The pardoned January 6th defendants
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The pardoned January 6th defendants are the subject of a short exchange on 22 October 2025, prompted by a viewer asking whether John Kiriakou had seen that a pardoned defendant had been arrested for threatening to kill the House minority leader.

The pattern he notices

Kiriakou had seen it, and generalised. "You know, so many of these people that Trump pardoned have gotten in trouble since their pardons and their release from prison."

He supplied a case of his own that had ended worse. "One was shot and killed in a shootout with a cop in Indiana."

The objection he accepts

The host immediately offered the statistical deflation: that there were thousands of people pardoned, and if you randomly select three thousand people, some number of them will get into trouble with the law regardless of what they did on any particular day.

Kiriakou accepted it without defending his own framing. "Yes, I think that's it. I think that's it."

Why the exchange is worth recording

The passage is a small instance of something Kiriakou does more often than his reputation as a polemicist suggests: he raises a pattern, is offered a boring explanation, and takes it. He does not argue that the pardons produced the offending, does not claim the defendants were uniquely dangerous, and does not use the deaths and arrests to relitigate the pardons themselves.

His view of clemency is complicated by his own position, he sought a presidential pardon for years, unsuccessfully, and the viewers of the programme frequently write in praying for one. He has been sharply critical of who receives pardons and on what basis. But when handed an opening to argue that these particular recipients were unworthy, he declines it and credits the arithmetic instead.

The conversation then moved, by way of the same host's association, to the Bernhard Goetz case and the aftermath of the 1984 subway shooting in New York, a digression Kiriakou takes no part in beyond expressions of disgust at what one of the men involved was later convicted of.

See also

- Donald Trump
- Mar-a-Lago pardon pitch
- John Kiriakou
