U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan responded to label used by the former president.
The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s election interference case on April 10 said that describing defendants being held on charges related to the U.S. Capitol riot as hostages is wrong.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, said that people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol who remain jailed in Washington don’t deserve to be called hostages or heroes.
“They’re being kept there because they are dangerous people,” Judge Chutkan said during a sentencing hearing for Antony Vo, an Indiana man convicted of entering the Capitol with his mother.
President Trump has increasingly shown support for Jan. 6 defendants, including playing recordings of defendants in jail singing the national anthem. In 2023, he spoke at a fundraiser benefiting Jan. 6 defendants and said he’d contribute. “There have been few people that have been treated in the history of our country like the people that you love, like the people that have gone through so much,” he said at the time.
Later that year, he described jailed defendants as “hostages, not prisoners.” In March, he said one of his first acts in office, if he wins the 2024 election, would be “free[ing] the January 6 hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” And more recently, he said a 71-year-old grandma who was sentenced to prison had become ”one of Joe Biden’s J6 hostages.”
Some people have criticized the characterization, including White House officials. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has called the description “grotesque and offensive” to people being held hostage. Others, though, have said they share President Trump’s views about the treatment of defendants, some of whom have been held pending trial for years.
“I have concerns about the treatment of January 6th hostages,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said earlier this year on NBC. “We have a role in Congress of oversight over our treatments of prisoners. And I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives.”
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