Three federal judges in Washington, DC, reluctantly dropped the cases of several Jan. 6 rioters who were among the 1,500 protesters President Trump pardoned on his first day in office.
“No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” said Judge Tanya Chutkan in a ruling Wednesday dismissing the pending case against, John Banuelos.
Chutkan — an appointee of former President Barack Obama — is the same judge who oversaw the 2020 election interference case against Trump, 78, before it was dropped by the feds when Trump was reelected.
Prosecutors moved for dismissal of the case against Trump since a sitting president receives absolute immunity from federal prosecution.
“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,’” Chutkan’s ruling reads.
“It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”
The judge also acknowledged the dismissal couldn’t erase the peril and injury that the officers faced in bravely trying to quell the violent mob.
Four Trump supporters died during the rioting and a Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, died of a stroke a day after the melee. Four Capitol cops killed themselves after the riot.
“And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power,” read the sharp-worded two-page order, first reported by Law & Crime.
Under the law, a president has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” on whether to prosecute a case, so Chuktan and other judges handling the Jan. 6 cases must comply with the 47th president’s executive order pardoning the rioters.
Two other judges in DC Wednesday similarly were forced to toss out cases against three other Jan. 6 agitators — including two who pleaded guilty and one who was convicted during a bench trial.
Judge Beryl Howell — also an Obama appointee — blasted Trump’s proclamation pardoning the rioters and claiming it “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins the process of national reconciliation.”
“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 scathing decision continued.
“This Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement,” Howell’s ruling reads.
Her ruling was signing off on the feds motion seeking to dismiss the cases against rioters Nicholas DeCarlo and Nicholas Ochs, who both pleaded guilty.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton — threw out the case of a man she found guilty at trial for his role in the violent demonstrations.
But she said in her Wednesday opinion that “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.”
Roughly 562 rioters were sentenced to hard time for participating in the Capitol Riot and many of those had already finished their prison terms, according to the DOJ.
A police union that backed Trump in the 2024 election came out against his decision to pardon the protesters — many of whom attacked law enforcement officers that day.
“Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families,” two large cop unions said in a joint statement Monday.
A White House spokesperson didn’t immediately return a request for comment Thursday.
The DOJ declined to comment.
