Within hours of being sworn in on January 20, 2025, President Trump pardoned 1,500 people who breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election. Many of them had attacked police officers. About 50 of them were from North Carolina.

The Charlotte Observer asked North Carolina's members of Congress what they thought.

Pat Harrigan — a freshman Republican from Hickory, a West Point graduate, a former Green Beret with two combat deployments to Afghanistan — gave this answer:

"He was transparent about his intentions, and voters knew exactly where he stood when they cast their ballots. That is leadership rooted in honesty and accountability."

Read the standard he just set. A president said in advance that he intended to do something. He did it. Therefore it was honest, and therefore it was accountable.

By that logic, there is no act a president could take that would fail the test, so long as he announced it first.

The same statement, two paragraphs apart

Harrigan did not stop there. In the same response, he turned to Biden's pardons of his own family members and allies:

"Using the pardon power to shield personal connections from scrutiny undermines trust and integrity in leadership. These actions do not serve justice or transparency but instead create more doubt about the motives of those in power. The American people deserve leaders who are honest and upfront, as President Donald Trump has been."

So the pardon power is dangerous when it shields personal connections from scrutiny — and it is honesty and accountability when it wipes away the convictions of 1,500 people who assaulted the seat of American government on the president's behalf.

You can criticize Biden's preemptive pardons. Plenty of people did, including Democrats. But you cannot criticize them for corroding "trust and integrity in leadership" in the same breath that you praise a mass clemency for a mob, and expect the standard to be taken seriously. One of those two things is a principle. The other is an outcome he wanted.

What was actually pardoned

This is the part that a decorated combat veteran might have been expected to weigh.

The people Trump freed were not all trespassers who wandered in behind a crowd. Among them were the men who fought police in the tunnel on the west front. The rioter who drove a stun gun into the neck of Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone until he lost consciousness had been sentenced to 12.5 years. He walked.

That same man smashed out the window of a sitting Republican senator's Capitol office. We wrote about that senator's response — he still won't discuss it.

NPR summed up the scope: on his first day back in the White House, Trump gave commutations and pardons to every defendant charged in the attack. Not the nonviolent ones. Every one.

Harrigan spent his career in an institution built on the idea that you are accountable for what you do, whatever your commander told you. Two Bronze Star Medals, according to his own official biography. Then he described erasing the consequences for people who beat police officers as accountability.

He knew what to say when it was easier

Harrigan is on record saying he would have voted to certify the 2020 election — a position he took while running in the 2024 primary, and one that put him alongside the outgoing Republican he was replacing.

That is the tell. He is not someone who believes the election was stolen. He knows what happened on January 6, and he knows Biden won. He simply reached a point where saying so cost him something, and the words changed.

It is a pattern with him. Running in one district in 2022, he told voters he opposed a federal abortion ban. Running in a more conservative district in 2024, he said he would support one. Same person, different map, different answer.

What it costs

This is not a debate about vocabulary. The police unions representing the officers who defended the Capitol counted more than 140 of them injured that day. When a member of Congress — especially one who wears the credibility of combat service — tells the country that pardoning their attackers is "honesty and accountability," he is telling every officer who held that line that their case was a political inconvenience.

And he is telling the next crowd what the price will be.

Harrigan has been in Congress since January 2025. He is on the ballot again in November.

We deserve better.

Source

Trump pardoned hundreds in Jan. 6 attack. Here's how many NC defendants are affected — Danielle Battaglia, The Charlotte Observer, January 22, 2025.