Evenhanded Injustice: Jan. 6 Pardons, Commutations & Dismissals
www.lawfaremedia.org

... How the "individual most responsible for what occurred" that day is trying to erase history.

In volume one of Special Counsel Jack Smith's final report, relating to President Donald Trump's attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, Smith wrote that four objectives listed in the Justice Department's Principles of Federal Prosecution influenced his decision to bring the case. One of those was "to promote fair and evenhanded application of the law."

Given that "more than 1,500 people [had] been criminally charged for their roles in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol," he explained, the fact that Trump was "the individual most responsible for what occurred" that day "weighed heavily in favor of charging him." Over the next five pages, Smith provided a sampling of the types of evidence indicating that Trump was, indeed, "the individual most responsible for what occurred" that day: multiple judges' observations at sentencings; defendants' contemporaneous statements on social media or video explaining why they were about to commit, were committing, or had committed their crimes; Trump's language at the Ellipse and the crowd's response to it; formal defenses invoked by rioters' defense counsel, arguing that Trump had authorized or induced their clients' crimes; defense attorney arguments in summations, blaming Trump for the violence; and pleas for leniency by defendants or their family members at sentencing, averring that the defendant had believed he or she was serving Trump. ...

A third, Judge Paul Friedman, wrote more understatedly:

In each of the cases, law enforcement diligently investigated the facts. The prosecutors . . . conscientiously presented the evidence to support the convictions " including powerful testimony from law enforcement officers and other witnesses, as well as hundreds of hours of shocking videos of assaults on the Capitol and those trying to protect it. In each case, either a judge or jury evaluated the evidence presented through the crucible of direct and cross-examination. Judges methodically applied the law to the facts or instructed juries to do so. The voluminous records created in these cases will forever reflect that in the tumultuous time following the events of January 6, 2021, this Court was at all times a place of law and fact.

That seems to be what Pres Trump, and his adorers, want to erase.