Federal judges presiding over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection cases, including the one who had overseen charges against President Donald Trump himself, are excoriating his blanket pardons for all the people charged, particularly those previously convicted of violent attacks on police officers.
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” wrote U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell on Wednesday in the case of two men, one of whom was the founder of the Hawaii chapter of the militant group Proud Boys.
“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, as she dismissed charges that included assaulting a police officer.