Federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the District of Columbia in Washington said Wednesday that the pardons granted by US President Donald Trump to those convicted of the Capitol assault “will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021.”
What happened that day, she said, will be preserved thanks to “thousands of videos, trial transcripts, jury verdicts and judicial opinions” that were analyzed through a “neutral lens,” according to Politico.
“These records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the defendants or their allies describe the events of January 6,” the judge stressed, adding that the role played by the police “cannot be altered or ignored.”
Kollar-Kotelly, who has been in charge of some of the cases of the assault on the Capitol, is the first to speak after Trump’s pardon campaign that has benefited, among others, the former leader of the far-right group Proud Boys, Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years in prison.
The federal judge has dismissed the case against Dominic Box, convicted of two charges in connection with his role in the assault on the Capitol. The pardons ordered by Trump have been piling up in the courts since he assumed the Presidency on Monday.
Another judge from the District of Columbia, Beryl Howell, has also spoken out. “There has been no ‘national injustice’ here, just as there was no electoral fraud that determined the outcome in the 2020 presidential election,” she stressed.
In this sense, he has assured that there can be “no process of national reconciliation” when the “losers” – referring to the supporters of those who lose elections – “are glorified for disrupting a constitutional procedure in Congress and they do so with impunity.”
Howell has dismissed the charges against Nicholas DeCarlo and Nicholas Ochs, members of the Proud Boys, although he has left the door open for the prosecution to be resumed one day. “This court cannot leave standing the revisionist myth transmitted during the presidential proclamation,” he ruled.
Both Ochs and DeCarlo threw smoke bombs at the Police, entered the Capitol and recorded themselves smoking inside. Both, who pleaded guilty, were sentenced to four years in prison each in December 2022.
