Trump pardons Capitol attackers condemned by judges

(Keystone-ATS) President Trump’s decision Monday evening “cannot erase the blood, the excrement, the terror that the mob left behind” nor “can repair the breach in America’s sacred tradition of peaceful transition of power,” he said. added in a comment on the order dropping charges against a rioter, the federal judge in the capital of the United States, Tanya Chutkan.

Barely inaugurated on Monday, Mr. Trump signed a decree at the White House pardoning some 1,270 people, whom he described as “hostages”, convicted of the assault on the Capitol during the certification four years ago of Joe Biden’s victory. Added to this are 14 members of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys movements, whose sentences were commuted to prison time already served.

Since then, acting prosecutors in Washington have dropped charges by the dozens against defendants still awaiting trial, in what police and elected officials have called a “betrayal.”

“Impunity” denounced

Two other federal judges from Washington, who had presided over trials of Congressional attackers, also had to validate Wednesday the dropping of prosecutions, while strongly condemning these pardons.

Judge Beryl Howell thus swept away any factual basis for dropping the charges, contesting what President Trump deemed to be a “grave national injustice inflicted on the American people”. The magistrate denounced “impunity”, a “dangerous prospect” that “behavior contrary to the law would recur in the future” and an “attack on the rule of law”.

Finally, her colleague Colleen Kollar-Kotelly also estimated that erasing a legal proceeding and pardoning the attackers “will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021”.

She was delighted that “thousands of videos, trial transcripts, verdicts and judicial comments will be preserved for the future”. These are all “immutable” data which constitute the truth, she concluded.