WASHINGTON — A federal judge appointed to the bench by former President Ronald Reagan said Friday that the public discourse about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — and the cases against Donald Trump supporters prosecuted because they committed crimes in support of the once and future president — had been distorted.
U.S. District Court Royce Lamberth said Friday that while the events of Jan. 6 may be a “distant, hazy memory” for many Americans, that there were many who suffered that day who never forget the attack and emphasized that “truth and justice, law and order” were bedrock principles of the judicial system. The jurors who heard the cases, Lamberth said, “know how perilously close we came to letting the peaceful transfer of power, that great cornerstone of the American republican experiment and perhaps our foremost contribution to posterity, slip away from us.”
Lamberth — who had previously said the “preposterous” claims Republican politicians were making about the Capitol attack “could presage further danger to our country” — made his comments during the sentencing of a man who ran for a congressional seat previously held by former Rep. George Santos.
Philip Grillo had been convicted of a felony count of obstruction of an official proceeding, but after the Supreme Court’s decision on that count over the summer, Grillow filed a motion for acquittal on the felony count, which the government did not oppose. So on Friday, Grillo was sentenced to a year in prison on the remaining misdemeanor counts.
“We f—ing did it, you understand? We stormed the Capitol,” Grillo said in a video he took of himself in the Capitol, according to the Justice Department. “We shut it down! We did it!”
Lamberth, who sentenced Grillo to 12 months behind bars, had rejected Grillo’s argument to delay his sentencing due to the possibility that Trump might pardon some of all of the Jan. 6 rioters. He ordered Grillo to be stepped back, or taken into custody immediately rather than be allowed to self-surrender.
“Trump’s gonna pardon you,” said one of Grillo’s supporters in the courtroom galley. “Donald’s got you, Phil.”
That Bronx man, along with another Grillo friend and supporter who is also involved in politics, falsely identified themselves using the names of two of their political rivals in an attempt to troll both their rivals and reporters, but NBC News was able to determine their real identities.
“Trump’s gonna pardon me,” Grillo said, removing his belt at the order of the U.S. Marshals taking him into custody.
Philip Sean Grillo inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Before sentencing Grillo, Lamberth said his job was “to facilitate the search for truth, interpret the law, apply it to the facts, and dispense justice as the law demands.”
Lamberth said the evidence in most Capitol riot cases was “overwhelmingly strong” and that it was “gravely disappointing that so many jurors had to be wrenched away from their daily lives to hear from rioters who would rather spout off mostly bogus defenses than take accountability for their actions.”
While everyone was “aware that the President-elect has publicly contemplated pardoning people who participated in the Capitol Riots at various points throughout his campaign,” Lamberth said, he had “nothing to say about that decision.”
But he did attempt to shoot down some of the multitude of falsehoods that have polluted the public discourse about the investigation.
“The bedrock assumption of our judicial system is that truth and justice, law and order, are values of paramount importance, and are worth protecting even at great expense,” Lamberth said. “This proceeding and others like it show that our system of justice is always working, no matter the political winds of the day. That is a message worth sending.”
Royce Lamberth during a ceremony honoring the chief judge for his service at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on July 15, 2013.
“Having read dozens of indictments related to January 6, I can say confidently: nobody has been prosecuted for protected First Amendment activity. Nobody is being held hostage. Nobody has been made a prisoner of conscience. Every rioter is in the situation he or she is in because he or she broke the law, and for no other reason,” Lamberth said.
Lamberth said that Grillo and other rioters had to be sentenced “without regard to the defendant’s political affiliation or any other attribute, and without consideration of whether our decisions will be popular.”
“That is what is means to have an independent judiciary, that is what it means to have law and order,” he said. “A jury of Mr. Grillo’s peers found that he broke the law when he participated in the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021, and it falls to this court to hold him accountable. So now, bound by my oath of office and my allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, that is what I will do.”
As of Nov. 6, approximately 1,561 defendants have been federally charged with crimes associated with the Jan. 6 attack, according to the Department of Justice. More than 1,100 have been convicted and more than 600 had been sentenced to periods of incarceration ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in federal prison for a Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy. That leader, Enrique Tarrio, testified this week elsewhere in the courthouse during the trial of a former police officer charged with unlawfully providing Tarrio with information in the days before the attack.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
