Some NW Republicans oppose Trump administration move to erase convictions of Jan. 6 riot leaders, while others stay silent

WASHINGTON - On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump wasted no time in fulfilling a signature campaign promise when he pardoned more than 1,500 people who had been charged or convicted for their roles in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

But for the scores of Trump supporters who retraced the steps of the protesters from the White House to the Capitol to mark the five-year anniversary of the riot in January, that wasn’t enough. The group called on the president to erase the convictions of leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys who were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for organizing the riot, whose sentences he had previously commuted without granting full pardons.

On Tuesday, two days after Trump accused Pope Leo XIV of being “weak on crime,” his Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to throw out the conviction of 12 members of the two extremist groups. A court filing signed by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host who is now the top federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia, argues that dismissing the criminal cases “is in the interest of justice.”

Republicans in Congress, wary of angering Trump, have largely kept quiet about his administration’s latest action to undo years of work by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies that led to charges for crimes ranging from trespassing to violently assaulting police officers. But in statements and interviews at the Capitol on Thursday, several GOP lawmakers from the Northwest said they disagree with the president granting clemency to those who committed violent crimes.

“I was not a fan of the blanket pardon,” said Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, who called what happened on Jan. 6 “an unfortunate stain on our republic.”

As some of his own constituents said the day after Trump pardoned the rioters en masse, Baumgartner said he draws a distinction between people who committed violent crimes while breaking into the Capitol and those who walked through the doors after they were opened.

Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho Falls, said he couldn’t comment on the specific convictions the Justice Department is now seeking to erase because he didn’t know enough about them, but he said he has a problem with “the organizers” getting clemency for their actions.

“I agree with Trump’s pardons in general, because there was an awful lot of people here that were just wandering through the Capitol,” he said. “I would have been more selective in how I did it, because there are people that should have been charged.”

Congressional Republicans routinely dismiss questions about Jan. 6 by saying the country should look forward, not backward. The president evidently does not share that attitude, as he still frequently claims the 2020 presidential election was rigged and has sought to rewrite the history of Jan. 6.

On the fifth anniversary of the riot, the White House created a webpage that blames Democrats for failing to prevent the assault on police by Trump supporters and refers to Jan. 6 as “a date which will live in infamy,” echoing the famous words President Franklin D. Roosevelt used to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Sen. Jim Risch, an 82-year-old Idaho Republican who is seeking re-election for another six-year term in November, refused to answer questions about the Jan. 6 defendants on Thursday, after The Spokesman-Review sent written questions to his office a day earlier.

After telling a reporter Thursday morning that he would talk later, the senator responded to questions that afternoon by saying, “No! No, don’t ask the question.”

Risch faces three opponents in Idaho’s Republican primary on May 19, but he has Trump’s endorsement and is likely to cruise to another term so long as he does not draw the president’s ire. Two other Idaho Republicans, Rep. Russ Fulcher and Sen. Mike Crapo, also did not respond to written questions about the Jan. 6 defendants.

Rioters ransacked Risch’s office in the Capitol building during the attack in 2021, but the senator did not address the incident even after video was released in 2023 until he told The Spokesman-Review in January the rioters had mistaken his office for the next-door office of a Democrat.

The day after Trump’s mass clemency in 2025, Risch called former President Joe Biden’s pardons for people convicted of attacking police officers “stomach-turning,” but he abruptly ended the interview when asked if he felt the same about Trump pardoning those who committed similar crimes.

Not every GOP senator is unwilling to address what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, another Republican who is up for re-election in a safely Republican seat in November, said he objects to efforts to rewrite the history of the riot.

“Look, I was here on Jan. 6,” Rounds said. “I saw it. It was a violent activity, and I think any suggestion that it did not occur is incorrect.”

Democrats say Trump’s unprecedented use of pardons and his administration’s new effort to wipe away the seditious conspiracy convictions are examples of brazen corruption that undermines the U.S. political system. The Justice Department’s request is likely to be granted because prosecutors have broad discretion in dropping criminal charges.

“This is what fascism looks like,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue. “If you are friends with the regime, the law doesn’t apply to you.”

In the 15 months since Trump granted clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants, at least a dozen of them have been charged with other serious crimes, including child molestation, assault, burglary and possession of child sexual abuse images, according to the New York Times. At least 27 other rioters committed other crimes before they were pardoned, including a 24-year-old woman who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing another woman in a crash while driving drunk.

