“I’m really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past,” Trump said during his first major mainstream media interview since being elected president for the second time. “I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, he said he would act quickly to pardon J-6ers, the Jan. 6, 2021 protesters who entered (and some who did not enter) the Capitol in an effort to halt the certification of the 2020 election of Joe Biden.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump told Kristen Welker, and he called the criminal justice system corrupt.
“I know the system. The system’s a very corrupt system. They say to a guy, ‘You’re going to go to jail for two years or for 30 years.’ And these guys are looking, their whole lives have been destroyed. For two years, they’ve been destroyed. But the system is a very nasty system.”
But it won’t be a blanket pardon, he said, saying he’d make exceptions, “If somebody was radical, crazy.”
He described the J-6ers as “living in hell. They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.” About 645 defendants have been sentenced to varying levels of incarceration, from a few days to as long as 22 years.
As for the highly controversial House committee members like former Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Bennie Thompson, who investigated the Jan. 6 surge on the Capitol, Trump said some of them “should go to jail,” but he added it would be up to Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi to decide whether to pursue people like Cheney or the Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, who has recently dropped all of his charges against Trump, post-election.
Trump also said that his nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, would have an obligation to pursue corruption, but said that as president he will not direct such actions.
From the outset and throughout the interview, Welker took an unfriendly and at times hostile stance toward the incoming president, but Trump remained his plainspoken self the entire interview.
