Miranda Devine on Trump’s “Year of Mercy” and the Fight for Justice

Tom Shillue interviews Miranda Devine about Ed Martin, January 6 defendants, presidential pardons, and what Devine describes as the broader political and legal targeting of Trump supporters during the Biden administration.

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Tom Shillue: Tom Shillue in for Guy Benson on The Guy Benson Show. I picked up my copy of the Post today. I didn’t really pick it up–I read the online version–but I like saying that: “You pick it up.”

I was reading Miranda Devine’s great article, and it’s very interesting. The title is, “Trump’s Ultra-MAGA Man Who Oversaw the Presidential Pardoning of Hundreds of Victims Persecuted by the Biden Administration Reflects on His Year of Mercy.”

It is a year of mercy, and this guy is very interesting. Miranda, welcome to the show.

Miranda Devine: Thanks so much, Tom. Thanks for having me.

Tom Shillue: So, Ed Martin–I didn’t know much about this guy. I’m reading your article, and he’s kind of an interesting character. How did he get this job? I’m assuming the president liked him and was like, “You’re the man for the job.”

Miranda Devine: Yes. Ed Martin was a protégé of a woman called Phyllis Schlafly, who was one of the earliest conservative movement leaders. She was one of the earlier people to come out for Donald Trump back in 2015, and Ed Martin was with her.

Trump does not forget the people who are with him from the very beginning.

Ed Martin’s an attorney, and he acted pro bono for some of the January 6 people who he felt had been very badly done by–people who hadn’t done anything violent. They just wandered through an open door or hadn’t even entered the Capitol. So he acted for them, and I think that’s how he came to Donald Trump’s attention.

He was the U.S. attorney for D.C. for a short time, but he couldn’t get Senate confirmation. I think Tom Tillis was one of the senators who was most outspoken, saying, “I cannot abide anyone who was helping January 6 prisoners.”

So he then moved on to be pardon attorney, and he basically recommended hundreds of pardons for Donald Trump to sign last year. He did a lot of good for a lot of people. That’s why he calls it Trump’s “Year of Mercy.”

Tom Shillue: Yeah, and it was actually kind of gutsy to be involved with anyone in January 6 because it wasn’t just defendants. There were lawyers who were prosecuted–persecuted–like John Eastman, right? Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani.

Miranda Devine: Yep, absolutely. You don’t really understand it until you’ve been through it.

Christina Bobb, who was an attorney for Trump and was at Mar-a-Lago on the day they raided it, has written a book about it. It’s a really good insight into the pressure and strain that is placed on people when they’re being targeted by the Department of Justice.

The feds have a very high success rate, something like 90 percent-plus, because they just never seem to lose in court. And it’s so expensive. People have to mortgage their houses.

Michael Caputo was another victim of what he considered Biden lawfare. He ended up with brain cancer, which he thinks was from the strain. So he had medical fees on top of legal fees, lost his home, and was put under enormous strain. Divorces, suicides–you name it. It was part of the tactics of the Biden administration to destroy people through lawfare.

Unless you’ve been through it, you don’t understand. The Trumps went through it. De-banking, for instance–you turn into a non-person.

It’s difficult to put that right because people lost whole years out of their lives, as well as family and friend relationships they’ll never get back. Not to mention homes, wealth, opportunity costs, and reputation. You can’t make money; you can’t get a job. It’s really destructive.

So I don’t think the reckoning has happened. I don’t think Americans have fully realized the injustices that were done.

January 6 is a good example. Although I don’t condone the Capitol riot that went on for a few hours, it was unarmed. Unlike all the Antifa riots we’d seen through the “Summer of Love” in the year leading up to the election in 2020, there were not people murdered and there were not houses burned down.

It was unfortunate, but no police were killed, as Nancy Pelosi lied and told us they were. I’m not downplaying it, but she lied. She told people that these January 6 people defecated all over the hallowed halls of Congress, which was another lie.

So people who were not violent, who were just allowed into the Capitol because the police opened the doors to try to minimize damage, or who just wandered onto Capitol grounds and didn’t realize they were trespassing–some of those people ended up in jail without trial for months, if not years.

And that’s really, as Ed Martin says, unconstitutional.

Tom Shillue: Yeah. In fact, I would downplay it a bit because of what we’ve learned about January 6.

I can remember those days. I remember when people were coming up to that “Stop the Steal” rally. The words were going around in emails, in different conservative groups. I’m on a lot of different mailing lists, and I follow people on social media.

I can’t remember exactly when this thing was going down, but I found the whole thing to be kind of strange. There were conservatives saying, “Don’t go down there. It’s not good. The feds are out there. They’re ready for people.”

They could see the writing on the wall.

I had a lot of conservatives who were essentially MAGA people saying, “I’m going to go to that rally.” They were all kind of frothed up with excitement about it. Whether it was talk radio, online blogs, Substacks, and things like that, people were very excited.

And other people who knew how the federal government works said, “Don’t go down there.”

Similar to what happened in Virginia.

Miranda Devine: Yes.

Tom Shillue: They saw the trap coming because they could see that they were mobilizing. And they knew what the establishment forces were ready to do to the pro-Trump people.

Then add to that what we’ve learned subsequently–that the SPLC was funding groups that had, essentially, people in there who were agitators.

So you take all of that, and then people were serving time who had done no violence at all, who just marched through the Capitol. It’s really quite amazing.

That is why people, I think, want more than pardons. And is Martin on record as saying he wants to do more than the pardons? Because the pardon all it does is get the people off, but their lives have already been damaged.

For instance, this report came out the other day saying the FBI went after conservative Catholics. They showed the dossier that they made on these people. The FBI said those people are no longer with the Bureau.

