Judges in Washington, D.C., who have spent the last four years wading through hundreds of criminal cases surrounding January 6 are now being asked by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice to dismiss hundreds of open cases in front of them.
In court filings responding to requests to toss charges for the remaining defendants, judges are barely hiding their contempt for Trump’s sweeping pardons for virtually every member of the mob — and warning against attempts to rewrite the history of the Capitol attack and downplay the staggering display of violence.
District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump’s federal election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, wrote that Trump’s pardons “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”
His pardons cannot “change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021” nor “repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power,” she wrote.
“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor,” she added. “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”
District Judge Beryl Howell — who presided over Rudy Giuliani’s defamation trial and served as the chief District Court judge at the time of the attack — wrote that “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,” she added.
“Yet, this presidential pronouncement of a ‘national injustice’ is the sole justification provided in the government’s motion to dismiss the pending indictment,” Howell continued. “This Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement.”
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that lengthy court filings — including “thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions” — will preserve the history of what happened that day, regardless of the public narrative from Trump’s clemencies.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened,” she 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.”
Judge Amy Berman Jackson said dismissing one rioter’s case without the possibility of filing charges in the future would dishonor the “patriots” who defended the Capitol.
“Patriotism is loyalty to country and loyalty to the Constitution – not loyalty to a single head of state,” she wrote.
“When others in the public eye are not willing to risk their own power or popularity by calling out lies when they hear them, the record of the proceedings in this courthouse will be available to those who seek the truth,” she added.
As one of his first official acts inside the Oval Office on January 20, the president issued unconditional pardons to more than 1,500 rioters, including hundreds of defendants who were found guilty of assaulting law enforcement officers.
He also commuted the sentences of 14 defendants — mostly members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who were convicted of seditious conspiracy — to time served.
More than 200 defendants who remained in federal custody were released by Tuesday morning.
Trump’s Justice Department is now in the process of filing motions to dismiss charges against hundreds of other defendants whose cases are still active.
Nearly 1,600 people were criminally charged in connection with a mob’s assault on the Capitol, fuelled by Trump’s bogus narrative that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen from him.
Trump has repeatedly defended his actions while downplaying the events of January 6 and lying about the outcome of the election he lost.
“They were treated like the worst criminals in history. And you know what they were there for? They were protesting the vote, because they knew the election was rigged, and they were protesting the vote, and that’s … should be allowed to protest the vote,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity on January 22.
“Most of the people were absolutely innocent,” Trump said. “These people have served horribly a long time. It would be very, very cumbersome to, look, you know how many people we’re talking about? 1,500 people, almost all of them … this should not have happened.”
