On Jan. 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a former Republican district leader in Queens, jumped through a broken window at the U.S. Capitol with a megaphone. He pushed his way past a line of Capitol Police officers and opened the exterior doors of the Rotunda to allow other rioters to enter the building and trash it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he exulted on video, and was seen smoking marijuana and high-fiving other Donald Trump supporters who were fighting the police. “We shut it down! We did it!”

President Trump pardoned Monday nearly all of the 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, hours after outgoing President Joe Biden immunized from prosecution family members and other potential targets of the incoming administration.

Trump’s sweeping clemency delivered on his polarizing campaign pledge to pardon supporters who joined in what federal judges and prosecutors have called an attack on American democracy.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy clashed with NBC News hosts on Monday in a contentious interview where he pushed back against a perceived double standard applied to President Trump by Democrats and the media.

McCarthy joined NBC's inaugural coverage shortly after former President Biden issued a series of preemptive pardons for five members of his family on his way out the door.

President Joe Biden has sparked outrage after commuting the sentence of Leonard Peltier in a last-minute move before leaving office Monday.

Peltier, 80, has spent nearly 50 years in prison after being convicted of the murder of two FBI agents on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. He also escaped from federal prison in 1979 while serving his sentence for the two murders and had five years tacked onto his sentence.

Peltier, a prominent Native American activist before his arrest, has always proclaimed his innocence in the crime.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on Monday he’s unsure whether “the extent of the pardons” granted by former President Biden was “necessary.”

Murphy told reporters that he has “real sympathy for the position that Trump has put Biden and his and his family [in].”

“There are real unique threats that are presented to the Biden family by Trump’s obsession with targeting his political opponents.”

But he also said he thinks “it’s probably time for us to take a look at the way the pardon system is being used.”

President Joe Biden on Monday pardoned his siblings and their spouses, saying his family had been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics.”

“Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end,” he said. He issued a slew of pardons and commutations in the moments before leaving office, including for aides and allies that have been targeted by Donald Trump. None have been charged with any crimes.

Joe Biden in the final minutes of his presidency on Monday issued pardons to five more members of his family—his brother James and wife Sarah, his younger sister Valerie Biden Owens and husband John T. Owens, and his brother Francis Biden—after he says they were "subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats" motivated by a desire to hurt him.

President Joe Biden pardons brother Jim Biden and other family members on Monday.

"My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me -- the worst kind of partisan politics," Biden wrote in a statement. "Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end."

President-elect Donald Trump spent the past two years on the campaign trail making more than a dozen promises about what he would enact on his first day in office.

Trump’s day-one plans are wide-reaching, calling for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, sweeping tariffs that economists have warned could have drastic and harmful effects on the U.S. economy and pardons of defendants charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.