Trump Jan. 6 judge hammers pardon of all Capitol rioters

homesafetytechpros — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 13:25:17 +0000

Top inset: U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP, File). Bottom inset: Donald Trump (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana). Background: Rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File).

A federal judge this week had choice words for Donald Trump‘s pardon freeing the rioters charged for the events on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who oversaw Trump’s criminal prosecution involving his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election before the case was dropped, said in an order dismissing another Jan. 6 defendant’s case, “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 Capitol’… 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”” she wrote. “It cannot diminish the heroism of law enforcement 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.”

Above all, she added, “It cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”

The comments from Chutkan, a Barack Obama appointee, followed comments from other prominent judges who took issue with Trump’s pardon.

In her order on Wednesday dismissing a Jan. 6 defendant’s case, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Bill Clinton appointee, said 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,” she wrote.

She added that the role of law enforcement that day and the officers’ heroism cannot be altered or ignored.

“Grossly outnumbered, those law enforcement officers acted valiantly to protect the Members of Congress, their staff, the Vice President and his family, the integrity of the Capitol grounds, and the Capitol Building-our symbol of liberty and a symbol of democratic rule around the world,” she said. “For hours, those officers were aggressively confronted and violently assaulted. More than 140 officers were injured. Others tragically passed away as a result of the events of that day. But law enforcement did not falter. Standing with bear spray streaming down their faces, those officers carried out their duty to protect.

“All of what I have described has been recorded for posterity, ensuring that what transpired on January 6, 2021 can be judged accurately in the future,” she wrote.

Judge Beryl Howell, another Obama appointee, said in her order involving two Proud Boys who admitted to their roles in the riots, that Trump’s dismissals undermine the rule of law.

“This Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement,” she wrote. “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.”

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Trump’s Jan. 6 judge won’t stop Jack Smith evidence dump

homesafetytechpros — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:20:32 +0000

Main: Former President Donald Trump motions as he returns to the court in New York (AP Photo/Seth Wenig). Inset left: Special Counsel Jack Smith (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File). Inset right: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP, File).

Not at all persuaded by Donald Trump’s request to keep special counsel Jack Smith’s immunity appendix under wraps until after the 2024 election, the former president’s Jan. 6 judge on Thursday scoffed at the “oxymoronic proposition” that hiding information from the public for political reasons will enhance its “understanding of this case.”

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday refused to grant Trump a stay extension until Nov. 14, meaning that on Friday the stay will lift and she will “direct the Clerk of the Court to docket the Appendix, with the Government’s proposed redactions.”

The special counsel has referred to the appendix as “voluminous” and noted that it includes “interview transcripts and reports, [Presidential Daily Diaries] PDDs, emails and text messages, and other relevant records that the defendant has long possessed,” so for that reason it was no surprise the defense wanted to keep it out of public view, just as they opposed (without success) the release of Smith’s immunity brief.

The Thursday ruling from Chutkan boils down to this: the public has a right to access the documents at issue and “none” of the arguments the Trump team made in favor of further sealing were “persuasive.”

“Exercising that judgment, the court cannot conclude that an extended stay is appropriate,” the judge wrote, noting that the defense did “not engage with the six relevant factors for sealing” but instead largely focused on the document dump’s potential impact on the 2024 election.

Chutkan wasn’t swayed by the “too speculative” argument that the fact of the appendix going public would necessarily “poison the jury pool,” but she was even less convinced that keeping documents from the public would somehow be helpful.

“Setting aside the oxymoronic proposition that the public’s understanding of this case will be enhanced by withholding information about it, any public debate about the issues in this case has no bearing on the court’s resolution of those issues,” the judge said.

The judge reiterated that Trump’s presidential candidacy “does not implicate the concerns animating his official immunity,” and she “stressed” that his interests in being elected don’t control the scheduling in the case.

Turning a defense argument on its head, Chutkan wrote that hiding documents the public has a right to see — just because of politics — would be “election interference” in itself.

“There is undoubtedly a public interest in courts not inserting themselves into elections, or appearing to do so. But litigation’s incidental effects on politics are not the same as a court’s intentional interference with them,” she said. “As a result, it is in fact Defendant’s requested relief that risks undermining that public interest: If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute—or appear to be—election interference.”

“The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests,” Chutkan concluded.

Read the ruling here.

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Trump Jan. 6 judge hammers pardon of all Capitol rioters

Trump’s Jan. 6 judge won’t stop Jack Smith evidence dump