A 529 college savings plan can be a powerful tool when saving for future education expenses because investments in the plan can increase tax-free, but many savers don’t take full advantage of all the benefits that 529 plans have to offer.
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One common deterrent to investing through a 529 plan is the concern that assets in a 529 account will reduce financial aid eligibility. While it’s true that 529 assets have an impact on financial aid, the effect is likely smaller than you think.
Do 529 plans affect financial aid?
The short answer is yes. An increase in the means to fund higher education naturally means the beneficiary is eligible for less need-based aid.
However, assets in a 529 plan have a lesser impact on financial aid packages than income does. A student’s federal financial aid is based on an estimate of what a family can contribute annually from their income and assets. Income is the largest portion of this measurement of a student’s ability to pay for college, which is represented by the Student Aid Index, or SAI, on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The SAI replaced the expected family contribution, which was previously used on the application.
Typically, the SAI calculation expects parents to use 25% to 35% of their adjusted available income to cover college costs, though that number can go as high as 47%. Parental contribution from assets, including 529 account balances, is assessed at a much lower maximum of 5.64%. So, if a family has a 529 account with $10,000, this raises the expected family contribution by at most $564 and reduces the federal aid package by the same amount.
A 529 plan’s impact depends on who owns the account
The impact of 529 assets on a beneficiary’s financial aid package depends on who owns the account. As outlined above, if the plan is owned by the beneficiary’s parent, then 5.64% of the account’s value is considered in the SAI, which determines a student’s financial aid eligibility on the FAFSA.
On the other hand, if the plan is owned by the student, then up to 20% of the account value may be considered in calculating financial aid eligibility.
With changes to the federal student aid calculation as part of the FAFSA Simplification Act that took effect for the 2024-25 academic year, 529 accounts owned by grandparents or other relatives are not considered student assets and won’t impact the beneficiary’s financial aid.
Siblings’ 529 assets don’t count for federal financial aid
After the FAFSA Simplification Act, assets in 529 accounts are counted as parental assets only for the beneficiary of the account. That means, if you have 529 accounts set up for your other children, the assets in those accounts are no longer counted toward the expected family contribution. As mentioned above, accounts owned by grandparents or other relatives will also be excluded from determining federal financial aid eligibility.
Financial aid eligibility differs between FAFSA and CSS profile
There are also schools that use the College Scholarship Service, or CSS, Profile (primarily private schools) to calculate their financial aid packages. The CSS Profile’s formula to calculate aid differs from FAFSA’s. For instance, the CSS Profile asks for all 529 accounts owned by the beneficiary’s parents, whereas the FAFSA only counts 529 accounts for which the student is the beneficiary. Moreover, the CSS Profile is customized by the institution, so each school can have its own formula to calculate its aid packages. While each school that uses CSS Profile information applies its own standards, this calculator estimates what your family might be expected to pay.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — After retreating from their workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs, tech companies could now face a second reckoning over their DEI work in AI products.
In the White House and the Republican-led Congress, “woke AI” has replaced harmful algorithmic discrimination as a problem that needs fixing. Past efforts to “advance equity” in AI development and curb the production of “harmful and biased outputs” are a target of investigation, according to subpoenas sent to Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and 10 other tech companies last month by the House Judiciary Committee.
And the standard-setting branch of the U.S. Commerce Department has deleted mentions of AI fairness, safety and “responsible AI” in its appeal for collaboration with outside researchers. It is instead instructing scientists to focus on “reducing ideological bias” in a way that will “enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness,” according to a copy of the document obtained by The Associated Press.
In some ways, tech workers are used to a whiplash of Washington-driven priorities affecting their work.
But the latest shift has raised concerns among experts in the field, including Harvard University sociologist Ellis Monk, who several years ago was approached by Google to help make its AI products more inclusive.
Back then, the tech industry already knew it had a problem with the branch of AI that trains machines to “see” and understand images. Computer vision held great commercial promise but echoed the historical biases found in earlier camera technologies that portrayed Black and brown people in an unflattering light.
“Black people or darker skinned people would come in the picture and we’d look ridiculous sometimes,” said Monk, a scholar of colorism, a form of discrimination based on people’s skin tones and other features.
Google adopted a color scale invented by Monk that improved how its AI image tools portray the diversity of human skin tones, replacing a decades-old standard originally designed for doctors treating white dermatology patients.
“Consumers definitely had a huge positive response to the changes,” he said.
Now Monk wonders whether such efforts will continue in the future. While he doesn’t believe that his Monk Skin Tone Scale is threatened because it’s already baked into dozens of products at Google and elsewhere — including camera phones, video games, AI image generators — he and other researchers worry that the new mood is chilling future initiatives and funding to make technology work better for everyone.
