Federal judges sound warning on Trump’s plans for Jan. 6 clemency

A federal judge says she regularly reassured law enforcement officers traumatized by the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, telling them the “rule of law still applies.” But now she is no longer sure that is true. 

“I’m not sure I can do that very convincingly these days,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan told her courtroom earlier this week, during the sentencing of an insurrectionist.  

Chutkan was overseeing Donald Trump’s election-interference case until dismissing it following this year’s presidential election. And she joins judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents in sounding the alarm over Trump’s promise to grant clemency to many of the insurrectionists serving sentences. 

“Well, we're going to look at each individual case, and we're going to do it very quickly, and it's going to start in the first hour that I get into office,” Trump recently told Time magazine. “And a vast majority of them should not be in jail. A vast majority should not be in jail, and they've suffered gravely.”

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who sentenced Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes to 18 years for seditious conspiracy, also warned against any clemency for the seditious traitor Rhodes. 

“The notion that Stewart Rhodes could be absolved is frightening and ought to be frightening to anyone who cares about democracy in this country,” Mehta said during a sentencing hearing of another Oath Keeper.

U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, whom Trump appointed, called Trump’s promises for sweeping pardons “beyond frustrating and disappointing.”

Nichols emphasized that sentiment twice “during a hearing in which he reluctantly postponed a trial for riot defendant Edward ‘Jake’ Lang until after Inauguration Day,” according to The Washington Post. Lang has been charged with beating Capitol police officers with a baseball bat during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia estimates that “approximately 140 police officers were assaulted on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, including about 80 from the U.S. Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department.”

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