Trump pardoned my cousin for assaulting a police officer Jan. 6 it was the right call

“We didn’t eat like this,” my cousin Patrick jokes, cutting his steak at a homecoming dinner with family to celebrate his release from prison.President Trump pardoned Patrick on Day One of his White House return.My cousin had been serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence at the Elkton federal correctional institution in Ohio for his actions Jan.

6, 2021.Patrick is one of the “violent” J6ers Democrats and even some right-wing commentators and congressional Republicans say Trump shouldn’t have pardoned.But like many of these cases, Patrick’s has — to use the words of Vice President J.D.

Vance — “gray areas.”Patrick McCaughey III was 23 years old when he drove to Washington, DC, with his father to protest what he saw as election manipulation.“I went down there expecting we would probably listen to a couple speeches and protest visibly, stand in location and make our voices heard,” he tells me.

“It was my first real political event, protest, rally.”Patrick readily admits he didn’t act well that day.He used a riot shield to push against a line of officers blocking the West Terrace entrance, pinning one to a doorway.Yet if Democrats and the Biden Justice Department had treated J6ers — violent or not — the same way they treated Black Lives Matter protesters, pro-Palestinian protesters or regular criminal offenders, we would not be discussing pardons today.“There were double standards in how sentences were applied to the J6 protesters versus other groups,” Vance said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “A double standard that was not applied to many people, including of course the Black Lives Matter rioters who killed over two dozen people and never had the weight of a weaponized Department of Justice come against them.”Critics will say this is whataboutism, but for a party so focused on criminal-justice reform and “restorative justice,” the Democrats were quick to indict J6ers as “insurrectionists” and equate them with ...