post, “We don’t have a statement about that.” It wasn’t until Tuesday evening that the organization finally offered up some commentary on the matter. In a joint statement with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the two organizations said they were “deeply discouraged” by “recent pardons and commutations granted by both the Biden and Trump Administrations to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers.” It made no specific reference to the January 6 attacks.
You may be curious what it is that former President Biden did. Shortly before leaving office he commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier, an 80 year-old Native America activist imprisoned for killing two FBI agents. Peltier claims he’s innocent, but even if he’s guilty he sat in jail for half a century. Biden also commuted the sentence of the “Waverly Two,” two Black men named Ferrone Claiborne and Terence Richardson who were acquitted of murdering a police officer named Allen Gibson in Sussex County, Virginia, but received a life sentence anyway on a drug offense. Even Gibson’s own daughter has expressed doubt that Claiborne and Richardson killed her father, and four years ago Virginia’s attorney general filed a motion to overturn their convictions. But after Republican Glenn Younkin’s election in 2021 the state opposed their release. Claiborne and Richardson sat in jail for a quarter century.
The FOP’s and IACP’s statement equating these Biden commutations with Trump’s commutations of scores of people who assaulted police officers on January 6th, often by their own admissions and sometimes captured on video, and who were jailed two or three years at most, and in many case not at all, is a slap in the face to Brian Sicknick and the 139 other police officers who were assaulted that day. As for all those January 6 defendants who said after they got caught that they were very sorry and made a terrible mistake, we don’t have to wonder very hard whether they’re sorry now.
* This post has been updated.
