Newsmax host on January 6 pardons: “If you battered a cop, you know, I don't think that that person should be pardoned in that situation”
Rob Schmitt: “In certain cases the pardon might have come too soon”
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From the January 21, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Rob Schmitt Tonight
ROB SCHMITT (HOST0: Well, I mean, I don't like that it turns into this whataboutism. I mean, the J6 situation is actually complex because I think for most people at home, you're looking at this, you're thinking they did terrible — you know, they have — the government has done terrible things to people that did very, very little in a lot of these cases. But at the same time, if you battered a cop, you know, I don't think that that person should be pardoned in that situation. But that's not most of the cases. Most of the cases are people that were nonviolent, that have been treated like they were, you know, government saboteurs. And there were these heinous people that deserve this horrible treatment. And that's wrong.
LARRY ELDER (GUEST): Can I jump in real quick?
SCHMITT: Go, Larry. Yeah.
ELDER: Here's the problem with this battery in cops thing. BLM riots, George Floyd riots, May 2020 for four months, 2000 officers were injured because they were battered by protesters. Nothing happened. So now all of a sudden, anybody who quote batters a cop ought to be sent to the Gulag. It's inconsistent.
SCHMITT: I completely agree, it's inconsistent. I wish it was more consistent the other way. Yeah. Go ahead, Mark.
MARK HALPERIN (GUEST): I hate to speak out against Larry after he plugged my book, but my preference as a citizen, as a journalist, is to evaluate all these cases on their own. Don't say, you know, Black Lives Matters versus January 6. Each case, each individual indictment should be dealt with on its own merits. I think that's the way forward for America. The Biden pardons were horrible. Some of the Trump pardons were horrible.
SCHMITT: Well, Trump indicated today, because he got hit on that — one second, Larry — because Trump did get hit on that. And he said, we're going to we might have to take a look at a particular case that involved assaulting a cop. But it seemed clear that, I mean, the vast majority of these fifteen hundred got way more prosecution than anyone else would have. It was political. It was disgusting. But in certain cases, you know, it may have been somewhat justified. And in certain cases the pardon might have come too soon. Larry. Go ahead, finish off.
ELDER: At least they were charged. At least they were prosecuted. And several of them, in fact, spent time in jail. Getting back to what happened in the summer of 2020, you got people that were battering police officers and absolutely nothing happened to them. So the same people are saying, how dare you attack a police officer, didn't give a damn when it was George Floyd, BLM riots. That's all I'm saying.