Jan. 6 Judges Tear Into Trump for Undoing Years of Their Work

Several prominent judges who oversaw cases related to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection publicly tore into President Donald Trump Wednesday for his sweeping pardons of more than 1,500 of the rioters.

Included in the group was Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was also slated to preside over Trump’s own election subversion case.

Chutkan, who sparred with the president’s own lawyers for much of the 2024 campaign cycle, joined her colleagues in writing scathing filings as they were tasked with dismissing the cases still being prosecuted in federal court.

“No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Chutkan wrote in an order dismissing the case against John Banuelos, who faced multiple charges including carrying and discharging a deadly weapon on Capitol grounds.

“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.’ It cannot diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers who “struggled, facing serious injury and even death, to control the mob that overwhelmed them,’ Chutkan wrote, citing findings in other January 6 cases. “It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”

Chutkan oversaw a number of cases related to the Capitol insurrection, and became notorious for her record of harsh punishments against rioters. In 2023, Chutkan had sentenced all 31 Jan. 6 defendants that came before her to prison sentences, frequently handing out more jail time than prosecutors recommended.

Before Trump took office on Monday, the Justice Department was still prosecuting cases against 170 defendants who pleaded guilty or were found guilty at trial for crimes related to Jan. 6.

About 300 more defendants faced federal charges for Capitol riot charges in court, the Justice Department said on the fifth anniversary of the attack, including about 180 defendants facing felony charges for “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder.”

Chutkan eventually dismissed the case against Banuelos without prejudice—meaning prosecutors are free to pursue charges against him again in the future.

District Judge Beryl Howell also opted to dismiss the case against Nicholas DeCarlo and Nicholas Ochs without prejudice on Wednesday,

DeCarlo and Ochs, a Proud Boys members and the founder of the group’s Hawaii chapter, took a plea deal in 2022. According to Howell, both men admitted under oath to throwing smoke bombs at law enforcement, breaching and defacing the Capitol, and stealing equipment from police.

Howell slammed the new government’s instructions issued on Trump’s first night in office for not providing a reason to dismiss the case against DeCarlo and Ochs. Instead, the order from the White House simply cited a “grave national injustice” and the beginning of a “process of national reconciliation.”

“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Howell wrote. “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. That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law.”

At least one judge, District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, acquiesced and dismissed the case against Dominic Box with prejudice. Box faced charges including civil disorder and entering a restricted building after he was caught on camera inside the Capitol.

Kollar-Kotelly, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton in 1997, accepted the government’s “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” in determining whether to prosecute a case—but wrote a stark warning condemning the actions of the rioters and praising the law enforcement officials who defended the Capitol.

“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.”