In the immediate aftermath of January 6, Fox News personalities spoke out against the insurrection, with some privately begging the administration to stop the Capitol attack. Even after Trump changed his tune on January 6 offenders and began suggesting pardons for them, Fox News maintained that those who had physically attacked law enforcement should not be among the pardoned.

• Host Sean Hannity declared: “Those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those that commit acts of violence.” He continued, “They — people — we don't believe should be vandalizing our nation's Ccapitol, attacking the brave men and women that keep us safe in law enforcement. They don't storm the Capitol, they don’t place pipe bombs at the RNC or anywhere else. And all of today's perpetrators must be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law." [Fox News, Hannity, 1/6/21]
• Fox host Laura Ingraham called “those who breached the Capitol Hill security … criminals.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 1/6/21]
• Fox host Jesse Watters asserted: “You’re allowed, as a member of the public, to go into the people's house, but you have to go through the front door and you have to pass through a metal detector. You can't smash windows, spray police with chemical agents, assault police officers, loot, and vandalize.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/7/21]
• In May 2023, Watters warned Trump “to be careful.”: “You can't pardon anybody that committed an act of violence.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 5/11/23] 
• In December 2024, Hannity declared that “the people that are responsible for acting in ways that were absolutely irresponsible and law-breaking, they’ve got to be held accountable.” [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 12/3/24] 
• Watters mused, “If I were president, I don’t think I would pardon January sixers who were slugging cops.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 12/12/24]

Even though these Fox hosts argued against pardoning violent offenders from January 6 as recently as December, since Monday, Fox hosts have clearly and at times explicitly supported Trump’s decision to pardon all offenders.

• Host Will Cain called Donald Trump pardoning 1,500 January 6 offenders “justice." [Fox News, The Will Cain Show, 1/21/25]
• Host Laura Ingraham defended pardoning violent January 6 defendants: “From Trump’s apparent point of view here, I guess it’s been four years since January 6 and he wants to put this entire episode behind us. Clearly there were a small minority who engaged in violence, but the overwhelming majority were charged with misdemeanors, with trespassing and parading in the Capitol. Plus were defendants given their due process rights, is another argument." [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 1/21/25]
• Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones suggested Trump pardoned people who “didn’t attack officers," or engage in “any actual violence,” failing to mention that many of the pardons went to those who did attack officers. While discussing Trump’s pardon of January 6 rioters, Jones alluded to the fact that both Trump and Vance previously implied the pardons would be for people who “didn’t attack officers, if there wasn’t any actual violence.” Jones went on to say, “Promises made, promises kept.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends First, 1/21/25]
• Fox News legal editor Kerri Urbahn emphasized “incredibly harsh sentences and penalties for … most of the relatively minor offenses" and failed to note that violent offenders were also pardoned. Instead, she highlighted what she implied was oversentencing of “relatively minor offenses like trespassing, misdemeanors.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/21/25]

On her Fox News show, Ingraham hosted two people who were issued pardons by Trump and allowed them to rewrite their offenses. During the attack on January 6, Ingraham texted then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, imploring him to get Trump to take action, writing: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” Four years later, she’s hosting participants and defending Trump’s blanket pardons.

• Beyond praising Trump for issuing the pardons, Ingraham hosted Brandon Straka and Isabella DeLuca. Straka — founder of the #WalkAway movement that encourages liberals to leave the Democratic Party — had been a Fox News guest prior to the events of January 6, and appeared on Ingraham’s own show days after the insurrection to gripe about alleged conservative social media censorship. DeLuca is a conservative influencer who has worked with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point, USA. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 1/21/25; Media Matters, 10/12/18, 1/25/21, 3/19/24; The New York Post, 1/21/25]  
• Straka claimed that his case was “a lie from the very beginning,” and that the FBI had “created this story” to target Straka because of his activism. Straka pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in September 2021 and signed a court document stating that it was “true and accurate" that he encouraged rioters to take a Capitol police officer’s shield. Straka has since tried to walk the statement back, saying that “I took a misdemeanor plea deal rather than choosing to go to trial” even though “I did not do those things,” in order to avoid jail time. According to the criminal complaint, in a video Straka recorded, he can be heard yelling “go, go” to encourage others to storm the building and to “take the shield.” Ingraham suggested that “a lot of people signed a lot of admissions of guilt because of the same kind of situation, they didn’t want to go to jail for 30 years." [DOJ, 1/20/21; NBC News, 7/29/22; NPR, 8/4/22]
• DeLuca claimed she was charged for solely “touching a table.” According to the criminal complaint, DeLuca can be seen in images and video “removing, and aiding and abetting other rioters in removing, a table” from a Capitol office that was later used to assault Capitol police officers. [NBC News, 3/18/24; The Associated Press, 3/18/24; The New York Times, 3/18/24]
• Ingraham praised them for sharing their stories, concluding that “people have to really understand what happens with these prosecutors and how these cases go down. Because this could happen again unless this is prevented from happening again.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 1/21/25]