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Three federal judges on Wednesday strongly condemned President Donald Trump's sweeping pardons of supporters who stormed the US Capitol four years ago in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
"No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021," District Judge Tanya Chutkan said in an order dismissing the charges against a Capitol riot defendant.
"It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake," Chutkan said. "And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America's sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power."
Trump, just hours after taking office on Monday, granted pardons to more than 1,500 of his supporters who stormed the Capitol in a bid to halt congressional certification of Joe Biden's election victory.
In doing so, he also commuted the sentences of 14 members of the far-right Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia.
Chutkan presided over the criminal case filed against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith accusing him of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The case never came to trial, and it was dismissed after Trump won the November election, in line with a long-standing Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
Two other Washington-based federal judges who presided over cases involving Capitol riot defendants also dismissed the charges on Wednesday with strongly worded condemnations of the pardons.
District Judge Beryl Howell said there was no factual basis for dismissing the charges against two of the defendants before her court, only an assertion by the Trump White House that a "grave national injustice" had been done.
"No 'national injustice' occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election," Howell said, adding that "poor losers" cannot be allowed to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power "with impunity."
"That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law," she said.
- 'Will not change the truth' -
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotel said the dismissal of charges and pardons "will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021."
"What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions," Kollar-Kotel said.
"Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies."
Trump, whose first term as president ended under the cloud of the Capitol assault, has repeatedly played down the violence of January 6, even going so far as to describe it as a "day of love."
More than 140 police officers were injured in hours of clashes with rioters wielding flagpoles, baseball bats, hockey sticks and other makeshift weapons along with Tasers and canisters of bear spray.
Trump repeatedly pledged during his election campaign to pardon those who took part in the Capitol assault, calling them "patriots" and "political prisoners."
The Capitol assault followed a fiery speech by then-president Trump to tens of thousands of his supporters near the White House in which he repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 race.
He then encouraged the crowd to march on Congress.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by News Agency staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)