Ten Iowans are included in President Trump’s mass clemency for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters. The attack, which was intended to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, injured more than 140 police officers. Property damage to the Capitol from the attack exceeded $2.8 million. Six people, including a police officer, died during the assault or following it.
The first successful assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812, the insurrection temporarily halted the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
Trump has consistently lied about the Jan. 6 attack since it occurred. On the campaign trail last year, he called Jan. 6, 2021, “a day of love” and called his supporters who stormed the Capitol “patriots.” He sometimes claimed the attackers, who attended a rally he held to demand the certification of Biden’s electoral victory be stopped, were basically tourists visiting Washington D.C. and touring the Capitol.
Trump said throughout the 2024 campaign he would pardon the J6 defendants, as members of the mob came to be known. But when pressed by reporters about people who assaulted law enforcement officers, Trump would occasionally demur and say that he might not pardon people convicted of committing violence. Sometimes Trump said pardons would be looked at on a case-by-case basis. That didn’t happen.
Instead, on Monday night, as his first day in office was drawing to a close, Trump issued a blanket pardon for all members of the mob that attacked the Capitol.
“‘Trump just said: ‘F–k it: Release ’em all,’ an adviser familiar with the discussions said,” Axios reported on Wednesday.
Despite Trump talking about J6 pardons for years, no one working for him had done the necessary preparatory work to look at pardons on a case-by-case basis, or to exclude those convicted of assaulting police officers — a group that includes three of the Iowans pardoned — prior to Trump taking office. Axios and other media outlets report that Trump was unwilling to take the time to have his staff do those things after he took office on Monday.
In all, more than 1,500 people were fully pardoned for crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack. Leaders of the assault who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy had their sentences commuted. Trump also ordered the U.S. Justice Department to dismiss “with prejudice” all pending cases related to Jan. 6. Dismissing the cases with prejudice would prevent them from ever being refiled in the future.
Images of Iowan Doug Jensen became some of the most famous in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack. The Des Moines resident, an avid Trump supporter and believer in various rightwing conspiracy theories, led a group of attackers who chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up a staircase and down a hallway. Goodman succeeded in drawing Jensen’s group away from members of Congress who were hiding, in fear for their lives.
In September 2022, Jensen was found guilty of five felonies and two misdemeanors for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. He was sentenced in December 2022 to five years in federal prison, but was released from prison in January 2024. Trump’s pardon expunges Jensen’s conviction on all seven charges.
Two of the three Iowans convicted of attacking police officers — Salvador Sandoval of Ankeny and Kyle Young of Redfield — have also had their convictions expunged. Sandoval, who assaulted multiple police officers inside the Capitol, was convicted of six felonies and six misdemeanors in December 2022. Young pleaded guilty in September 2022 to holding down a police officer while other members of the mob attacked the officer and “an individual repeatedly applied a taser to the back of [the officer’s] neck,” as the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia explained when the guilty plea was entered.
The third Iowan charged with attacking police officers, Earl Jordan of Dickens, was awaiting trial on felony and misdemeanor charges when Trump issued his blanket pardon on Monday.
The Des Moines Register reached out to Iowa’s four House representatives and its two senators — all Republican, all vocal Trump supporters — for their reaction to Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons. Rep. Zach Nunn and Rep. Randy Feenstra did not respond to the Register’s questions. Spokespeople for Rep. Ashley Hinson and Sen. Joni Ernst avoided directly commenting on Trump’s pardons, and instead denounced President Biden’s preemptive pardons to protect members of his family and others Trump has said he wants prosecuted, even though there have been no plausible accusations of criminality made against them. Sen. Chuck Grassley took the same approach while speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
“I think, following on the precedent of Biden, which I disagreed with, it’d be hard for me to criticize Trump,” Grassley said.
In a statement, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks went further than her colleagues, and suggested Trump should be congratulated for fulfilling a campaign promise with his pardons.
“The president said what he was going to do, and the American people voted him and Republicans into power, seeing right through Democrat-led political persecution,” Miller-Meeks said. “… The media and Democrats can obsess over this all they want. It didn’t work in November, and it won’t work now. I remain focused on supporting President Trump’s agenda to deliver for Iowa and the country.”
In an order dismissing a Jan. 6-related case after Trump issued his pardon, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan said Trump’s actions “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”
Chutkan, who was presiding over Trump’s trial for crimes committed while trying to subvert the 2020 election until the Justice Department had to withdraw the case following Trump victory last November, added the pardons “cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”
“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor. The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”
