Too many of the Jan. 6 rioters who received pardons from Donald Trump have had subsequent
run-ins with the law since receiving presidential clemency, but Taylor Taranto is an especially unsettling example of the phenomenon.
Two years after joining the insurrectionist mob in January 2021, Taranto was arrested again after he showed up with firearms near Barack Obama’s home. As
NBC News reported, investigators said they found two guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in Taranto’s van, along with a machete, when he was arrested. Prosecutors alleged that Taranto repeatedly said he was trying to get a “shot” and that he wanted to get a “good angle on a shot.”
Trump’s pardon of Taranto’s Jan. 6 crimes had nothing to do with these unrelated charges, and in May, Taranto was convicted of illegal possession of guns and ammunition.
In theory, the focus was then supposed to shift to sentencing. In practice, the focus has instead shifted to the prosecutors in the case
The federal prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, asked a federal judge to sentence Taranto to 27 months in prison. That, in and of itself, is unremarkable.
What proved far more significant was how the prosecutors asked for the sentence. In their legal filing, they said Taranto had been among the “mob of rioters” on Jan. 6. They also briefly noted that, after the assault on the Capitol, Taranto “returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.”
As MSNBC reported, after using phrasing about Jan. 6 that the president and his operation don’t approve of, the Trump Justice Department not only put Valdivia and White on leave, but it also locked the line prosecutors out of devices and escorted them out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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