They’ve been purged. Purged.

I don’t want to purge. I want to put them on trial.

Miranda Devine: Yes, I totally agree. And some of those people at the FBI were, in fact, elevated at the beginning of the Trump administration.

So I hope–as Ed Martin told me–justice is slow, but there are some reckonings. You’re not going to be able to hold all these people accountable because there were so many. But you can hold a few of the most well-known, most powerful, and influential ones.

That would include, I would say, John Brennan, the former CIA director, James Clapper, former NSA director, and various others who are being investigated for wrongdoing in Florida with the U.S. attorney there, Jason Meares.

You have some really good attorneys there who understand–you know, they’re not naive about the deep state and the ravages that it caused to the conservative side.

And you’re absolutely right: January 6 was exaggerated by the Democrats and then weaponized and used against Donald Trump and MAGA, or as Joe Biden used to call them, “semi-fascist” and “ultra-MAGA,” to divide the country.

This was a guy, Joe Biden, who ran his campaign on uniting the country and bringing back the adults and not having chaos.

And, of course, the chaos was caused by the Democrats and their street militia, Antifa, deliberately to make Americans so exhausted with the chaos and mayhem that seemed to accompany Trump that they just voted for Joe Biden to make it all go away.

I worry that memories are very short, and as we’re two months from the midterms, people may make the same mistakes again. They may just decide to vote for Democrats, who are wolves in sheep’s clothing, who come across as being reasonable and sensible and listening to their concerns, when really it was the Democrats who opened the borders and unleashed, you know, up to 20 million illegal aliens on the country, which are still causing so many problems to try to remove, and depressing wages, et cetera.

I mean, you talk about the measles outbreak as one example of the consequences. The measles outbreaks we had in the middle of a pandemic, when Americans were being forced to have a vaccine they didn’t want and that didn’t work.

Joe Biden was allowing in unvaccinated people who weren’t even vaccinated, let alone for COVID. That’s measles, whooping cough, rubella, and all sorts of other diseases. It didn’t even occur to them that they might need to vaccinate them.

We’re reaping the consequences now.

Tom Shillue: So you mentioned the 90 percent figure. The federal government–they always get their man, essentially. They have a very strong record.

Now, the Department of Justice handled the January 6 trials, right? So that’s federal crimes?

All the January 6 things go under federal jurisdiction, is that right?

Miranda Devine: Yep.

Tom Shillue: Okay, so they get them in there, and the juries are all from the D.C. region, right?

Miranda Devine: That’s right.

Tom Shillue: That’s the way it is for everything? Everyone that the Department of Justice prosecutes, they have the trials right there in D.C., is that right?

Miranda Devine: Well, I don’t know all of them, but certainly with January 6, you had people who lived in Arkansas, in the middle of the country, and they were shipped to the D.C. jail–the “D.C. Gulag”–in unbearable conditions.

Their jailers were told that they were white supremacists. So the riot, the protest, had absolutely nothing to do with race, but their jailers, most of whom were Black, believed these people were white supremacists, so they treated them appallingly and, you know, forced some into suicide and the rest of it.

And they were far from family and friends. If you’re a working-class guy from Arkansas who ekes out a living replacing windows and you’re shipped to a D.C. gulag, how is your family meant to come and visit you without breaking the bank?

So they’re lonely. It’s deliberate to sort of undermine their confidence.

Their lawyers–they were not allowed–there were no pro bono lawyers for January 6, unlike the millions of lawyers who steam out to protect FBI guys who’ve done the wrong thing, or anybody on the Democratic side gets pro bono legal help. None of those big firms did it. Only small fry like Ed Martin were helping these people.

And then you have the fact that their lawyers were not really allowed to spend the time with them to allow them to have their constitutional rights to a fair trial.

Then you have the judges in D.C. who threw the book at them and who would lecture them about their wrong thinking because they were still defending Trump.

You could only save yourself and get a lighter sentence if you stood up there and denounced Donald Trump and all his work.

Tom Shillue: Almost all of them plead to something–to whatever. They threaten them with tons of charges, and then they plead to something lesser. That’s usually the way they do it.

But did anyone go to trial and testify? Did any January 6 person take the stand to defend themselves and say, “I didn’t do it. I was not violent. I didn’t break any law,” and plead to the jury, and the jury still convicted them?

Do you know of any case like that?

Miranda Devine: I’m thinking there was one or two guys who were initially charged with spraying bear spray in the direction of the cop, Brian Sicknick, who died the following day of natural causes. He had, I think, an aneurysm or a stroke or something, which is obviously very sad.

But Nancy Pelosi put his body to lie in state in Congress and pretended that he’d been killed by the mob.

And, I mean, to this day, there will be a lot of readers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and CNN viewers, who believe that Officer Brian Sicknick was one of several police officers who were murdered by the violent mob that day.

Now, they weren’t able to actually pin the murder of any police officer on any of the January 6 people, because that was completely untrue.

But they did try and frame up these two guys by saying that they sprayed bear spray in the vicinity of Officer Sicknick.

I think they went to trial. I’m just trying to see now. They certainly went to jail, but I don’t think that they were convicted of that, which was effectively manslaughter.

Tom Shillue: Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing. I don’t know what I would do.

While this was going on, I was thinking, “I hope that these people plead innocent and take the stand and defend themselves.”

So few did. But you can’t blame them because they threatened them with life in prison, and then they say, “Oh, no, okay, I’ll take 20 years.”

So the injustice is just too much to even talk about in a segment. It’s absolutely maddening, and it’s good we’re staying on it.

We gotta go now. We gotta go to a break.

But Miranda Devine, thank you so much for being here.

Miranda Devine: Good on you, Tom. Thanks very much.