'Blood, feces and terror': Judge Chutkan unleashes on Trump in response to Jan. 6 pardons

22 January

The judge who oversaw President Donald Trump's criminal proceedings in Washington D.C. just issued a blistering response to his pardons of participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

In a Wednesday post to his Bluesky account, Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney noted that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan didn't hold back in her criticism of the 47th president of the United States — a former defendant in her courtroom. She wrote in a filing pertaining to one current defendant's case that Trump's decision to pardon roughly 1,500 people charged and convicted in connection to the riot "cannot undo the 'rampage [that] left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people and inflicted millions of dollars in damage."

"It cannot whitewash the blood, feces and terror that the mob left in its wake," Chutkan continued. "And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America's sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power."

"In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor," she added. "The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning."

Chutkan isn't the only federal judge in Washington D.C. to speak out against the wave of pardons of those convicted for laying siege to the U.S. Capitol. Cheney noted that U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell also tore into Trump for propagating a "revisionist myth" about the worst attack on the nation's capital since the War of 1812.

"No 'national injustice' occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election," Howell wrote in a recent ruling. "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 references to "national reconciliation" and "national injustice" are direct quotes from Trump's announcement that he was pardoning January 6 participants. Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes recently opined Trump's underlying goal of changing the narrative surrounding the events of January 6 with his mass pardons will ultimately prove ineffective, given how much it's already been cemented in American culture.

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