Judges denounce Trump’s January 6 pardons as based on ‘revisionist myth’
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One of two federal judges says pardons ‘cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake’. US federal judges have criticized Donald Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 people involved in the January 6 insurrection, arguing that the clemency “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake” and that the president’s reasoning for the pardons was based on a “revisionist myth”.
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The fierce condemnation came as the GOP scrambled to deal with Trump’s move, which was broader in scope than some Republicans had expected and included pardons for people convicted of assaulting police officers. Trump, who described the attacks on law enforcement as “very minor incidents” in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday, issued the pardons in one of his first acts in office. The president said the clemency would begin a process of “reconciliation” and correct a “grave national injustice”, but in a scathing order on Wednesday the US district judge Beryl Howell disagreed.
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“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Howell wrote in an eight-page order issued in the case of two January 6 defendants. “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.”.
![[a woman looks ahead]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a06c5b96b2d43f44495a018ab9f5b673dccd439f/0_0_5410_3607/master/5410.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
