GOP strategist Karl Rove slams January 6 rioters and says Trump made a “critical” mistake by promising to pardon them.

Republican strategist Karl Rove slammed January 6 rioters and said Donald Trump made a “critical” mistake by promising to pardon them.

MSNBC’s “The Beat With Ari Melber,” on Wednesday aired footage of Rove from back in February at Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, where he strongly condemned the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution. And what those people did, when they violently attacked the Capitol in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history,” Rove told Melber at the February panel.

“Every one of those sons of bitches who did that, we ought to find them, try them, and send them to jail. And one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, I'm going to pardon those people because they're hostages,” Rove said. “No, they're not. They're thugs.”

Rove said the Biden administration should emphasize the events of January 6 in his campaign messaging, and criticized Trump for not supporting “law and order.”

“If they were smart, they'd take January 6 and go hard at it, and they would say, he wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol,” Rove said. “I'm a Republican. I don't want to have a Democrat president. I want to have a Republican president. But we're facing as a country, a decision — and you know what, everybody gets to make it — as to what kind of leadership we're going to have. And, to me, it is a mistake on the part of the Trump campaign to allow the president's impulses to identify himself with the people who assaulted the Capitol rather than people who stand for law and order.”