U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan says she has often reassured police officers traumatized by the violence of Jan. 6, 2021 that “the rule of law still applies.”
But as President-elect Donald Trump — once a defendant in Chutkan’s very court — prepares to retake the White House and pardon many Jan. 6 perpetrators, Chutkan now says, “I’m not sure I can do that very convincingly these days.”
Chutkan’s comments, delivered this week as she sentenced another member of the Jan. 6 mob to eight months in prison, are emblematic of the increasing alarm and dismay expressed by federal judges in Washington D.C. at the likelihood Trump will grant clemency to people they view as responsible for a grave crime against democracy.
In extraordinary but little-watched court proceedings since Election Day, judges appointed by presidents of both parties have emphasized the need for accountability for the people who stormed the Capitol in an attempt to derail the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. These judges have sounded dire warnings about the fate of the country if the lessons of the 2020 election go unlearned, and they are bluntly bracing for a turbulent start to the second Trump presidency.
One Trump-appointed judge has already warned the incoming president against a “blanket pardon” for Jan. 6 offenders. A judge appointed by Barack Obama said Wednesday that any effort to absolve a former leader of the Oath Keepers, Jan. 6 ringleader Stewart Rhodes, would be “frightening.” Rhodes is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy, but Trump will have the power to wipe away that sentence on his first day back in office.
The judges’ clarion calls are becoming markedly more frequent and pointed as Trump’s inauguration nears. Since his 2024 victory, the federal trial courts in Washington have largely plowed ahead with Jan. 6 cases, even as defendants have tried to delay their cases by citing the possibility that Trump will soon pardon them. Judges have emphasized that his pardon power has no relationship to their obligation to mete out justice, and they have ignored, in Chutkan’s words, “whatever happens outside this courthouse door.”
At the same time, the judges are increasingly using their modest bully pulpits to reject efforts to memory-hole an attack they have been dissecting in their courtrooms for the past four years.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, lamented Thursday that few members of the public had been able to observe Jan. 6 cases in court and the reams of video and factual details that conveyed the true magnitude of the attack.
“The rewriting of the history of Jan. 6, 2021 is incredibly disturbing,” Howell said during the sentencing of a man who surged onto the Senate floor and onto the dais where then-Vice President Mike Pence had only recently stood. “There are politicians on the Hill still trying to rewrite the history.”
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee who has ripped Trump as a “charlatan” for lying about the outcome of the 2020 election, worried that if losing candidates refuse to accept defeat, “we’re headed for a breakup of this country.”
“This is supposed to be America,” the judge said. “America isn’t a third-world country.”
Walton noted that after the 2024 election, he hadn’t seen “this type of lying and misinformation from the Democrats regarding their loss this time.”
“Mr. Trump won,” Walton said. “He won legitimately just like he lost legitimately.”
The judges are also confronting Jan. 6 defendants who are becoming more brazenly defiant of their authority. Walton got into a heated argument with defendant Michael Bradley after accusing the man, convicted for swinging a baton at police officers at the Capitol, of lying on the stand.
“What did I lie about?” Bradley shot back before denigrating Walton for once appearing on national television to defend the judiciary amid Trump’s attacks on the judge in his New York hush money trial.
“I’m being convicted without a victim,” Bradley continued.
At least three Jan. 6 defendants — barred from visiting Washington without court permission — have asked judges for permission to attend Trump’s inauguration, including one at the invitation of Republican members of Congress. In two of those cases, the Justice Department pushed back fiercely, saying that permitting the defendants to return to “the scene of the crime” would be an affront to the police officers victimized that day — some of whom may be protecting the Capitol at Trump’s second inaugural. Judges have yet to rule on those two cases.
But on Thursday, Chutkan granted permission to the third defendant, Eric Peterson, in a one-sentence order without explanation.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the bench, captured the mood among many of the federal judges in Washington when he issued a 13-page statement accompanying his sentence of a Jan. 6 misdemeanor defendant earlier this month. He decried efforts by some defendants to “minimize” the toll of the riot or recast themselves as victims of a government intent on squelching their First Amendment rights.
“On January 6, 2021, an angry mob of rioters invaded and occupied the United States Capitol, intending to interrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” Lamberth wrote. “No matter what ultimately becomes of the Capital Riots cases already concluded and still pending, the true story of what happened on January 6, 2021 will never change.”
Chutkan, on Monday, said she fully endorsed Lamberth’s words.
“This is the United States Capitol — the people’s house,” Chutkan said. “They trashed it. They treated it like a motel room after a concert. … Engaging in an act of destruction and violence in order to halt the peaceful transfer of power has to be met by consequences.”