Donald Trump’s Day One: Executive Orders and Jan. 6 Pardons
25:42 Share

America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

President Trump starts his second term in office with a flurry of executive orders on energy, foreign policy, the federal workforce, and more, while also signing an unconditional pardon for almost all of the January 6th Capitol rioters, including those convicted of attacking police officers. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues, columnists Kim Strassel and Alicia Finley.

Donald Trump's best and worst instincts both on display on Inauguration Day. At least that's one way to put it. The worst, in my view, being his sweeping clemency for nearly everyone connected with the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. Let's start with Donald Trump here. He is first at the Capital One Arena, speaking to the rally there, and then later in the Oval Office. Tonight, I'm going to be signing

on the J6 hostages, pardons to get them out. And as soon as I leave, I'm going to the Oval Office and we'll be signing pardons for a lot of people, a lot of people. So this is January 6th, and these are the hostages, approximately 1,500 for a pardon.

- Yes. - Full part. - Full part or commutations? - Full part. We have about six commutations in there where we're doing further research. Nice to see you again. So this is a big one. We hope they come out tonight, frankly.

You're expecting it. Were there any cases you did not mean for part of the people to-- We're looking at different things, but the commutations would be the ones that we'll take a look and maybe it'll stay that way or it'll go to

Give them full pardon. President Trump had promised January 6th pardons, but perhaps not in such a sweeping fashion. In December, he was asked about it. He said, "I'm going to do case by case. If they were nonviolent, I think they've been greatly punished." He added that, "We're going to look at each individual case."

perhaps taking his cues from the boss there. This was Vice President-elect J.D. Vance last week on Fox News. I think it's very simple. Look, if you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you've had Merrick Garland's Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn't be pardoned. And there's a little bit of a gray area there, but we're very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law. And there are a lot of

people we think in the wake of January the 6th who were prosecuted unfairly. We need to rectify that. Kim, that distinction is not reflected in this proclamation issued by the White House. It has a list of, I think, 14 people, including leaders of the Oath Keepers group, who are getting commuted sentences.

two times served. And then it says this, it grants a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021, which as I read that, Kim, means everybody, if you were there beating a police officer that day, straight out of jail for you too. Yeah, I think this is really unfortunate. Look,

I can appreciate, I do understand some of the frustration that I think a lot of Republicans, conservative voters have over what they have felt has been a dual standard of justice over the years in that the crackdown on these folks was pretty intense versus people who burnt buildings to the ground in 2000 as we watched reporters say, nothing here but peaceful protests, folks, as the fires blazed in the back

ground, a lot of liberal special interest prosecutors over the years that just, you know, when you're convicted of a terrible offense, they send you back out the door. And I get that. That being said, the Republican Party is supposed to be the law and order party, not supposed to be the party that is in any way in favor of rioters, people smashing windows, people beating on cops, people generally breaking the peace. And this happened there.

And I think absent strong evidence that in some way the people who were being held account here were being held to an entirely different standard of justice, not just a simple, straightforward one, then I think it's very hard to make this argument that this was something that should have happened.

I think Joe Biden stepped on this a little bit with his own pardons of his family. I note that most of the stories today had to deal with both issues of pardons, neither of which are really defensible. And I would imagine Democrats view that as a mistake as he left the door. Maybe it would help to do a bit of a reminder on the overall numbers of cases here. So as of late last year, the Justice Department announced

said there were about 1,600 January 6 cases. About 600 of those were for assaulting or impeding law enforcement. As of that time, about 1,000 cases had been adjudicated and the people involved had been sentenced. About 650 of those, so a little more than half, resulted in incarceration. And to underline that, if you go through and look at recent cases, there was a lot of violence

on January 6th. That is pretty ugly. So here's a case from January 17, prison sentence for Louis Snutes, accused of helping hold down a metropolitan police officer in Washington while he was pulled out of the crowd and tased, physically attacked, robbed of his police badge and radio. Footage shows another rider attempting to seize the officer's service weapon,

while shouting threats. Here's another one. January 17, Illinois man sentenced to prison. He sprayed streams of wasp and hornet killer at multiple police officers on four distinct occasions. Then he threw it at officers. Several MPD officers were forced to immediately remove themselves from the defensive line and seek treatment for their eyes.

