It’s called the Gulag for a reason.

According to a congressional report released in December 2021, the poorly kept Washington, DC, jail that housed approximately 40 January 6 defendants treated them more harshly than other defendants there. “Cells in the January 6 wing … were extremely small, composed of a single toilet, sink, and a small bed cot. The walls of the rooms had residue of human feces, bodily fluids, blood, dirt, and mold. The community showers were recently scrubbed of black mold — some of which remained. The interior walls of the common area were also freshly painted. According to the inmates, the U.S. Marshals had recently visited the area just days before, which caused a flurry of activity by guards to clean up the January 6 area while the U.S. Marshals were inspecting another area.”

The report adds that these J6 inmates say they were denied “basic medical care, bathrooms, exercise, religious services, haircuts, and a nutritious diet,” even though, as American citizens, they enjoyed the presumption of innocence and had yet to be convicted of any crime.

In what was, for many, undoubtedly the most fervently awaited executive order of his brand-new second term, Donald Trump announced Monday night from the Resolute desk in the Oval Office that he was granting pardons and commutations to all defendants convicted for their actions on January 6, 2021. Trump has called them “hostages” on more than one occasion, and for good reason. His sweeping order is a blanket pardon for all but 14 Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, whose sentences he otherwise commuted.

The Washington Examiner called it “a stunning repudiation of the Justice Department’s wide-ranging four-year investigation into the Capitol attack, extended to nonviolent rioters, including those who damaged and stole property, and those who engaged in violence.”

This repudiation, though, is entirely self-inflicted. As Fox News legal analyst Kerri Urbahn put it, The DOJ “again and again would ask for these incredibly harsh sentences and penalties for mostly relatively minor offenses like trespassing.” She added, “Here in Washington, judges who were not friendly to Donald Trump would consistently knock down the sentences that the DOJ asked for. … So it shows you that even the judges here were thinking, ‘This is too much.’”

Indeed, for these “hostages” and their friends and families, it was far too much.

As Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary, said yesterday, “President Trump campaigned on this promise. It should come as no surprise that he delivered on it on Day One. And there are people who’ve been held hostage, as President Trump says, by the Biden DOJ, many of them having had due process denied. They were targeted by our Department of Justice, while the DOJ turned a blind eye to real criminals … especially illegal migrant crime.”

So, just hours after Joe Biden had sleazily and preemptively pardoned members of his own family — and some six months after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared that the Biden “Justice” Department had unconstitutionally overreached in its persecution of some 300 January 6 defendants — President Trump committed to delivering on a campaign promise to pardon the J6ers.

How did it come about? As Axios reports: “Eight days before the inauguration, Vice President-to-be JD Vance — channeling what he believed to be Trump’s thinking — said on ‘Fox News Sunday’ that Jan. 6 convicts who assaulted police ought not get clemency. … But as Trump’s team wrestled with the issue, and planned a shock-and-awe batch of executive orders Day 1, ‘Trump just said: "f*** it: Release 'em all,”’ according to an advisor.“

Some Americans are offended by the pardoning of anyone who engaged in violence against law enforcement that day, and for obvious reasons. My problem is a case-by-case one. I think the cases of those violent offenders could’ve been examined carefully and individually because I know that all their cases are different, and some probably dramatically so.

I don’t trust the Biden DOJ at all, also for obvious reasons. And I’d bet my life that many of those 200 or so J6ers who were convicted of violence were coerced into pleading guilty by the knowledge that they had no chance of getting a fair trial by jury in the rigged, rabidly partisan town of Washington, DC, which votes 90% Democrat. Not a chance.

Did some of them throw punches at officers or hit cops with flagpoles? Should they be treated differently than, say, the ones who were caught in the middle of the melee and might have merely shoved or been shoved into officers? Reason certainly suggests so. In any case, most of these folks already served four years of hard time.

After being passed the signed pardon, a Trump staffer said to his boss and to the assembled media, "The order does require the Bureau of Prisons to act immediately on receipt of the pardons and commutation orders.”

To which Trump pointed out the door and replied, “Why don’t we get that down so we can get them going right now.” Clearly, Trump didn’t want these people imprisoned for a single extra moment.

For the opposition, here’s Nancy Pelosi, who couldn’t resist weighing in on the pardons after having disgracefully skipped the Trump inauguration: “The President’s actions are an outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol, the Congress and the Constitution.”

This from the elected official most responsible for the rigged congressional report on January 6. This from the elected official who failed to protect the Capitol on January 6 when she refused to call in the National Guard troops that Donald Trump had authorized.

I’ve had serious questions about January 6 from the jump, mostly about the two-tiered nature of our criminal justice system. Why were these J6ers treated so markedly differently than, for example, the BLM rioters who burned down the Minneapolis police station, or the 214 mostly “black bloc” antifa thugs who were indicted on felony rioting charges for their activities during Trump’s first inauguration? As CNN reported, those people “smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine, and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police.” Six cops were injured that day, and 230 rioters were arrested. And yet, on July 6, 2018, as the AP reported, the government dropped the charges against all 214 of them.

Trump’s blanket pardon of the J6ers serves as vindication for the relative handful of citizens and journalists who pursued the January 6 story beyond the whitewashed mainstream media headlines and the rigged January 6 Committee report, all while hundreds of the defendants were languishing in prison cells, awaiting their Sixth Amendment right “to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.”

Among these stalwarts, no one — and I mean no one — has been a more dogged and determined pursuer of justice for the January 6 defendants than independent journalist Julie Kelly. Yesterday, she was asked about the unprecedented nature of the J6 prosecutions and show trials. This was her response:

There has not, and the criminal defense attorneys have said this to me, they’ve said it in court motions. There is nothing comparable. And I think one big indication is having that reversal of the 1512(c)(2) count … that post-Enron obstruction that was overturned by the Supreme Court in June, saying that the DOJ wrongfully applied that statute in 300+ cases. Nonetheless, the DOJ DC U.S. Attorney, Matthew Graves, at the time, pushing forward with trying to make that charge stick even after the Supreme Court overturned them. This was a rogue, reckless, destructive political persecution, and people have to pay for what they have done. This cannot be the last word on the travesty of J6 defendants. Those in charge — Matthew Graves, Lisa Monaco, even Merrick Garland — have to be held accountable for the lives that they have destroyed or tried to destroy over the past four years.“

In the vast majority of these cases, I think four years of hard time is more than enough. If our nation is to put January 6 in the past and move forward with Donald Trump’s ambitious America First agenda, then perhaps this mass pardon, however imperfect, is the best way to do it.