WASHINGTON ― Federal judges presiding over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection cases, including the one who had overseen charges against President Donald Trump himself, are excoriating his blanket pardons for all the people charged, particularly those previously convicted of violent attacks on police officers.
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” wrote U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell on Wednesday in the case of two men, one of whom was the founder of the Hawaii chapter of the militant group Proud Boys.
“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,” Howell wrote, as she dismissed charges that included assaulting a police officer.
Trump, within hours of taking the presidential oath Monday, set free nearly 1,600 of his followers who were charged for their actions on Jan. 6 intended to keep him in power. That total included hundreds convicted of assaulting police officers and about 300 defendants awaiting sentencing or still awaiting trial.
He has repeatedly described the people who were arrested and imprisoned as “hostages” and “political prisoners.” He told reporters Tuesday evening at the White House that they had been punished too harshly.
“They served years in jail. And if you look at the American public, the American public is tired of it. Take a look at the election, just look at the numbers on the election. We won this election in a landslide,” Trump said.
In fact, Trump’s margin over former Vice President Kamala Harris was among the smallest in modern history. And the public does not support the release of the violent Jan. 6 inmates.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who had famously told Trump that his “day job” of running for president would not give him any special status in her courtroom, refuted Trump’s claims about the Jan. 6 defendants.
“No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. On that day, ‘a mob professing support for then-President Trump violently attacked the United States Capitol’ to stop the electoral college certification,” she wrote in an order dismissing charges against John Banuelos, who was arrested and charged last year after a video emerged of him firing off a gun from the scaffolding that been erected in front of the Capitol for Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power,” Chutkan wrote. “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”
In November, she had dismissed four felony charges against Trump based on his attempt to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election, an act that authoritarian experts say meets the definition of a self-coup.
Chutkan a year earlier had ruled that Trump’s actions leading up to and on that day were not immune from prosecution merely because he was president at the time. A federal appeals court agreed with her in early 2024, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed her decision in July, ruling that all of a president’s “official” acts are immune from prosecution and ordering Chutkan to hold hearings to determine which of Trump’s actions in the indictment were official and which weren’t.
The timing made it impossible to hold the necessary hearings before the November election. After Trump won, special counsel Jack Smith dismissed that case, as well as an unrelated federal prosecution based on Trump’s refusal to turn over secret documents he had taken with him to his South Florida country club upon leaving the White House. Smith cited Department of Justice policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” wrote U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly as she dismissed charges against Dominic Box, who was to have been sentenced next month.
She and other judges wrote about the heroism of Capitol and Washington, D.C., police, as well as officers who came in from surrounding areas to ward off Trump’s mob.
More than 140 officers were injured by Trump’s followers. One died hours later and four others died by suicide in the subsequent weeks and months.
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“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,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.”