Here's a guy, Ohio man swinging an ax handle at MPD officers. Here's another one, December 20, sentenced to prison. A guy who's emptied a can of pepper spray at the police line through objects, including a metal pole at police officers.

Michael Bradley, this is a sentence on December 17, apparently brought his own metal baton to the Capitol and is on video swinging it at officers. Alicia, isn't the Republican Party supposed to be the party of law and order? How are any Republicans going to defend pardons for these people who were either convicted by juries of doing this sort of real serious violence to officers of the law or they pleaded guilty to it?

it. Right. And I think Kim laid that out pretty well, in that Republicans do purport to stand for law and order and especially defend the police officers who have been assaulted by the left. The left is usually the ones who try to justify these attacks on officers or excuse them, rather. And here you have Donald Trump doing that. And not explicitly, but that's what his order, his pardons convey. And it sets a

horrendous precedent. I think Kim earlier alluded that perhaps Biden's sweeping pardons actually encouraged and may have emboldened Trump to issue his sweeping pardon saying, hey, if he's going to do this, I'm going to one-up him. But where does this eventually lead?

If there are perhaps at some point even more heinous crimes committed against the United States in such a form, will the next president part of them if they just happen to be his political supporters? I imagine these sweeping pardons could also encourage Congress or interest in the state legislatures or such to perhaps amend the Constitution to limit

the pardon power. I'm not saying I would oppose, but I am not sure Donald Trump fully considered the ramifications of his actions before he did it. Hang tight. We'll be right back. America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.

Welcome back. The other piece of this that I think bears mentioning is the effort to bend the reality of what happened that day and bend the history in Trump's direction. And just to review again, Trump lost the 2020 election. He was told by his advisors, including people in the Justice Department,

that there was not some evidence of mass fraud that would have affected the outcome of the election. He nonetheless continued to say that the election had been stolen from him. He called this rally in Washington. He spoke at the rally, urged people to march to the Capitol. When the rioting began, there's testimony that he was sitting in the Oval Office, not trying to speed along aid to

help Congress. And Kim, shortly afterward, there was acknowledgement by many Republicans that it was an awful event, a terrible event, violence, people should be prosecuted for it. But then soon after that, Trump began to try to defend this as a day of love, he sometimes says.

And that is the tenor of this proclamation by him as well. He says, this proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated on the American people for the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation. And Kim, I guess my response there is that is an effort to gaslight people about what actually happened on January 6th. And it will be interesting to see which Republican officeholders go along with him on that.

Well, he's never going to get over this. And there were a number of Republicans before he put this out who suggested to him and encouraged him not to do it. I think one of the other pities of this is that on a day when there's plenty to be looking forward to, obviously, I mean, there were dozens upon dozens of executive orders that touch on every aspect of government organization and policy and changes that he wants to make, that this is a look back.

It's something that I think most Americans are, you know, tired of thinking about and dealing with and relitigating over and over. And so, you know, it's pretty well known what happened that day. And he can keep going there, but it probably would help his effort more to be focused on the positive changes he's making going forward. Let's turn to Trump's executive orders. There were many of them on day one, and we probably can't touch on all of them today. But as expected, Alusha,

One, that is an effort to save TikTok from this law that is now in effect saying that TikTok has to be divested from Chinese ownership or else banned from the US app stores, upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court. Let's listen to Trump explaining what he's doing here by executive order. - I could see making a deal where the US gets 50% of TikTok, polices it a little bit or a lot, depends on them.

