As Jan. 6 leaders call for retribution, judges warn against revisionism
Trump pardons of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers fuel battle over how history will view the Capitol riot; House GOP launches investigation into earlier Jan. 6 probe.
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On Wednesday, several federal judges granted the Justice Department’s pardon-based requests to dismiss cases while saying in their rulings that the true story of Jan. 6 could not be whitewashed.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in dismissing one riot defendant’s case.
The record in these cases — thousands of videos, trial transcripts, verdicts and legal opinions analyzing the evidence through a neutral lens — “are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies,” the judge said.
In an opinion Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell dismissed cases against two pardoned Proud Boys members but declined to go along with a Trump Justice Department request to do so “with prejudice,” which would keep them from being charged again.
The distinction has little practical effect. The five-year statute of limitations on such charges ends Jan. 6, 2026, in less than a year, well before Trump’s term ends. Howell’s point was that prosecutors in citing Trump’s pardon declaration failed to provide any factual basis to contradict evidence the men submitted in plea papers.
Howell defended the work of the courts, prosecutors, defenders and other public servants in the criminal justice system, saying they had afforded “those charged every protection guaranteed by our Constitution.” And she rejected “the revisionist myth” in Trump’s pardon proclamation, which stated that it “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.”
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Howell concluded. “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.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/01/22/tarrio-rhodes-retribution-jan6-revisionism/
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