“Google wants their products to work for everybody, in India, China, Africa, et cetera. That part is kind of DEI-immune,” Monk said. “But could future funding for those kinds of projects be lowered? Absolutely, when the political mood shifts and when there’s a lot of pressure to get to market very quickly.”
Trump has cut hundreds of science, technology and health funding grants touching on DEI themes, but its influence on commercial development of chatbots and other AI products is more indirect. In investigating AI companies, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the judiciary committee, said he wants to find out whether former President Joe Biden’s administration “coerced or colluded with” them to censor lawful speech.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a Texas event this month that Biden’s AI policies were “promoting social divisions and redistribution in the name of equity.”
The Trump administration declined to make Kratsios available for an interview but quoted several examples of what he meant. One was a line from a Biden-era AI research strategy that said: “Without proper controls, AI systems can amplify, perpetuate, or exacerbate inequitable or undesirable outcomes for individuals and communities.”
Even before Biden took office, a growing body of research and personal anecdotes was attracting attention to the harms of AI bias.
One study showed self-driving car technology has a hard time detecting darker-skinned pedestrians, putting them in greater danger of getting run over. Another study asking popular AI text-to-image generators to make a picture of a surgeon found they produced a white man about 98% percent of the time, far higher than the real proportions even in a heavily male-dominated field.
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Face-matching software for unlocking phones misidentified Asian faces. Police in U.S. cities wrongfully arrested Black men based on false face recognition matches. And a decade ago, Google’s own photos app sorted a picture of two Black people into a category labeled as “gorillas.”
Even government scientists in the first Trump administration concluded in 2019 that facial recognition technology was performing unevenly based on race, gender or age.
Biden’s election propelled some tech companies to accelerate their focus on AI fairness. The 2022 arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT added new priorities, sparking a commercial boom in new AI applications for composing documents and generating images, pressuring companies like Google to ease its caution and catch up.
Then came Google’s Gemini AI chatbot — and a flawed product rollout last year that would make it the symbol of “woke AI” that conservatives hoped to unravel. Left to their own devices, AI tools that generate images from a written prompt are prone to perpetuating the stereotypes accumulated from all the visual data they were trained on.
Google’s was no different, and when asked to depict people in various professions, it was more likely to favor lighter-skinned faces and men, and, when women were chosen, younger women, according to the company’s own public research.
Google tried to place technical guardrails to reduce those disparities before rolling out Gemini’s AI image generator just over a year ago. It ended up overcompensating for the bias, placing people of color and women in inaccurate historical settings, such as answering a request for American founding fathers with images of men in 18th century attire who appeared to be Black, Asian and Native American. Google quickly apologized and temporarily pulled the plug on the feature, but the outrage became a rallying cry taken up by the political right.
With Google CEO Sundar Pichai sitting nearby, Vice President JD Vance used an AI summit in Paris in February to decry the advancement of “downright ahistorical social agendas through AI,” naming the moment when Google’s AI image generator was “trying to tell us that George Washington was Black, or that America’s doughboys in World War I were, in fact, women.”
“We have to remember the lessons from that ridiculous moment,” Vance declared at the gathering. “And what we take from it is that the Trump administration will ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias and never restrict our citizens’ right to free speech.”
A former Biden science adviser who attended that speech, Alondra Nelson, said the Trump administration’s new focus on AI’s “ideological bias” is in some ways a recognition of years of work to address algorithmic bias that can affect housing, mortgages, health care and other aspects of people’s lives.
“Fundamentally, to say that AI systems are ideologically biased is to say that you identify, recognize and are concerned about the problem of algorithmic bias, which is the problem that many of us have been worried about for a long time,” said Nelson, the former acting director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy who co-authored a set of principles to protect civil rights and civil liberties in AI applications.
But Nelson doesn’t see much room for collaboration amid the denigration of equitable AI initiatives.
“I think in this political space, unfortunately, that is quite unlikely,” she said. “Problems that have been differently named — algorithmic discrimination or algorithmic bias on the one hand, and ideological bias on the other —- will be regrettably seen us as two different problems.”
DA NANG, Vietnam (AP) — The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, when the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces. But millions of people still face daily battles with its chemical legacy.
Nguyen Thanh Hai, 34, is one of millions with disabilities linked to Agent Orange. Born with severe developmental challenges, it’s a struggle for him to complete tasks others take for granted: buttoning the blue shirt he wears to a special school in Da Nang, practicing the alphabet, drawing shapes or forming simple sentences.