But remember, they make telephones in China. They make all sorts of things in China. Nobody ever complains about that. I guess I have a warm spot for TikTok that I didn't have originally. But, you know, I went on TikTok and I won young people up by 36 percent, Peter. And Republicans typically don't do too well with young people. But it's a different Republican Party. TikTok is largely about kids, young kids. If China is going to get information about young kids, I don't know.

I think, to be honest, I think we have bigger problems than that. The order signed by President Trump tells the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce this divestment requirement for 75 days. The Department of Justice shall take no action. Alicia, what do you make of this? Is there any legal ambiguity here or doubt about whether President Trump enjoys his authority?

Well, in some ways, actually, this action is more troubling than the January 6th pardons in a way because he essentially is suspending the law. He doesn't like it, so he's going to just wave it away. What he's doing is, as you mentioned, telling his AG, soon to be Pam Bondi, not to enforce the law's penalties on app stores or other tech companies that host TikToks, for instance, Oracle hosted on its servers.

for at least 75 days so that he can consult his advisors on the quote-unquote national security concerns posed by TikTok and pursue some kind of resolution that saves the platform. But Congress spent years studying the national security concerns and already resolved them with the law, which required...

TikTok to divest from its Chinese owner ByteDance gave it 270 days or face a permanent ban. Now, ByteDance and TikTok never made even really any effort to seek a divestment until, well, now there are some inklings and we're hearing kind of leaks that, well, Chinese officials and TikTok may be open to a deal. But that was only really once it became clear that the law was going to be upheld, the Supreme Court

oral arguments didn't go their way. And so now they're like, oh, well, maybe we'll cut a deal. That's not in the president's authority, by the way, under the law. It provides the president the authority to grant a one-time 90-day reprieve from a ban only if TikTok demonstrates a path to executing a qualified divestiture, quote-unquote, evidence of significant progress and, quote-unquote, relevant legal agreements to enable its execution. Now, none of these conditions have been met. And what's more likely

deal that Trump is floating about. And we don't know really if he means the U.S. government having a 50% stake or U.S. investors having a 50% stake. But none of these would qualify under the law as a qualified investiture, in part because ByteDance would still own part of the company.

Now, the law precludes the establishment or maintenance of any operational relationship between TikTok's U.S. operations and any formerly affiliated entities like ByteDance that are controlled by foreign adversary. And this includes its algorithms. That's what's being apparently floated, and it's still one we muster under the law.

So it seems like Trump is just trying to wave away the law and assumes that while nobody will have power or legal standing, that they won't be in legal standing, by which we mean under the Supreme Court's precedence, that they have to demonstrate a tangible and concrete harm that results from his actions. We'll be able to sue. But I think that this misses one crucial aspect. He can't bind any other parties.

So he can't stop an AG, a state AG, and some have floated this in private, from suing the app stores for, one, violating their fiduciary obligations to shareholders by violating the law, or, for instance, putting their citizens' data at risk. And I also just want to go back to something that Trump said, only kids use this. Well, actually, there are 170 million users in the U.S.,

That's roughly half of the US population. And most of them aren't kids. And not only that, TikTok, as the record showed, it sweeps up all kinds of information on the contacts, the social contacts, not just on TikTok, but actually just the stored information on their phones.

of these people who use it. So they could potentially be sweeping up information on federal government employees. And this is exactly why Congress passed the law it did. It considered all these interests. In fact, Trump has actually invoked during his first term pointed to these national security concerns when he ordered a similar divestment. So somehow there's now some kind of amnesia. But I think it just sets a terrible precedent and it's completely lawless and more even so than anything that the

and Biden administrations did in kind of basically non-forcing laws. Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break. America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at lightsonenergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.

Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Welcome back. Kim, what jumps out at you from this list of day one executive orders? I share Alicia's skepticism about this effort to save TikTok from this divestment or ban law passed by Congress. But there are several other places where there is a hope of better government policy, I think, coming out of the Trump administration. Yeah.

