Judicial Temper

We've talked a bit about the way in which DC courts are being used to ensure that cases against J6 defendants are tried in front of juries who will assuredly be aligned against them politically. It's not clear to me that it's possible for them to get a fair trial in DC, but the judges have refused to budge on moving the cases elsewhere. Many of these people are guilty, of course, but a less partisan jury pool -- and a pool less likely to be directly attached to the government as an income source -- would present the image of a fair trial whose outcomes could be relied upon as just. Instead it has the strong look of the law being deployed as a weapon of partisanship, just as it does when a DC jury in a DC court refuses to convict a Clinton partisan who was in fact plainly guilty.

Today Judge Tanya Chutkan showed another issue: the judges themselves are biased and partisan. 

A federal judge said Monday that there “have to be consequences” for the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and raised concerns that members of the mob were getting off light.... “There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government beyond sitting at home,” Chutkan said Monday. “The country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the history of this country before,” Chutkan said. While Mazzocco was far less culpable of many others who participated in the riot, he was proud of what he did, Chutkan said.

“That mob was trying to overthrow the government,” Chutkan said, and “showed their contempt for the rule of law.” She rejected comparisons between the protests of the summer of 2020 in support of civil rights and the attack on the Capitol, which she said was “no mere protest.”

She again today handed down a sentence in excess of the government's request, this time over five years in length. It ties the longest sentence yet issued for the riot, which she insists on seeing as an 'attempt to overthrow the government' -- a charge not actually alleged by the prosecution, but for which she is issuing sentences as if it had been charged and proven.

But sure, this is about the "rule of law." The law, that is, as defined and practiced by them.