Politico reports:

A prominent federal judge on Wednesday ripped President Donald Trump’s mass clemency for Jan. 6 rioters, saying the justification he offered in his proclamation — to correct an “injustice” and trigger a “national reconciliation” — was “flatly wrong” and a “revisionist myth.”

“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote in an eight-page order in the case of two Jan. 6 defendants who pleaded guilty to felonies. “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 remarks are the most pointed yet in response to Trump’s decision to wipe away the nearly 1,600 criminal cases stemming from the attack — including hundreds of charges of assaults on police, as well as seditious conspiracy convictions. She said his decision “merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law.”

Howell, who presided over several secret proceedings in special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal cases against Trump — issuing key rulings that required some of his top aides to testify to a grand jury — was not the only judge Wednesday to defend the Jan. 6 prosecutions.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — who was slated to preside over Trump’s own criminal prosecution for seeking to subvert the 2020 election before his 2024 victory ended the case — said Trump’s mass pardons “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”

“It cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power,” Chutkan wrote in an order connected to a Jan. 6 felony case. “In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor. The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Trump’s action could never change the “immutable” record of violence and heroism of law enforcement, which will remain enshrined in court records. [Continue reading…]