Look, there's one big category that really jumps out at me, and that is Trump following up on his promise to reorganize, restructure, shake up the federal government. So unsurprisingly, there is an executive order establishing and implementing the president's new Department of Government Efficiency. It kind of lays out the structure of that, how it will function vis-a-vis the Office of Management and Budget. And

There's a regulatory freeze, which is going to require, first of all, all departments to stop issuing anything, but also to take a look for any rules or regulations that were completed by Biden but not yet published in the Federal Register to see about pulling those back.

to also have a little moratorium on those that were recently published but had not yet been put into effect by departments. I think especially because Congress will probably be looking at some of those to see about doing one of these disapproval resolutions that they have the legislative power to get rid of them. There's a hiring freeze that's put in place. There's an end to remote work.

Some of that will be varied, even though everybody makes everybody cheer. The reality is not everyone knows this. The Biden administration was rushing around trying to sign contracts with unions before it left office to continue to allow them to work from home under contractual rules.

So some of this is not as easy as just saying, hey, y'all have to show up again. Some of them have been written into contractual law that they do not. I think one of the bigger things, there's a couple of orders that are aimed at the civil service. One trying to infuse some more accountability in career senior executive civil servants, which are folks that have a lot of power. And it's not always easy to remove them or

or have them changed out if they're not doing the job that they're meant to be doing. So there's going to be some new standards put into place there. Also, Schedule F, which is a rule that Donald Trump put forward in 2020 that, again, allows political appointees to move people around in positions.

under the argument that this is necessary for the efficient functioning of a government. It was controversial when it came out. The Biden team pulled it back. Trump re-implemented it yesterday. It is already the subject of a lawsuit that was filed today by the National Treasury Employees Union. So there's going to be a lot of fights over this reorganization, but he was certainly showing a lot of interest in proving that he is going to get off running on the ground with this project.

Alicia, how about the piece of this that is aimed at encouraging U.S. energy production? There's one executive order saying that the Energy Department is supposed to restart reviewing applications for liquid natural gas export.

There's another one declaring an energy emergency. How significant do you think this day one Trump executive action is going to be on the energy piece? Well, I think it's really important. Some of this is symbolic. I think on the energy declaring that an emergency, that's mostly symbolic. It does allow the president some more authorities to ease some permitting requirements on certain projects. So you don't have to go through all the hoopla on the Endangered Species Act.

consultations between different agencies. Now, you can debate whether this was really needed to invoke the emergency. I would argue that there probably is an emergency to the extent that there are electric power shortages expected within the next year due to, in part, green energy policies, but also just the increasing demand. And you do need to speed up the construction of power plants and transmission lines to prevent blackouts.

To your point, you mentioned the liquefied natural gas lifting the moratorium. This was a lawless action that the Biden administration took, arbitrarily putting a pause on permits for liquefied natural gas export projects on the pretense that they were going to study their public benefits or whether if they were in the public interest. Now, they put out a study last month that effectively found that these exports were in the public interest, had economic benefits for the U.S. and then strategic ones.

And so I don't think it should come as any surprise that the Trump administration is lifting the moratorium. It's also announced that it's going to pull back the EPA tailpipe emission standards for CO2. That is effectively an electric vehicle mandate.

and which should please the automakers very much. So a lot of these exceptions were expected, but it's basically pulling back from the nonstop threats that the companies have been experiencing under the Biden administration, whether it be a ban on exports from LNG, whether it be difficulties getting approvals for

new leases on oil and gas leases on federal lands. Trump also ordered a halt to offshore wind leases, and I'm not sure I would support that. I think the better way, if you want to really nip the offshore industry in the bud, and I don't believe in targeting the industry, but I do think that the prices...

We shouldn't be subsidizing them. And so I think the Trump should push for Congress to eliminate the subsidies for offshore wind and all the other renewable projects. But otherwise, I think everything he did was very common sense and will be very welcomed by most energy producers, even if the climate lobby will try to pick a fight in the courts. Thank you, Alicia and Kim. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com.

If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch. America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.