Two judges in the Washington, D.C., region are pressing pause on various trials for Jan. 6, 2021, case defendants amid President-elect Donald Trump’s confirmation he’ll consider pardons for them.
Multiple thousands of individuals who were part of a protest against suspicious developments in the 2020 presidential election have been charged and convicted of offenses like trespassing for walking into the Capitol building when authorities said it was “closed.”
They sometimes walked past security guards who were holding the doors open for them, but nonetheless were charged anyway.
About 600 already have been given, and many have served, prison terms.
Many others have remained in jail for years awaiting the resolution of their cases.
Now it is Politico that has reported U.S. District Judges Rudolph Contreras and Carl Nichols have suspended action on those pending cases, to avoid calling in dozens of possible jurors for cases that will end.
The judges have, after multiple requests, agreed that Trump’s coming inauguration could make the proceedings fruitless.
The federal Department of Justice has objected to the moves, insisting on sending as many Trump supporters to jail as possible in what has come to be seen as primary evidence of the weaponization of the Department of Justice by Democrats against Trump and his supporters.
Politico reported, “It’s the first time federal judges have acquiesced to the demands of Jan. 6 defendants for delays in anticipation of potential pardons from Trump, who has pledged to grant clemency to many people charged for their role in the attack on the Capitol.”
Trump has said several times that he thinks most of those defendants did nothing to deserve prison time, but that there are a few who vandalized the Capitol that do need to be punished.
One case defendant, William Pope, representing himself, had been scheduled for trial next month on misdemeanor charges, and Contreras agreed to consider a trial, if necessary, in February.
“Nichols, similarly, declined to set an imminent trial date for three Jan. 6 defendants charged with misdemeanors for trespassing in the Capitol. Without prompting, he asked prosecutors whether they expected the trial would go on even after Trump took over the Justice Department. When the prosecutor in the case could not confirm either way, Nichols opted to set an April trial date and postpone all other deadlines, allowing time for the Justice Department to recalibrate after Trump takes office,” the report added.
Multitudes of the defendants already have had their cases changed, after the Supreme Court ruled prosecutors had incorrectly used a specific charge against them that was not allowed.
Other judges have claimed that Trump’s commitment to the defendants is “speculative.”
One judge, Paul Friedman, claimed that whatever the president would do “is irrelevant to the court’s” own obligations.
A report at the Gateway Pundit said Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, under Merrick Garland, already has pushed to have sentenced 944 individuals from events that day.
More than 560 have been sent to prison.
Most of the judges hearing the cases, leftist in their own ideologies, “remained defiant after the Supreme Court reversed the ‘obstruction’ statute,” the report saiod.
That was when the Supreme Court delivered a stunning blow to the DOJ by rejecting its use of a specific statute regarding obstruction of an official proceeding in the J6 cases.
The judges responded to that correction by their own judiciary superiors by threatening to add “enhancements” to J6 cases against defendants.