Hai grew up in Da Nang, the site of a U.S. air base where departing troops left behind huge amounts of Agent Orange that have lingered for decades, leeching into food and water supplies in areas like Hai’s village and affecting generations of residents.
Across Vietnam, U.S. forces sprayed sprayed 72 million liters (19 million gallons) of defoliants during the war to strip the enemy’s cover. More than half was Agent Orange, a blend of herbicides.
Agent Orange was laced with dioxin, a type of chemical linked to cancer, birth defects and lasting environmental damage. Today, 3 million people, including many children, still suffer serious health issues associated with exposure to it.
Vietnam has spent decades cleaning up the toxic legacy of the war, in part funded by belated U.S. assistance, but the work is far from complete. Now, millions in Vietnam are worried that the U.S. may abandon Agent Orange cleanup as President Donald Trump slashes foreign aid.
FILE- Armored personnel carriers with tank support move through dense underbrush with a payload of South Vietnamese infantrymen and U.S. cavalrymen during patrol through jungle 40 miles northeast of Saigon on June 5, 1969. (AP Photo/Rick Merron, File)
FILE- Infantryman points out a suspicious shadow in a tree to his machine gunner as they move on patrol near the Cambodian Border west of Pleiku in Vietnam on Nov. 26, 1966. Troops of the 25th Infantry Division (1st Battn. 14th Inf.) inches through the thick jungle from their base camp after being held up three days by snipers. AP Photo/Horst Faas, File)
FILE- A yellow flag marks a field contaminated with dioxin near Danang airport, during a ceremony marking the start of a project to clean up dioxin left over from the Vietnam War, at a former U.S. military base in Danang, Vietnam Thursday Aug. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Maika Elan, File)
FILE- Maps of the area contaminated with dioxin around Danang airport are displayed during a ceremony marking the start of a project to clean up dioxin left over from the Vietnam War, at a former U.S. military base in Danang, Vietnam Thursday Aug. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Maika Elan, File)
FILE -A woman walks next to a highly contaminated pond around the grounds of the Danang airbase in Danang, Vietnam, May 21, 2007. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
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FILE- Armored personnel carriers with tank support move through dense underbrush with a payload of South Vietnamese infantrymen and U.S. cavalrymen during patrol through jungle 40 miles northeast of Saigon on June 5, 1969. (AP Photo/Rick Merron, File)
When the war ended, the U.S. turned its back on Vietnam, eager to turn the page on a painful chapter in its history.
But Vietnam was left with dozens of dioxin hotspots spread across 58 of its 63 provinces.
Vietnam says the health impacts last generations, threatening the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of people exposed to the chemicals with health complications ranging from cancer to birth defects that affects the spine and nervous system.
But the science about the human health impact — both to those exposed to Agent Orange and the generations that follow — remains unsettled. This is partly because when the two countries finally started working together in 2006, they focused on finding dioxin in the environment and clearing it instead of studying the still-contentious topic of its impact on human health, said Charles Bailey, co-author of the book “From Enemies to Partners: Vietnam, the U.S. and Agent Orange.”
“The science of causality is still incomplete,” said Bailey.
Vietnam identifies Agent Orange victims by checking family history, where they lived, and a list of health problems linked to the poison. And Hai’s disabilities were very likely linked to the spraying of the defoliant, added Bailey.
The 34-year-old dreams of becoming a soldier like his grandfather, was unable to leave home for years, waiting alone while his family went out to work. It was only five years ago that he began attending a special school. “I am happy here because I have many friends,” he said. Other students at the school hope to become tailors or makers of incense sticks.
The contamination also denuded Vietnam’s natural defenses. Nearly half of its mangrove trees, which shield shores from strong storms, were destroyed. Much of its tropical forest was irrevocably damaged, while the herbicide also leached the soil of nutrients in some of Vietnam’s most climate-vulnerable areas.
A student sweeps the area in front of a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
FILE- A Vietnamese soldier stands guard in front of military aircraft near a dioxin contaminated area while U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visits Bien Hoa air base in Bien Hoa, outside Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Oct. 17, 2018. (Kham/Pool Photo via AP, File)
FILE- A Vietnamese worker sprays water over stones to be used in the construction of a silo for storing soil contaminated with Agent Orange dioxide at the site of a former American airbase in Danang, Vietnam on Wednesday, April 24, 2013. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh, File)
FILE- Attendants sit next to a field contaminated with dioxin before a ceremony marking the start of a project to clean up dioxin left over from the Vietnam War, at a former U.S. military base in Danang, Vietnam Thursday Aug. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Maika Elan, File)
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A student sweeps the area in front of a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
In the decades after the war ended, the recovering country fenced off heavily contaminated sites like Da Nang airport and began providing support to impacted families.
