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.”
