By Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal judge who has overseen scores of criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol condemned President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons on Wednesday, saying they reflect a “revisionist myth” about the riot.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, in dismissing charges against two men accused of participating in the riot, Nicholas DeCarlo and Nicholas Ochs, said Trump’s justification for pardoning nearly all 1,590 people charged in the attack was wrong.
“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 wrote in the order.
“That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law,” the judge added.
A White House proclamation announcing the pardons said the action “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”
Thousands of Trump supporters breached on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, tearing down barricades, fighting police and sending lawmakers running for their lives in a failed attempt to stop the certification of Trump’s election loss.
They were fired up by Trump’s false claims that his defeat was the result of widespread fraud, a claim that the new president has continued to make even after returning to office four years later.
Trump’s pardon, which fulfilled a campaign promise, extended to all but 14 of the people who have been charged in the attack. The remaining 14, members of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups, had their convictions left intact but were released from lengthy prison sentences.
Trump’s order also directed the Justice Department to drop about 300 pending cases against people accused of taking part in the riot.
Howell was not the only judge to raise concerns about the pardons.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in an order dismissing another Jan. 6 case.
Federal judges in Washington, who for years have raised alarms about the seriousness of the riot, have mostly granted prosecutors’ requests to drop the charges without comment.
But Howell, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama and formerly served as chief trial judge, used her order to defend prosecutors and law enforcement officers who investigated the riot.
Howell has clashed with Trump allies over her treatment of Jan. 6 defendants and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, whom she found liable for defaming two Georgia election workers.
“This Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement,” Howell wrote.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Andrea Ricci)
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