A woman who once called herself the “MAGA Granny” will decline the pardon that President Donald Trump offered her and other Jan. 6 convicts during the first hours of his second term, the Washington Post reports. Pamela Hemphill, 71, has spent the past few years criticizing Donald Trump after she was sentenced to 60 days in prison for being part of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “I don’t want to be a part of them trying to rewrite history. It was an insurrection that day,” Hemphill said Tuesday, the day after Trump issued the pardons. She said she will remain on federal probation for nine more months. She pleaded guilty, according to court documents, to violent entry or disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. She said she served 60 days at a federal prison in California in 2022.
It is exceedingly rare for someone to reject a pardon, said Erica Zunkel, director of the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “The reasons underlying what she did are truly of a different time and of a different political atmosphere, and really stands in stark contrast to how other people who got commutations and pardons for Jan. 6 stuff have very much leaned into ‘I did nothing wrong,’” Zunkel said. A week and a half after the riot, an FBI agent wrote in a court filing, a tipster sent a screenshot of a late December 2020 post from Hemphill that read: “It’s not going to be a FUN Trump Rally that is planned for January 6th, its a WAR!” Another post showed the self-proclaimed “MAGA Granny” holding a large firearm, with a caption saying she was on her way to Washington for Jan. 6, when Trump scheduled a rally that coincided with Congress’s certification of the electoral college vote count confirming his election loss, the FBI agent wrote.
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