Since 2001 ESPN has aired a half hour television program entitled “Pardon The Interruption.” The cohosts are Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. The two of them are friendly and play back-and-forth on all things sports. Kornheiser always ends the program waving a small Canadian flag and saying: “We are out of time. We will try to do better next time.” At that point, Wilbon says: “Same time tomorrow, knuckleheads.” The show is watched by 1 million people each evening.

But there are pardons, and then there are pardons. When you bump into somebody in a crowded store, you may say “sorry, pardon me.” But besides these well-mannered “pardon me’s,” there are real “pardons” which have nothing to do with good manners.

Which brings us to Juan Orlando Hernandez. I did not know who this person was until he was recently pardoned by President Trump. It turns out that he was the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of overseeing a massive cocaine smuggling operation into the United States while he was president of Honduras. At the time of his pardon, he was serving a 45-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Hazleton, West Virginia.

Apparently, this pardon was given in order to affect the election in Honduras so that Hernandez’s right-wing party would be the winner.

Neither did I know Changping Zhao, a crypto billionaire, until he was also pardoned by President Trump. He had pled guilty to money laundering and served four months in prison and paid a fine of $4 billion and had to resign from his CEO position at Binance which is the leading exchange for crypto trading in the world. One of the Trump family crypto ventures has just helped organize a $2 billion investment in Binance.

I don’t think it is too cynical to imagine that this pardon had to do with money since the Trump family is “all in” with the crypto world.

However, I did know or, more appropriately, was well aware of the 2,000 individuals who rampaged the United States Capitol January 6, 2021 and were pardoned by President Trump on his first day in office. Of course, Trump had encouraged those individuals to march to the Capitol and actually said that he would join them which he didn’t. This was as close to a coup d’etat as has ever been seen in this country.

The January 6 desecration of the US Capitol resulted in millions of dollars of damage and numerous injuries to police officers. According to Trump, criminal charges against these rioters and vandals was improper as they were “political hostages” even though thousands of these “political hostages” had pled guilty and were serving jail time and many more were about to be tried. 

Once the Capitol was breached, the chants began to “Hang Pence.” Vice President Pence had refused Trump’s demand that he recognize the votes of “fake electors” in certain swing states which would’ve changed the outcome. Rather, he was determined to perform his constitutional duty and count the proper electoral votes which clearly demonstrated that Trump had lost the election. According to the sworn testimony of Mark Meadows, his Chief of Staff, Trump said that afternoon that maybe Pence should be hanged, an account that was corroborated by another witness.

Pence and his family were taken to a secure room in the Capitol but his security detail wanted him to leave the complex. He refused apparently because he was determined to continue the vote. After the Capitol was cleared of rioters, the vote did recommence and was finalized at 3 AM the next morning.

In April 2025, Pence was awarded the “John F. Kennedy Profile In Courage” award by the JFK Library in Boston for his actions on January 6, 2021 despite the damage he may have caused to his political career and in spite of the threat to his personal safety and that of his family. The late president’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, said: “At the time I thought Vice President Pence was just doing his job. Only later, did I realize that his act of courage saved our government…”.

On January 20, Trump did not attend the inauguration of President Biden and continued to maintain that the election had been stolen from him. That day, when he left Washington for Florida, he was a complete political pariah because of January 6. Indeed, it is remarkable that he made a comeback helped, no doubt, by President Biden’s abject failure to secure the southern border, a job that should’ve been pretty easy to accomplish. He thus served up to Trump a winning issue.

The business of presidential pardons has always been grist for the political mill. For example, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich who had fled the United States and was responsible for over $48 million in unpaid taxes and numerous related crimes. The quid pro quo for the pardon was rumored to be that his ex-wife had made substantial contributions to the Clinton presidential library and to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the United States Senate. President Jimmy Carter said the pardon was “disgraceful.”

While the rioters in the Capitol were the enlisted foot soldiers in the coup d’etat, the commanding officers were working in a different sphere. They included the “fake electors” whose job was to rewrite the results in the swing states. And then there were people like Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani who brought multiple lawsuits in any number of states alleging problems with the voting machines and other issues. These lawsuits were, without exception, rejected. They too received pardons which did not save them from civil lawsuits or from criminal actions brought by the states.

The civil lawsuits were substantial. Giuliani was in ordered to pay $148 million to two women who were slandered into saying that they had fixed the vote in Georgia. The case was recently settled for an undisclosed amount so that Guliani’s homes in New York and South Florida along with his Yankee member memorabilia would not be auctioned to satisfy the judgment. It appears that Giuliani was bailed out by a third party. Who knows but maybe the third-party was a Saudi prince who was cozying up to the White House or had been called by the White House.

Giuliani lost his law licenses in New York and in the District of Columbia because of his legal efforts to overturn the election without any colorable proof.

Fox News, the media outlet for the coup d’etat, settled a case from Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million for its role in slandering that company in various of its newscasts.

Sydney Powell avoided the loss of her law license in Texas but pled guilty to 6 violations of the Georgia law relating to her efforts to undo the Georgia election result. She too is on the wrong end of slander suits.

The Commander-In-Chief of the coup d’etat got off scot-free. He was indicted for criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of a proper election. However, the case could not proceed once he was reelected President under long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president may not be the defendant in a criminal case.

Recently, Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the Trump case, outlined the case to a closed meeting of certain members of the House Judiciary Committee. Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland was at that meeting and commented thereafter that the Chair of the Committee (Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio) was very smart in insisting upon a closed meeting because Smith’s testimony would’ve been devastating if it had been heard by the public.

Memory is sometimes unreliable. We might remember an event from years ago but have added details which are not correct. It is important to get the details right. Let’s get the details of January 6 right.

We know Amber as a piece of jewelry but it starts off as sticky tree resin and then hardens into the stone. In the process of hardening it might catch an insect which ends up being fossilized. If the amber were conscious, it might say to the insect: “Gotcha.”

We need the equivalent of Amber for the purpose of preserving our memory of the January 6 riots, the protagonists and the pardons. These events should be recorded in our school history books to remind us that the pardons, in Jimmy Carter’s words, were “unforgivable” and to teach future generations about the first attempted coup d’etat in American History.

The sticky resin of our January 6 amber will catch all the protagonists including the Commander-in-Chief of the coup d’etat and, as it hardens, his face will be seen through the amber glass.

Gotcha.