But the U.S. largely ignored growing evidence of health impacts — including on its own veterans — until the mid-2000s, when it and began funding cleanup in Vietnam. In 1991, the U.S. recognized that certain diseases could be related to exposure to Agent Orange and made veterans who had them eligible for benefits.
Since 1991, it has spent over $155 million to aid people with disabilities in areas affected by Agent Orange or littered by unexploded bombs, according to the U.S. State Department. The two countries have also cooperated to recover war dead, with the U.S. aiding Vietnam’s search for its own missing.
Cleaning up Agent Orange is expensive and often dangerous. Heavily polluted soil needs to be unearthed and heated in large ovens to very high temperatures, while less contaminated soil can be buried in secure landfills.
Despite years of work, large sites still need to cleared. In Da Nang, where an air base was contaminated during storage and transportation of Agent Orange, the U.S. completed a $110 million cleanup in 2018 but an area the size of 10 soccer fields still remains heavily contaminated.
Cooperation on war legacy issues also laid a foundation for growing U.S.-Vietnam ties, culminating in 2023 when Vietnam elevated the U.S. to its highest diplomatic status of comprehensive strategic partner.
“The United States considers Vietnam a key partner in advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific,” former U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in Vietnam in 2023.
Truong Minh Phu, 20, centre, sits in a classroom with other students at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
A boy smiles looking out of the window at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
Nguyen Thanh Hai, 34, reacts after getting compliments on his work during class at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
Nguyen Van Quoc Hung, 13, plays with building blocks at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
Students exercise and play with wooden blocks in physiotherapy class at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
A student plays with a wooden shape sorter at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
Students put on uniforms at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
A girl who has health problems because of exposure to Agent Orange practices sewing at a special school In Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
Students attend a physiotherapy class at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
Truong Minh Phu, 20, practices with an arm pedal exerciser in physiotherapy class at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
A student fills a colouring book at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
Nguyen Thanh Hai, 34, centre, raises his hand to answer question during class at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
Nguyen Khanh Vy, 19, smiles while writing in her book at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
Nguyen Ba Quy Phuoc, 14, attends a physiotherapy class at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
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Truong Minh Phu, 20, centre, sits in a classroom with other students at a school for victims of Agent Orange in Da Nang, Vietnam, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Aniruddha Ghosal)
But Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID stalled key projects in Vietnam, and while many have resumed, doubts remain about U.S. reliability.
Vietnam now has to negotiate a new reality where the U.S. president says the country can no longer afford to help other countries.
The country can’t handle the toxic chemicals that still persist without help, said Nguyen Van An, the chairman of Association for Victims of Agent Orange in Danang. “We always believe that the U.S. government and the manufacturers of this toxic chemical must have the responsibility to support the victims,” he said.
He said he hoped that any stoppages to ongoing projects due to shifting politics in Washington would be temporary.
Insufficient data means that experts can’t definitely say when the risk to human health will end. But the more urgent problem is if that cleanup efforts are interrupted, the now-exposed contaminated soil could get into waterways and harm more people.
A 10-year project to clear the some 500,000 cubic meters (650,000 cubic yards) of dioxin-contaminated soil — enough to fill 40,000 trucks — at Bien Hoa airbase was launched in 2020. It stopped for a week in March and then restarted.
But Bailey, who worked on issues related to the Agent Orange in Vietnam for years, said future USAID funding for the cleanup and a $30 million program for people with disabilities was uncertain.
With federal cuts to USAID, most staffers in Vietnam are expected to be gone by later this year, leaving nobody to administer funding for remediation programs, even if it is not cut itself.
“This basically leaves a very large mountain of contaminated soil. Only 30% of which has been dealt with and that is less contaminated,” said Bailey.
He added that less than half of the soil at Bien Hoa had been treated and much of the remaining soil was heavily contaminated and needed to be treated in an as-yet unbuilt incinerator.
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Tim Rieser, who was retired Sen. Patrick Leahy’s foreign policy aide when the Vermont Democrat secured the original funding for Vietnam War remediation projects and is now a senior advisor to Sen. Peter Welch, said Congress still supports the programs but it would be hard for them to continue without staff.
“For more than 30 years, the U.S. and Vietnam have worked together to rebuild relations by dealing with the worst legacies of the war, like Agent Orange,” he said. “Now the Trump administration is mindlessly shutting everything down, with no concern for the impact of their actions on relations with an important partner in the Indo-Pacific.”
