Ex-President Donald Trump has been publicly outspoken about intentions to secure the release — if re-elected to the White House — of detainees with criminal allegations originating in the U.S. Capitol violence of early 2021.
Likely by default, a key area of focus for a potentially future President Trump would be the Capitol riot detainees currently held in Washington, D.C.’s prisons, who figures in Trump’s political circles — like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — have also specifically spotlighted. And almost all of them are facing assault cases, most of which have already led to a guilty plea or a conviction. The targets of these assaults were the police officers defending the Capitol complex that day.
The D.C. detention facility where these defendants are held had, as of recent data collection by the news and analysis site Just Security, 27 Capitol riot defendants who were originally charged with assaulting police. Nineteen of them either pleaded guilty or were convicted. And that’s almost the entirety of the Capitol riot/January 6 defendants in the facility, meaning when Trump and political allies of his stump so feverishly for these people… that’s who’s on the other side.
“This new chart and @just_security piece tells you exactly how violent Trump is. Trump’s contemplating freeing violent criminals who viciously assaulted law enforcement,” said Andrew Weissmann, an ex-federal prosecutor who spent time in federal service on the Justice Department’s Russia investigation led by Robert Mueller.
Notably, despite all this, Trump is still trying to make “law and order” a big issue in his campaign, falsely claiming — for instance — that migrants arriving to the U.S. are bringing waves of crime. He talks consistently on the campaign trail about wanting to see sweeping deportations if re-elected to the presidency this year, sometimes getting outright bizarre in his proclamations, like with his semi-recent claim that migrants were speaking languages for which the U.S. wasn’t prepared. He said they were “coming from parts unknown, countries that you’ve never heard of — languages that nobody in this country speaks. You know, we don’t even have teachers of some of these languages.”
