Police officers attempt to push back a pro-Trump mob trying to storm the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump’s indiscriminate release of some 1,600 January 6 insurrection defendants, including those convicted of violent crimes against police, is meeting with mixed reviews from law enforcement, and with silence from Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, who served as sheriff of Clark County before his election in 2022 as governor.
“I back the blue,” Trump asserted while honoring police in Florida in 2020, and dozens of times since, a pronouncement that stands in stark contrast to the pardons and commutations bestowed on Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, resulting in injuries to some 150 officers.
“To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country, and to those who broke the law, you will pay,” Trump said following the insurrection.
Asked Tuesday about his professed support for police and the obvious contradiction of pardoning those who attacked law enforcement, Trump responded with a non-sequitur:
“Murderers today are not even charged.”
Lombardo’s identity as a “law and order” candidate was integral to his campaign – so much so that he was fined $20,000 for displaying the trappings of being sheriff in his gubernatorial campaign ads, a violation of ethics laws.
Like Lombardo, Republican Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony, who is also a former cop, did not respond to requests for comment on Trump’s wholesale pardons and acts of clemency.
“Assaulting or attacking a police officer – we take great offense to those charges and those actions by people, and they should be held to standards of the law,” Steve Grammas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, which represents more than 3,000 Metropolitan Police officers Lombardo once led, told the Current during a phone interview Wednesday. “I’m not the president of the United States, so Trump’s the one that’s got to make that call.”
Days before Trump’s announcement, his designated vice-president, J.D. Vance, told Fox News that violent offenders should not be let off the hook.
“I think it’s very simple, look if you protested peacefully on January 6th, and you had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance said in an interview. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there.”
Like Vance, Grammas says he would have preferred a more surgical approach in which the president parsed non-violent from violent offenders.
“I would have looked at the most egregious level of what we had, and worked my way down from there,” he said. “Do I think someone that made it into the Capitol and sat at a congressman’s desk is different than someone that put a taser to a police officer’s neck? One thousand percent.”
Asked if he’s surprised Lombardo, his former Metro comrade, hasn’t spoken out on behalf of police, Grammas said he hasn’t given it any thought. “I know he’s very busy leading into the (legislative) session.”
‘Betrayed and outraged’
Capitol police are smarting from Trump’s executive order releasing the Jan. 6 rioters. Some, such as Michael Fanone, are seeking protective orders from the insurrectionists who assaulted him.
“I have been betrayed by my country, and I’ve been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump, whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons, or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming. And here we are,” Fanone told Anderson Cooper on CNN Monday. “Tonight, six individuals who assaulted me, as I did my job on Jan. 6, as did hundreds of other law enforcement officers, will now walk free.”
“It’s a miscarriage of justice, a betrayal, a mockery, and a desecration of the men and women that risked their lives defending our democracy,” Aquilino A. Gonell, a former Capitol police sergeant, told the New York Times.
Friends and relatives who had a hand in turning in some of the defendants are also fearing for their safety.
Among those released from prison by Trump is former Nevadan Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia group composed in significant part of former members of law enforcement and the military.
Rhodes, sentenced to 18 years for his role in the insurrection, was among the Oath Keepers who took part in the 2014 armed rebellion staged by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. Bundy, in 2014, led a standoff against the federal government over the court-ordered seizure of his cattle, which illegally grazed for years on public land while Bundy refused to pay grazing fees to the federal government.
Lombardo, who was sheriff at the time, is credited with bringing the national spectacle to an end without bloodshed, and later testified against six men who pointed their weapons at law enforcement.
Strange bedfellows
Despite reciprocal endorsements in their respective campaigns, Lombardo and Trump’s alliance remains strained, with Lombardo periodically veering from the president’s standard prescription for utter devotion.
In 2022, during a debate with Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, Lombardo, a Republican, declined to refer to Trump as a ‘great’ president.
“I wouldn’t use that adjective. I wouldn’t say great,” Lombardo responded. “I’d say he was a sound president.”
The same day, Lombardo’s campaign capitulated in a news release. “By all measures, Donald J. Trump was a great president and his accomplishments are some of the most impactful in American history.”
More recently, Lombardo has wavered on Trump’s aspiration to deport millions of immigrants whose only crime is to be in the country illegally.
Last summer, Lombardo, via a spokesperson, said he did not support Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that echoes Trump’s calls for mass deportation. However, in November, he would not say whether he’d mobilize the National Guard to support the effort.
In early December, Lombardo said it was “too soon to opine” on using the Guard, but days later pledged full support to Trump’s effort.
Then last week, Lombardo said mass deportations are “not what I believe is an appropriate policy” and suggested action in that direction will take “an exorbitant amount of time.”