As Donald Trump prepares to take office again, the country is still coming to terms with what happened on January 6, 2021. But perhaps the best way to move forward is to neither forgive nor forget the past—but obliterate it. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What if Biden pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists?
What if President Joe Biden had pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists? That is, the 1,500 or so people charged with federal crimes related to the riot. And yeah, I said Joe Biden, not President-elect Donald Trump. This is an idea I've heard floated around these past few weeks. And on its face, it sounds illogical.
Like, why on earth would the outgoing Democratic president pardon people who damaged property or injured law enforcement officers or plotted to overthrow democracy? Trump has said many times that he will pardon the J6ers. He said he'll pardon some of them, or most of them, or even consider pardoning all of them at different times.
He said he'll pardon them on his very first day in office, which is just in a few days.
People that were doing some bad things weren't prosecuted, and people that didn't even walk into the building are in jail right now. So we'll be looking at the whole thing, but I'll be making major pardons. Yes, please.
Chapter 2: Why would Biden consider pardoning January 6th offenders?
Right. So why would Biden do that again? I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. The answer to that question requires you to zoom out to different countries and different periods of history to understand the long political traditions that pardons are a part of and what at their very best they could accomplish. And it matters who does the pardoning and their motive for doing it.
I myself did a lot of research on the January 6th prosecutions for a podcast series I hosted for The Atlantic called We Live Here Now. And as I was researching, I came across a couple of articles by author and journalist Linda Kintzler that helped me understand these cases and this charged political moment in a new way. Linda is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
She writes about politics and collective memory, and she's written for many publications, including The Atlantic. She's also working on a new book about the idea we're talking about today, which is Oblivion. Linda, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Absolutely.
So the J6 prosecutions are for the most part unfolding at the federal courthouse in D.C., just a few blocks from where we are now. Linda, you attended some of these cases. I did also. What is your most vivid or lasting impression from these trials? Oh, wow.
Yeah. I mean, I spent months, I mean, the better part of a year, actually, attending these trials in downtown D.C. And there are so many elements, as you have described, about the courthouse, you know, namely that it's right across from the Capitol and overlooks the grounds upon which all of these crimes happened.
And, you know, there were so many times I was walking through the halls of the courtroom, and some of them had little windows you can peer through. And almost on every single one, there was one day when I, you know, you could see the monitors in the courtroom and you could see that they were all playing January 6th footage. You know, different angles.
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Chapter 3: What are the lasting impressions from January 6th trials?
You could hear the sounds of the footage that the prosecuting attorneys had assembled.
We're about five months out. We're trying to make our way through all this.
And you really do get the sense there that in this building, this really pivotal event in history is being litigated and worked through in real time, kind of away from the public eye, even though these are open to anyone who wants to come see them.
We need to hold the doors of the Capitol!
A few of these cases have stuck with Linda for different reasons. One was the hearing of a member of the Proud Boys. It was the juxtaposition of this violent offender and his young kids who were playing around on the courthouse benches at his sentencing. And the other was a woman, a nonviolent offender with no prior record.
We've lost the line.
We've lost the line.
And did you feel – like, how did you feel in that moment? Like, did you feel like, oh, there's some injustice being done or not quite that? No.
I mean, I think this is justice, right? I mean, this is actually the levers of justice working. You know, it is absolutely that these people broke the law and they are being brought to court because they violated public order in different ways. So it is kind of like our ur-definition of justice. But it's a different question, and I think –
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Chapter 4: How does the legal process handle January 6th offenders?
And the way he puts it is that the J6ers were treated unfairly, persecuted by the justice system, they're hostages. You know, he said this in many different ways with many different degrees of passion throughout the course of his campaign.
Well, thank you very much. And you see the spirit from the hostages, and that's what they are, is hostages. They've been treated terribly.
What do you think of that argument and how does that fit into what you're saying?
Yeah, I mean, like, on the face of it, what they are doing is, you know, manipulating historical terminology, right, for their political ends.
So you don't think they were unfairly—like, your argument is not at all that they were unfairly persecuted, right?
No, no. I mean, I think that they broke the law and they should be punished for what they did. I think there's a genuine argument you could have about which offenders should be kind of facing jail time, but I don't think that's the conversation we're having right now.
But I do think, you know, what this question raises is the fact that Trump himself has not been held accountable for what he did on January 6th, right? And there were many efforts to do that and... My view of this whole process is that historically speaking, we're doing it kind of backwards.
Historically, it was the top people in power who oversaw the crime who would be the first to be held responsible for it. for what they had done. In this case, we have almost the exact opposite, right? We have the lower level offenders, the people who are easier to find, the kind of foot soldiers of Trump's, you know, movement who are being the ones hauled into court.
And obviously, we have seen the efforts to prosecute Trump himself have kind of sequentially collapsed and are now are almost certainly not going to happen.
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Chapter 5: What are the political implications of Trump's comments on J6ers?
Yeah. Can we talk about Nazi Germany for a minute? I mean, I realize we always have to be careful when we're making historical comparisons to Nazi Germany. But you threw out the sentence denazification didn't work. There were, though, a lot of higher Nazi officials who were held accountable.
So how can we use what happened in Nazi Germany to inform what you're saying we have to figure out right now?
Right. So, I mean, yes, of course, saying genotification didn't work is a huge sweeping claim, and we can argue about that a lot. But what you had there was, you know, the Nuremberg trials. Of course, what we think of as Nuremberg did hold, you know, the top brass accountable for what they had done.
