After a jury found a January 6 rioter guilty on all charges a federal judge weighed in with a warning on American democracy.
“The insurgency, and it was in effect that, is very troubling,” Judge Reggie Walton, a Senior U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia, said, CNN reports. “I think our democracy is in trouble because unfortunately we have charlatans, like the former President, in my view, who don’t care about democracy and only care about power.”
Judge Walton is no “liberal activist judge,” a term of derision conservatives like to wave. He was nominated to the federal bench by a Republican, President George W. Bush. He also served as the Presiding Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA Court), and was nominated to that post by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, another Bush nominee.
Walton’s remarks came at the end of the trial of Dustin Thompson, a 38-year-old Ohio exterminator who “faced six charges — obstructing an official proceeding, theft of government property, illegally entering the Capitol, illegally protesting in the Capitol, and two counts of disorderly conduct in the Capitol,” CNN adds.
He “claimed he was following ‘presidential orders’ when he stormed the US Capitol and stole liquor and a coat rack.”
CNN notes the “trial marked the first time a Capitol riot defendant tried to convince a jury that Trump was responsible for the violence on January 6, 2021.”