Within hours of his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump issued roughly 1,500 pardons and commuted the sentences of 14 Jan. 6 criminals — including violent felons who were in prison for assaulting police officers — sparking ample conversation among elected officials, pundits, prosecutors and other law enforcement personnel.
But they’re not the only ones with notable perspectives. As The New York Times reported, some members of the judiciary shared some thoughts of their own.
No one knows more about the hundreds of criminal cases filed against rioters who took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol than the federal judges in Washington who oversaw their trials and guilty pleas, watched thousands of hours of surveillance videos and heard hundreds of witnesses deliver firsthand accounts of the attack. On Wednesday, two days after President Trump granted sweeping reprieves to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack, some of the judges started to push back against his moves, declaring that nothing — not even a presidential decree — could alter the reality of what happened that day.
Of particular interest was U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, who was responding to Trump’s Justice Department moving to dismiss indictments against two admitted Jan. 6 criminals. In fact, the defendants in the case freely acknowledged that they threw smoke bombs at police officers, breached the U.S. Capitol, defaced the building, and even stole equipment from law enforcement personnel during the riot.
The Justice Department invested time and resources into identifying these men, apprehending them, prosecuting them, and ensuring accountability for their egregious crimes. The new American president, however, wants them to simply walk away without any punishment at all.
The jurist conceded that the criminal case obviously can’t proceed in light of Trump’s pardon. The Republican said he was ending “a grave national injustice.”
Howell made clear that she knew better.
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” she explained. “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity. That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law. Yet, this presidential pronouncement of a ‘national injustice’ is the sole justification provided in the government’s motion to dismiss the pending indictment.
“Having presided over scores of criminal cases charging defendants for their criminal conduct both outside and inside the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, which charges were fully supported by evidence in the form of extensive videotapes and photographs, admissions by defendants in the course of plea hearings and in testimony at trials, and the testimony of law enforcement officers and congressional staff present at the Capitol on that day, this Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement. The prosecutions in this case and others charging defendants for their criminal conduct at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, present no injustice, but instead reflect the diligent work of conscientious public servants, including prosecutors and law enforcement officials, and dedicated defense attorneys, to defend our democracy and rights and preserve our long tradition of peaceful transfers of power — which, until January 6, 2021, served as a model to the world — all while affording those charged every protection guaranteed by our Constitution and the criminal justice system.
“As to these two defendants specifically, both admitted their criminal conduct under oath, after consultation with their attorneys, and pursuant to plea agreements to which they agreed. Bluntly put, the assertion offered in the presidential pronouncement for the pending motion to dismiss is flatly wrong.” What’s more, Howell wasn’t alone. In a separate but related case, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote, “The dismissal of this case cannot undo the ‘rampage that left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage.” Quoting court filings, she added, “It cannot diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers who ‘struggled, facing serious injury and even death, to control the mob that overwhelmed them.’ It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.” U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, in yet another case, wrote, “Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens. … Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.” In recent years, a great many federal jurists — U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, among others — have addressed the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol with great eloquence and historical weight. The criminal cases are ending, but that recent tradition continues.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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