By james art 
Although Vice President JD Vance said two weeks ago that those who committed violence during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot “should not be pardoned,” he defended 1,500 pardons issued by President Trump last week, which includes the most violent offenders.
In an CBS News interview “Face the Nation with Margaret BrennanVance was asked by Brennan about the 1,500 pardons Mr. Trump issued last week to people accused or convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She noted that just two weeks ago, in an interview on Fox News, Vance said, “If you protested peacefully on January 6th and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treated you like a gang member, you should be pardoned, if you have committed violence on this day, you obviously should not be pardoned.
She asked Vance, “Did you advise the president against these blanket pardons of 1,500 people — including those who committed violence?”
Vance, in his first interview since becoming vice president, countered that she missed the next thing he said in the Fox interview that “there are gray areas.” He accused the Department of Justice, led by Merrick Garland, of “denying constitutional protections in prosecution” and of applying “a double standard in the way sentences were applied to J6 protesters versus other groups.”
Mr. Trump extended the pardon to those convicted of violent and serious crimes, including assault on police officers and seditious conspiracy. He also ordered the attorney general to dismiss all pending charges related to the Capitol riot, essentially uprooting a massive effort by Biden’s Justice Department to prosecute those involved in the attack.
The vice president told Brennan that Mr. Trump said the defendants would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and that’s exactly what we did. We reviewed 1,600 cases. He accused Mr Biden’s Justice Department of denying “a lot of people” their constitutional rights and said he believed Mr Trump “made the right decision”.
Brennan described two of the attacks on officers on January 6: “Daniel Rodriguez used a taser on an officer who was pulled from the defensive line, driving it into the officer’s neck. He was in prison, sentenced to 12 years, 7 months He was pardoned, he punched a policeman while wearing reinforced brass ring gloves and he held one on the ground while other rioters attacked the policeman for more than 20 seconds, causing a concussion, how can you to call these people unjustly imprisoned?’
Vance acknowledged, “There’s what people actually did on January 6th, and we’re not saying everybody did everything perfectly,” but he accused the Justice Department of “unfairly prosecuting over a thousand Americans in a way that was politically motivated.”
Asked again if “violence like this against a police officer is ever justified,” Vance said it was “not justified” and then repeated his accusation that the defendants since Jan. 6 had been subjected to an unfair trial, “a double standard that is not applied to many people, including, of course, the Black Lives Matter rioters who killed over two dozen people and never had the brunt of an armed Justice Department.
After the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis in May 2020. millions participated in Black Lives Matter protests — more than 2,000 in US cities and 60 countries around the world, according to The New York Times. According to the Justice Department, 300 people have been charged with federal crimes since the Trump era, including approximately 35 people charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer and related crimes.
“We fixed a mistake,” Vance said, “and I stand by it.”