And then you had many, many smaller sequential trials, both in West Germany and in the former Soviet Union. But you know what? I often think of—and I want to be careful about making the comparison today, of course—
But I have been thinking about this line that the philosopher Judith Schlar said, which was that, you know, why denazification failed in many ways was because the prosecutors mistook a group of individual offenders for a social movement. So in other words, they thought that by denazification.
Continuing with all these trials that they would squash the kind of violent, virulent sentiment underlying Nazism itself.
Which holds some intuitive appeal because you think I'm holding people accountable. That's what we're supposed to do as a society, hold people accountable.
Totally. And it feels good. Like it appeals to all of our liberal sensibilities about how, you know, order and justice are supposed to work.
And particularly you say liberal because I think right now we do have this divide where Democrats or maybe the left are trusting in institutions and the right is a lot less trusting in institutions. So Democrats are putting their faith in this case, in this institution, the court, to go through the paces and do the right thing.
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Chapter 6: How can historical examples inform our understanding of justice?
Okay, you said that casually, and there have been a few law professors who floated that idea. It is, on its face, a kind of shocking idea. Like when you read a headline that says, should Joe Biden pardon the Jay Sixers, it's actually kind of hard to get your head around. What do you think of that idea?
Well, I think, you know, first of all, historically, pardons have been almost a routine thing that any new ruler or president has done upon taking office.
Are you glad that you pardoned those people that went to Canada, the draft evaders? Yes, I am. Why?
Well, it was a festering sore and involved tens of thousands of young men
Like I was reading about Jimmy Carter who pardoned draft dodgers and thinking that like we can look in retrospect and say they were peaceful and the January Sixers were violent rioters. But it must have been hurtful to a lot of people whose children or who they themselves went to Vietnam didn't want to. And it was quite controversial. So to what end does a new president pardon people?
Well, I mean, it's kind of on the face of it. It's, you know, a gesture of goodwill. But it's supposed to say, you know, we are all subject to the law and let's kind of start on the right foot, et cetera, et cetera.
So it sets a national mood. Like it sets a mood of I'm the president for all of you. We're all in this together. And the value of this country is mercy. Mercy is a value. Yes.
So after I made my inaugural speech, before I even left, the site. I went just inside the door at the National Capitol and I signed the pardon for those young men. And yes, I think it was the right thing to do. I thought that it was time to get it over with. I think the same attitude that President Ford had in giving Nixon a pardon.
We would needlessly be diverted from meeting those challenges if we as a people were to remain sharply divided over whether to indict, bring to trial, and punish a former president who is already condemned to suffer long and deeply.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from the Nuremberg Trials?
Where they said, you know, and this is generally happening in the kind of quote unquote Western world, but we also see similar measures elsewhere. But what they would say is, you know, everything that happened prior to this law, whatever it was, whether like hostility, war, killing, theft, etc.,
None of that can be litigated or spoken of in public, which often meant, you know, you can't bring a lawsuit after this measure is passed.
So it's not actual forgetting. It's like a public declaration that we shall all forget together.
Right. And like in some ways forgetting isn't even the right word. And the interesting thing to me is that, you know, the word oblivion is the kind of Roman invention that was used to describe it, that Cicero used after the fact. And that was kind of like his spin on it, right? Everyone is telling tales about how to make a democracy work or how to make a state or a kingdom work, right?
Not all of these were democracies. But yeah, forgetting in some ways, it's not really the correct description of what's going on. It's more of a kind of collective agreement about how you're going to move past something that is like fundamentally irreconcilable.
Got it. It's almost a funny word, like I'm going to blast you into oblivion. Like it's a very powerful word. I don't know if it was meant as kind of campy, probably not by the Romans. but there is something kind of like huge about it, you know?
Yeah, oblivio sempiterna, eternal oblivion to kind of wash away everything. It's a totally beguiling word, and it kind of connotes erosion in English, an erasure, but like there's also... You know, in other languages, in Russian, it's, you know, eternal oblivion, right? Eternal forgetting in a way.
So it's almost so grand and big that it's not connected to the mundane act of, oh, I forgot my keys. Like, it's almost so big that it's on a grand national scale. Maybe it's something like that.
Yeah, like it's like you're always rescuing things from oblivion or losing things to oblivion. I mean, it is in a way, right? Because you're burying something in oblivion. It's a physical location, right? It's a noun, oblivion. And so to me, I think of it as like, okay, you're burying it, but you're not forgetting where it is, right? It's always there.
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Chapter 8: How could pardons affect reconciliation in America?
And what we have been seeing with the kind of the lower level offenders that some of them would not have had to explicitly as a kind of gesture of goodwill.
A couple of challenges I can think of to using this approach with January 6th. The first surface one is just the sheer amount of documentation, YouTube videos, like what you're describing, which is a clever act of forgetting or a memory game. It's, I mean, you know, like if you're a prosecutor working in the federal courthouse, this is a gift. Like you've seen these trials.
Basically what you're doing at these trials is watching videos.
Mm-hmm.
some Facebook video that somebody made saying, hey, I was at the Capitol. Like, I did this. Me, nobody else did this. Like, literally, that's what some of them say because they're proud in that moment.
And then, I mean, there's footage from everywhere. Yeah.
So since you are talking about historical examples, what do you do with an era in which everything is uber-documented?
Yeah, and it's actually interesting. I mean, I was in a couple of trials where the judge was like, to the prosecutor, was saying like, listen, I've been to so many of these trials. You do not need to establish for me what happened on January 6th writ large. Like, I get it. Like, can you please fast forward?
But I mean, like, I guess what I'm talking about is not even about like, oh, you know, keep these videos from circulating or, you know, don't talk about what happened. It's more about don't expect the legal process to achieve something that cannot be achieved through law.
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