Alicia Powe — defender and whitewasher of violent Capitol rioters — was shocked, shocked, to discover that the American justice system continues even during the holidays in a Dec. 15 WorldNetDaily article:
With Donald Trump promising to pardon some, if not all, of those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, logic would suggest that the Justice Department might slow down or halt its ongoing prosecution of J6 defendants, and that the FBI would terminate its ongoing orders to surveil, raid and apprehend new suspects who demonstrated in Washington, D.C. that fateful day.
In just a few weeks, on Jan. 20, 2025, President-elect Donald Trump will make his return to the Oval Office, something long awaited by the men and women who have been politically prosecuted by the Biden DOJ for protesting the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results at the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump has vowed repeatedly over the years to pardon the Jan. 6 prisoners. And in his first interview after his historic Nov. 5 victory, the president-elect, who himself faced an unprecedented 92 politically motivated felony counts while on the campaign trail, doubled down on his promise to free the political prisoners.
Speaking with “Meet the Press,” Trump vowed to grant pardons on “day one” upon returning to the White House.
Yet the DOJ and federal prosecutors are ramping up the charges against Jan. 6 defendants, even circumventing the Supreme Court’s ruling on its misuse of federal statutes, to send protesters who trespassed in the “People’s House” to prison for years or decades, all in a scurry as the new Republican administration prepares to assume power.
The FBI continues to steadily arrest protesters who sought to “Stop the Steal,” apprehending at least two new Jan. 6 suspects every day, often in predawn SWAT team raids, four years after the event.
Contrary to Powe’s suggestion, crimes do not magically go away if the perpetrators aren’t charged immediately, and she offered no evidence that “predawn SWAT team raids” for Capitol riot defendants is a common occurrence. She also doesn’t back up her suggestion that Capitol rioters should evade justice because are just so darn many of them. She then uncritically repeated one attorney’s claims:
Criminal defense attorney Roger Roots, who has represented nearly four dozen Jan. 6 defendants over the past three-and-a-half years, is sounding the alarm on the government’s incessant attempts to destroy the lives of everyday Americans who supported Trump by exercising their First Amendment rights to speech and assembly.
As Roots awaits a verdict on the fourteenth Jan. 6 case he’s taken to trial, he maintains the unconstitutional assault on these defendants’ rights warrants a blanket pardon for all Jan. 6 defendants and suspects in “one fell swoop” immediately after Trump takes office … “on day one.”
The government insistence on doling out to J6ers prison sentences fit for murderers, child predators and perpetrators of mass casualty events is “a black stain on the history of America,” the crusading attorney explained in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily.
“I’ve been on the front lines, and I’ve seen that this is the darkest chapter in the history of criminal justice in the United States. A lot of lawyers don’t even know this – many Republicans and conservatives don’t even know – how evil it has become.
Powe didn’t mention that Roots has a bit of personal experience on that front. As Politico reported, Roots has been charged with two felony convictions, served time in federal prison and authored articles in the 1990s expressing racist views and referring to the U.S. government as a “Zionist Occupation Government.” A memo to the Rhode Island Supreme Court recommended that Roots be rejected from joining the legal bar for those reasons, as well as beause he “affirmatively lied on his law school application and his application for admission to the Bar, and I believe has carefully avoided disclosing aspects of his past which may rise to the level of tacit untruthfulness. He also by his own admission, lied on the gun permit applications by affirming that he had not been convicted of a felony.” Roots was eventually admitted to the bar.
Roots also apparently believes that justice and criminality should be decided by popular whim instead of an established set of standards:
“The American people clearly and resoundingly have spoken – they are tired of these cases. The government is not slowing down, even though they clearly lost the election,” he said. “The Jan. 6 overzealous prosecutions were a factor in the Trump re-election. Nonetheless the Biden DOJ continues arresting people for Jan. 6-related events.”
Roots and his law partner John Pierce are inundated with phone calls from recently charged Jan. 6 suspects “almost every day.”
“We had a phone call from a Jan. 6 suspect yesterday – indicating that the FBI contacted him and told him that he’s got to be arrested and that he needs legal help. Even though Trump has promised to pardon all these guys – hopefully all of them – the government is not slowing down,” he reiterated.
As the DOJ maintains a 100% conviction rate on jury trials, the government typically provides defendants several months to turn themselves in after the jury reaches the verdict. But for at least two of Root’s clients, J6 defendants Jared Kastner and Patrick Montgomery, a judge has granted the prosecutors’ request that they report to prison for Christmas.
“It just boggles my mind,” Roots exclaimed. “I have two Jan. 6 clients who were sentenced recently. They have been ordered to report to prison very quickly – on Dec. 23, the day before Christmas Eve.
In fact, Kastner and Montgomery were sentenced to prison in late October — five months for Kastner and 37 months for Montgomery. Which means both men had a good two months to get their affairs in order — which is not “very quickly” by any definition of the word. And the “Christmas disaster” Powe claims in her headline is entirely a creation of the defendants, not the government.
If Kastner and Montgomery had not committed crimes at the Capitol, they would not be going to prison now — an inconvenient fact Powe ignores.