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U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth declined this week to postpone the trials of Richard Slaughter and Caden Paul Gottfried in light of president-elect Donald Trump’s vow to pardon Jan. 6 rioters.
Gottfried and Slaughter, his stepfather, were observed engaging law enforcement in an area known as “the tunnel” on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We don’t leave,” Slaughter reportedly said in one interview recorded that day. “We stay united, and we take back our country.”
Following the November election, the two men asked the court to postpone their trials because Trump had made campaign promises about providing pardons to U.S. Capitol rioters, but in a five-page ruling on Wednesday, Lamberth denied the request.
“[T]he Department has not, in fact, adopted an official agency policy of halting any and all matters related to the Capitol Riots,” Lamberth wrote.
According to the judge, special counsel Jack Smith’s decision to drop prosecutions against Trump for election subversion also “bear no resemblance to the case against Mr. Slaughter and Mr. Gottfried.”
“This Court recently had the occasion to discuss what effect the speculative possibility of a presidential pardon has on the timetable for a pending criminal matter. In short: little to none,” the ruling continued. “The defendants ask this Court to do something extraordinary: to defray the execution of its own constitutional duties.”
Lamberth also addressed the assertion that going forward with trials would waste resources.
“The defendants’ implicit efforts to caricature the timely pursuit of truth as a mere ‘expedien[t],’ and to recast the defendants as the hapless victims of arbitrary government action, are a preposterous mischaracterization of our justice system,” he explained.
