Rachel Maddow Applauds Judges for Refusing Trump Order to Dismiss Violent Jan. 6 Charges: ‘Not Even the Trumpy Police Like It’ | Video
Rachel Maddow dug into the continued blowback from President Donald Trump’s full pardoning of all Jan. 6 rioters, including those who violently attacked police and ransacked the Capitol in 2021, on MSNBC Wednesday, applauding the federal judges who have taken a stand against Trump’s directive to dismiss the charges with prejudice.
“This is a debacle,” Maddow said. “I mean, it’s morally, it’s obviously a debacle, strategically, in terms of our country holding itself together, it’s a debacle. But it’s a political debacle.”
Maddow began the segment, watchable below, by highlighting federal Judge Beryl Howell’s condemnation of Trump’s controversial pardons. The judge wrote at length on the reasons why the pardoning of those who attacked Capitol police is a misguided effort, even calling those charged “poor losers.”
“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,” Maddow said, reading directly from Howell’s Wednesday dissent. “That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines rule of law.”
Howell’s remarks were in response to Trump pardoning more than 1,500 people who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots, and commuting sentences for 14 others on his first back in the Oval Office. At the time, the group attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and in doing so invaded the Capitol building and brutalizing police officers.
Now, Howell and other federal judges in Washington, D.C. who presided over the cases are calling Trump out, saying his pardons promote a “revisionist myth” about the attacks.
“This is one of the three rulings by a federal judge today absolutely rebuking Donald Trump and his new justice department for trying to make these Jan. 6 cases disappear, to try to make it like Jan. 6 didn’t happen,” Maddow explained. “The decision to spring these guys from prison and to stop the ongoing trials of people convicted or charged with physically attacking police officers — this is a debacle. I mean, it’s morally, it’s obviously a debacle, strategically, in terms of our country holding itself together, it’s a debacle. But it’s a political debacle.
But it’s not only the judges who have who taken issue with Trump’s mass pardon, even his campaign supporters are speaking out, Maddow explained.
“The public doesn’t like it, the police don’t like it, not even the Trumpy police like it. Even the Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Trump and initially appeared flummoxed by this pardons decision, they’ve now come out and denounced it as well. The violent felons who Trump ordered freed yesterday are already today starting to be arrested for other violent crimes.”
Among those pardoned are high-level members of the far-right groups The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. The family of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, who died the day after rioters attacked him, called Trump a “poor excuse of a man” and his pardons a “betrayal of decency.”
“It is our hope that the truth of what happened that tragic day will survive, irrespective of partisan political objectives,” the family said in a statement Tuesdasy.
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