Federal Judges in Jan. 6 Cases Slam Trump’s Pardons
A prominent federal judge on Wednesday ripped President Donald Trump’s mass clemency for Jan. 6 rioters, saying the justification he offered in his proclamation — to correct an “injustice” and trigger a “national reconciliation” — was “flatly wrong” and a “revisionist myth.”
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote in an eight-page order in the case of two Jan. 6 defendants who pleaded guilty to felonies. “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’s remarks are the most pointed yet in response to Trump’s decision to wipe away the nearly 1,600 criminal cases stemming from the attack — including hundreds of charges of assaults on police, as well as seditious conspiracy convictions. She said his decision “merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law.”
Howell, who presided over several secret proceedings in special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal cases against Trump — issuing key rulings that required some of his top aides to testify to a grand jury — was not the only judge Wednesday to defend the Jan. 6 prosecutions.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — who was slated to preside over Trump’s own criminal prosecution for seeking to subvert the 2020 election before his 2024 victory ended the case — said Trump’s mass pardons “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”
“It cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power,” Chutkan wrote in an order connected to a Jan. 6 felony case. “In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor. The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Trump’s action could never change the “immutable” record of violence and heroism of law enforcement, which will remain enshrined in court records.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a six-page order dismissing charges against Dominic Box, whom she had previously convicted of two felony counts for his role in the riot.
“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.”
Howell and Chutkan, both Obama appointees, and Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, are the first judges to make substantive comments after Trump’s sweeping clemency and dismissals of the more than 1,500 Jan. 6 criminal cases. Judges have been steadily processing the dismissals of hundreds of pending cases since Monday evening, when Trump signed his clemency proclamation.
But none of them had offered any public commentary on the matter yet, despite having warned repeatedly prior to Trump’s inauguration that they were fearful of attempts by the president and his allies to bury the truth about Jan. 6.
Kollar-Kotelly said the “heroism of each officer who responded” could also not be erased.
“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 wrote.
Howell’s remarks came in the case of Nicholas DeCarlo and Nicholas Ochs, two leaders of the Proud Boys who admitted to throwing smoke bombs at officers at the Capitol. Howell noted that judges are permitted to seek a factual basis for the reasoning behind DOJ’s decision when it abruptly dismisses a case, and she said the Trump administration had offered no such facts.
As a result, Howell opted to dismiss the case “without prejudice,” meaning the charges could be brought again if prosecutors reconsider, despite the Justice Department’s effort to drop them in a way that would prevent them from being lodged in the future. Chutkan, too, dismissed her cases “without prejudice.”
“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,” Howell wrote, “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.”
“Bluntly put,” she continued, “the assertion offered in the presidential pronouncement for the pending motion to dismiss is flatly wrong.”