The worst Jan. 6 offender hasn't spent a second in prison

Then-President Trump speaks to supporters outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.

May 12, 2024 3 AM PT

To the editor: In her May 9 column about the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and whom former President Trump is promising to pardon should he win a second term, Jackie Calmes tells the story of Ryan T. Nichols, who was sentenced recently to a five-year prison term and ordered to pay $200,000 for being “in ‘a class of his own’ among the rioters.”

Calmes believes that description more fittingly belongs to two other offenders, who are currently serving 18- and 22-year terms. She sees them as being “the worst of the anti-democracy offenders.”

I beg to differ. The worst Jan. 6 offender, without whom the insurrection would not have happened, is the man who has yet to spend so much as one second in prison: Donald Trump.

Joan Walston, Santa Monica

To the editor: Oh, the irony.

After the Heritage Foundation publishes Project 2025 as the blueprint in the event Trump regains the presidency, followed by his stated authoritarian positions in the Time magazine interview, the former president claims President Biden is “running a Gestapo administration.”

If there was a Guinness World Record for how much projection can be attributed to a single individual, it wouldn’t be close.

Ted Rosenblatt, Pacific Palisades