“If you’re the type of person that assaulted a police officer on Jan. 6, you’re probably prone to violence and criminal behavior,” Baumgartner said.

In March, 45-year-old Andrew Paul Johnson was sentenced to life in prison for sexually abusing a boy and a girl, both 12 years old at the time, whom he tried to keep quiet by promising to give them millions of dollars from a restitution payment be claimed he would receive for being unjustly imprisoned. Trump administration officials have openly advocated for pardoned rioters to be paid reparations after their release.

Trump himself has sought such payments on a far larger scale. He has filed claims with the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service, demanding that the government he leads give him billions of taxpayer dollars as compensation for a leak of his tax returns during his first term and investigations into his conduct after that term ended. In federal court filings on Friday, lawyers for the president and the IRS said they were in talks to settle Trump’s lawsuit seeking $10 billion from the agency, to be paid by American taxpayers.

Past American presidents have used their clemency powers sparingly, often in the days before they leave office because they fear political blowback for making an unpopular move. In contrast, Trump has granted pardons and commuted sentences at an unprecedented pace and in ways that contradict his tough-on-crime image.

Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was in prison for helping to traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, just weeks before ordering a raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to face similar drug-trafficking charges. The U.S. president has ordered federal agents into Minneapolis and other cities supposedly to crack down on fraud committed by immigrants, but on his second day back in office he commuted the sentence of a Cuban immigrant found guilty of defrauding $73 million from taxpayers through Medicare.

Rep. Ryan Zinke, a retiring Republican who represents Western Montana and served as Interior Secretary in Trump’s first term, said he disagrees with those who describe what happened on Jan. 6 as an “insurrection,” but he thinks people who assault police officers should not have been pardoned.

“I think you should take it case by case, because there were people that were instigators,” Zinke said. “There were people that inflamed it. There were people that did strike an officer or push an officer. I think those people should be segregated out differently.”

Another retiring congressman who opposes the pardons is Rep. Dan Newhouse, who was one of just 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment for inciting the riot. The soft-spoken Yakima County farmer has largely kept his head down since that fateful vote, surviving re-election twice despite standing by his decision to impeach the president.

In a statement, Newhouse’s spokesman said the congressman believes those convicted of seditious conspiracy for organizing the riot “committed crimes, were convicted accordingly, and should serve jail time.”

“Any move to reverse their lawful convictions is an affront to the rule of law and lessens the damage done,” spokesman Juan Ayala wrote. “Granting mass clemency sends the wrong message to our dedicated Capitol police officers who were assaulted as they came to the aid of lawmakers, staff, and other personnel.”

Few Republicans in Congress have forcefully supported Trump’s decision to grant clemency to violent offenders, but those who object to the move have done so quietly. Former Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who represented southwestern Washington in the House from 2011 to 2023, said the explanation is not complicated.

“Because everybody’s afraid,” she said when asked why her former colleagues have stayed silent about Jan. 6. “Fear is powerful. It can motivate people.”

The former congresswoman, who lost re-election in 2022 after she was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, invoked a famous letter Abigail Adams, the wife of the nation’s second president and mother of its sixth, wrote to her son when he was 12 years old and struggling with a difficult trip overseas with his father and older brother.

“Great necessities call out great virtues,” she wrote to John Quincy Adams in 1780. “When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the Heart, then those qualities which would otherways lay dormant, wake into Life, and form the Character of the Hero and the Statesman.”

Herrera Beutler, who named her first daughter Abigail after her political hero, said she believes there are still “heroes and statesmen” in Congress.

“Now would be a good time for them to make their presence known,” she said. “I know people are afraid, but that doesn’t change truth and it doesn’t change responsibility to lead.”

The former congresswoman said many Republicans in Congress say privately, “I’ve got to go along so that I can help make it better.”

“I know they believe what they’re saying, but at some point, like, these are the times that wake to life the character of the hero and the statesman,” she said, invoking Abigail Adams.

If that does not happen now, she said, that does not mean history will not judge lawmakers who stayed silent.

“Our children, or children’s children, will look back and say, ‘Gee, this seems inappropriate,’” Herrera Beutler said. “They’re still going to judge us, and it won’t matter whether you keep your seat or you don’t keep your seat. It’ll matter whether or not you were on the side of the truth.”

Orion Donovan Smith’s work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper’s managing editor.

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This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 3:58 PM.