Background: Supporters loyal to President Donald Trump gather at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File) Inset: Greg Rosen (Department of Justice)
The federal prosecutor who played a key role in leading the investigation into the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol has criticized the decision to pardon those found guilty of participating, indicating that this move influenced his decision to leave the Justice Department.
Greg Rosen, the former head of the Justice Department’s now-defunct Capitol Siege Section, expressed he was “shocked, if not stunned, by the extent of the pardons.”
“I think the message that they send is that political violence towards a political goal is acceptable in a modern democratic society,” he told CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane in an interview posted on Monday. Some 1,500 defendants were pardoned by President Donald Trump on the first day of his second term in the Oval Office, and members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers had their sentences commuted.
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To Rosen, it was the people who appeared to have violence in mind who gained the most from the president’s actions.
“The primary beneficiaries of those pardons were not the trespass-defendants who have talked about ‘walking through the Capitol,”” he said. “It were the individuals that — judges across the spectrum, appointed by both political parties, had determined were a danger to society. Individuals who were serving real, serious jail time.”
The Capitol Siege Section was shut down shortly after Trump returned to office. The Trump administration also fired and demoted prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the Jan. 6 investigations, suggesting such inquiries were due to a “weaponization” by government agencies under the Biden administration, arguments the former president and his Cabinet secretaries have firmly denied.
When MacFarlane asked Rosen what he made of these firings and demotions, which were announced to employees by then-interim U.S. District Attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, Rosen said he found them “ridiculous.”
“To see those talented prosecutors be marginalized or removed from office is an affront to the independence of the department,” Rosen added, touting the success in the conviction rate of those who went to trial.
“The reason those juries convicted — and the reason those judges convicted individuals — was not because of some bug in the due process,” Rosen said. “It was because the evidence was overwhelming. It was the most videotaped crime in American history.”
Law&Crime has reached out to the DOJ for comment.
Rosen will be joining the boutique legal firm Rogers Joseph O’Donnell in Washington, D.C., where the firm says he will “bolster the firm’s capacity to advise clients facing significant government scrutiny.”
