In his first sit down interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump told NBC News’ Meet the Press that he still plans to pardon those convicted for their role in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, while he said that the members of committee tasked with investigating it “should go to jail.”
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker.
“So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?” Welker asked.
“For what they did,” Trump responded, adding that he thinks “everybody” on the January 6th Committee should go to jail. Cheney served as vice chair of the January 6th Committee, which concluded in 2022 with a criminal referral to the Justice Department over Trump’s role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump said that he would not direct his FBI director or attorney general to do so, but “they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill. I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases.”
In the wide ranging interview, Trump said that he plans to issue pardons to the January 6th rioters on his first day in office, adding that many of those convicted have been in prison “for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Trump also vowed action on the first day in office to end birthright citizenship, and he reiterated plans for mass deportations.
Welker challenged him on his ability to remove the millions of undocumented immigrants, given the tremendous resources needed to carry out such a plan.
“Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.”
Trump did say that he wanted to “work something out” to come up with a plan in how to handle “dreamers,” who were children when they were brought to the United States illegally.
Welker asked Trump about his previous pledge to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden.
“Where did I say that?” Trump said.
Welker noted that he posted on Truth Social on June 12, 2023.
“Are you going to do that? Are you going to go after Joe Biden?” Welker asked him.
Trump told her that he was “really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past. Retribution will be through success.”
Pressed again on whether he would go after Biden, Trump said, “I will say this, no, I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable, but that’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, [FBI director nominee] Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved. … While you ask me that, what they’ve done to me with weaponization is a disgrace.”
Trump defended his plans for mass tariffs, saying that he doesn’t believe economists who predict costs will be passed on to consumers. But he told Welker that he cannot guarantee that Americans won’t end up paying more.
He said, “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation.”
English (US) ·