Trump pardon promise for Capitol rioters ‘stuff of dictators’ - Nixon aide

Donald Trump's promise to pardon supporters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was "the stuff of dictators", Richard Nixon's White House counsel warned.

Trump made the promise at a rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday.

"If I run and if I win," he said, referring to the 2024 presidential election, "we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly."

More than 700 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, around which seven people died as Trump supporters tried to stop certification of his election defeat, in service of his lie that it was caused by electoral fraud. More than 100 police officers were hurt.

Eleven members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Trump himself was impeached for inciting the riot. Ten House Republicans voted to impeach but Trump was acquitted when only seven Republican senators found him guilty. That left him free to run for office again.

John Dean, 83, was White House counsel from 1970 to 1973 before being disbarred and detained as a result of the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon's resignation in 1974. Dean responded to Trump on Twitter.

"This is beyond being a demagogue to the stuff of dictators," he wrote. "He is defying the rule of law. Failure to confront a tyrant only encourages bad behaviour. If thinking Americans don't understand what Trump is doing and what the criminal justice system must do we are all in big trouble!"