By Katelyn Polantz and Marshall Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — The federal judges in Washington, DC, who handled hundreds of cases from January 6, 2021, are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s mass clemency for convicted rioters, rebuking the newly pardoned as “poor losers” and memorializing the “blood, feces, and terror” from the US Capitol attack.

The orders from the judges serve as a reminder of the judiciary’s work and factual findings bringing to justice guilty pleas, trials and sentencings for more than 1,000 rioters, both those who walked into the building then left as well as far more violent participants who fought police and other law enforcement officers.

Tanya Chutkan, the judge who oversaw Trump’s 2020 election federal criminal case, wrote some of the most graphic descriptions as she dismissed one of the pending rioter cases before her on Wednesday.

Dismissing the case, Chutkan wrote, “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”

Their language also serves as a political statement following Trump’s sweeping pardons, standing in stark contrast to the president and other Republicans who are making celebrities of former prisoners.

Trump, in his executive order late Monday, said he was ending “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years” to begin a “process of national reconciliation.”

That language simply doesn’t hold true, said Judge Beryl Howell, who was the chief of the DC District Court at the time of the riot.

“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 on Wednesday. “No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election.”

“That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law,” Howell added.

Howell, like several of the other judges in DC’s federal court this week, agreed to dismiss pending Capitol riot cases because Trump’s Justice Department no longer wants to prosecute them.

But Chutkan and Howell refused to grant the Justice Department its request for dismissal “with prejudice” for three Capitol riot defendants, including one who was a Proud Boys extremist group chapter leader. Instead, the two judges simply dismissed three rioters’ cases, leaving open the possiblity charges could be brought again later.

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

Next steps in court

It’s also possible some judges on the DC federal bench choose to delay or effectively hold up the ending of some of the 300 pending rioters’ cases. The judges’ case dismissals have trickled in gradually since prosecutors began asking for them after Trump signed his clemency order, and not all of the pending Capitol riot cases have been dismissed yet.

While the presidential clemency is powerful and led to convicted January 6 rioters’ release from federal prisons quickly this week, the president doesn’t have the sole authority to wipe away cases where alleged rioters still await trial or sentencing.

Senior Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly noted that a federal court has the authority to tell prosecutors to provide a statement of reasons and facts before a judge dismisses a case, though neither she nor other judges have taken that step themselves.

Kollar-Kotelly also recorded her sharpest thoughts on the Capitol riot cases, “for posterity.”

“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote, noting the events have been preserved through “thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens.”

“Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies,” the judge wrote. “What role law enforcement played that day and the heroism of each officer who responded also cannot be altered or ignored.”

“Standing with bear spray streaming down their faces, those officers carried out their duty to protect,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote, noting five different police forces that tried to protect the Capitol and congressional members and had officers who were injured by the violent mob.

Celebrated by congressional Republicans

On Capitol Hill, many Republicans continued to either celebrate, defend, or downplay the pardons. House Speaker Mike Johnson – who said before Trump’s inauguration that “violent criminals should not” get pardons – said Wednesday that he’d defer to Trump.

“There was a weaponization of the events, the following prosecutions that happened after January 6,” Johnson told reporters. “It was a terrible time and a terrible chapter in America’s history. The president made his decision. I don’t second guess those. It’s kind of my ethos, my worldview. We believe in redemption. We believe in second chances.”

He also announced a new select subcommittee for Republicans to continue their counter-investigation into January 6, which they began in 2023 after retaking the House.

CNN reported Wednesday that Trump administration officials discussed inviting some January 6 convicts to the White House. Some Republican lawmakers have visited the DC jail to meet the January 6 support groups and spoke of organizing Capitol tours.

“I would certainly be willing to give them a guided tour,” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert told CNN.

DOJ notifies victims of inmate releases

At the same time, the Justice Department is notifying some of the police officers who testified in court that January 6 defendants are being released.

It’s routine for prosecutors to notify trial witnesses, or victims who speak at a defendant’s sentencing hearing, when the people they helped lock up are released from prison, but especially striking given the number of rioters prosecuted and sentenced here.

Former US Capitol Police Staff Sgt. Aquilino Gonell posted screenshots to social media on Wednesday of phone calls and emails he said he got from the Justice Department this week. Gonell suffered repeated assaults at the hands of the rioters on January 6, including in one of the most brutal hourslong battles in a tunnel leading into the Capitol.

“Each email and call log is a different violent rioter who assaulted me in the tunnel,” Gonell wrote in an X post. “If you are defending these people who brutally assaulted the police, maybe you ARE NOT a supporter of the police and the rule of law to begin with.”

One screenshot showed an email from the Justice Department about a convicted rioter whose upcoming sentencing hearing was cancelled. It said, “We are so sorry” that the victims of the crime “never got a chance to tell your story in your own words in court.”

Gonell was among the police officers who testified to the House January 6 committee in July 2021, offering gripping firsthand accounts of the violence. Former President Joe Biden, in one of his final acts in office, granted preemptive pardons to those officers, to protect them from “baseless and politically motivated investigations” under Trump.

A Trump critic who campaigned against him in 2024, Gonell told CNN in an interview that he didn’t ask for a pardon from Biden. “I can’t believe I need a pardon for doing the right thing, while the person who set January 6 in motion is inaugurated,” he said.

Convicted rioter rejects Trump’s pardon

The overwhelming majority of January 6 defendants responded to Trump’s clemency with jubilation and a sense of vindication. But at least one convicted rioter, who has disavowed Trump, told CNN she would reject the pardon.

Pam Hemphill of Boise, Idaho, pleaded guilty in 2022 to a misdemeanor for unlawfully protesting on restricted Capitol grounds and served two months in prison.

“I don’t want this pardon,” Hemphill said in an interview. “I’m not going to be part of their propaganda … I couldn’t live with myself. This is my amends for being there that day. It’s my amends to the Capitol Police. Knowing that I was a part of this terrible day, it’s the least I can do.”

She is the first of the roughly 1,250 pardoned January 6 convicts to publicly turn it down.

Accepting the pardon “would be a part of them trying to rewrite history,” Hemphill said. “That would be saying, ‘What I did on January 6 was OK.’ No, it wasn’t. I broke the law.”

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