The U.S. State Department said that war legacy projects like clearing dioxin at Bien Hoa or demining programs in central Vietnam remain “active and running,” adding that it would conduct assessments for the resources needed for their continuation.
Chuck Searcy, an American Vietnam War veteran who has worked on humanitarian programs in the country since 1995, said he worries that trust built over years could erode very rapidly. He pointed out that those who benefit from U.S. funded projects to address war legacies are “innocent victims.”
“They’ve been victimized twice, once by the war and the consequences that they’ve suffered. And now by having the rug pulled out from under them,” he said.
Associated Press journalist David Rising in Bangkok contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Michael Romano spent more than 17 years at the Justice Department, eventually becoming a supervisor on the team that would prosecute more than 1,500 people charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The moment he watched the largest investigation in department history get wiped away with the stroke of a pen — on President Donald Trump’s first day back in the White House — Romano knew he had to leave.
“I knew on January 20th, when the pardons were announced, that I needed to find my way out,” Romano said in an interview with The Associated Press weeks after his resignation from the Justice Department. “It would be untenable for me to stay, given the pardons and given the false narratives that were being spread about January 6.”
Now, Romano says he fears Trump’s decision to pardon even the most violent rioters — whom his own vice president once said “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned — could embolden right-wing extremists and encourage future political violence.
“The way that the pardons have been received by the January 6th defendants and by other right-wing extremists, as I understand it, is to recognize that if you support the president and if you commit violence in support of the president, that he might insulate you from the consequences, that he might protect you from the criminal justice system,” Romano said. “And so that might encourage people to commit these sort of acts.”
Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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Michael Romano, former Jan. 6 prosecutor, speaks during an interview, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Romano is among dozens of Justice Department lawyers who have resigned, been pushed out or fired in the weeks since Trump’s new leadership has taken over and begun making sweeping changes to align the law enforcement agency with the priorities of the Republican president whom the department once prosecuted.
Trump’s return to the White House has ushered in a dizzying change for many in the Justice Department, but perhaps few have felt it more than the lawyers who spent years working on the largest-scale serious attack on the Capitol since the war of 1812.
As a deputy chief of the now-disbanded Capitol Siege Section that prosecuted the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, Romano had a close-up view of the evidence, including harrowing videos and court testimony detailing the violence that unfolded when the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol as lawmakers met to certify former President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
Romano joined the Justice Department in 2007 straight out of law school, and was working in the section in Washington that handles public corruption cases on Jan. 6, 2021. He recalled watching the riot unfold on television, and quickly deciding he wanted to help with the prosecution of what he described as a “crime of historic proportions.”
While vying to return to the White House, Trump repeatedly downplayed the violence that left more than 100 police officers injured, and lauded the rioters as patriots and hostages whom he contended were unfairly persecuted by the Justice Department for their political beliefs. Only two Capitol riot defendants were acquitted of all charges, which Trump supporters cited as evidence that Washington juries can’t be fair and impartial. Some Jan. 6 defendants are now considering running for office.
The scope of Trump’s clemency hours after the inauguration came as a surprise to many, considering the president had suggested in the weeks prior that instead of blanket pardons, he would look at the Jan. 6 defendants on a case-by-case basis. Trump’s proclamation described the prosecution as “a grave national injustice” and declared that the pardons would begin “a process of national reconciliation.”
Trump’s pardons led to the release from prison of the leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power as well as rioters convicted of brutal attacks on police — many of whose crimes were captured on camera and broadcast on live TV. Trump has defended his pardons, saying the sentences handed down for actions that day were “ridiculous and excessive” and that “these are people who actually love our country.”
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Romano said the notion that the Jan. 6 defendants were not treated fairly by in the justice system or not given the due process they were entitled is “simply not true.” In many cases, he said prosecutors had overwhelming evidence because the defendants “filmed themselves proudly committing crimes.”
“They had the full protection of rights guaranteed to them by the American justice system and the Constitution,” Romano said. “It was my experience when dealing with these cases and seeing the way that the rioters and some of their attorneys behaved in court, that their take was that they should be treated like heroes and not prosecuted at all.”
Despite the pardons, Romano said he still believes that the Capitol Siege Section’s work was important because it left behind a “historical record” of what happened on Jan. 6 that cannot be changed.
“In light of the efforts to whitewash the history of that day, in light of the efforts for people to lie about that day for their own benefit, which is what’s happening, it’s important that people really understand the truth about what happened on January 6th,” he said.