J6 — you can pardon the man. You can't pardon the day.

On January 20, 2025 — his first day back — the President granted clemency to roughly 1,500 people charged over January 6th. Most received full pardons; 14 leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes — had their sentences commuted.

Here is the part that decides it for me. The Justice Department had documented assaults on more than 140 police officers that day, and over $2.8 million in damage to the Capitol. More than 169 of the people pardoned had pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement.

And this isn’t my team talking — it’s theirs. The country’s largest police organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, condemned the pardons, warning they tell people the consequences for attacking police are not severe. When the cops’ own unions say you went too far pardoning people who beat cops, the jersey came off. That’s just the record.

My line, and it’s already on my wall

Some things are not to be pardoned — full stop. I wrote that about traffickers; it holds here, evenly: you don’t pardon the assault on the house, or on the people who stand in the door of it. That is not a party position. It is a floor.

You can pardon the man. You can’t pardon the day.

Here is what a signature can’t touch: the record is the arbiter. A pardon erases the penalty. It does not erase the day. The video is still the video. The dated artifact still says what it says. You can sign a man out of his sentence; you cannot sign the day out of the record. Score the record, not the paperwork.

And a pardon like this is the purest Gray Star — power buying you out of the record. Bought, never earned; the cold light, not the warm one.