The Justice Department on Wednesday placed two prosecutors on leave after they filed a legal brief describing the people on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, as “a mob of rioters,” and connecting President Donald Trump to the 2023 doxxing of former President Barack Obama‘s house.
Assistant U.S. attorneys Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White were informed they would be placed on leave after writing a memo about sentencing in Taylor Taranto’s case related to his visiting Obama’s house with firearms and ammunition, according to ABC News and other outlets. Taranto was a Jan. 6 rioter who was pardoned.
In the memo, Valdivia and White wrote that “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters” were involved in Jan. 6. The memo also ascribed some type of culpability for the doxxing of Obama’s address to Trump, saying, “On June 29, 2023, then former president Donald Trump published on social media platforms the purported address of former President Obama,” according to CBS News.
The document was signed off on by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro.
Pirro has largely stood by Trump’s interpretation of the events of Jan. 6, saying she has “publicly condemned the violence and called for those responsible to be held to account,” while suggesting the vast majority of protesters and Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., that day did nothing wrong.
Reports noted it was unclear if Valdivia or White were given a reason for their suspensions when the two men were locked out of their government devices hours after they filed the sentencing memorandum in Taranto’s case.
Taranto was one of the many individuals pardoned by Trump over his involvement in Jan. 6. Federal prosecutors are still working on a separate case involving Taranto regarding his conviction for firearms and threat charges related to his 2023 arrest near Obama’s home. Taranto is set to be sentenced for those charges later this week.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the DOJ for comment, but did not receive a response.
In their 14-page memo on Taranto’s case, Valdivia and White urged U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to sentence Taranto to more than two years in prison, according to Politico.
The prosecutors also briefly noted Taranto’s involvement on Jan. 6, writing, “Taranto returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.”
Trump and his allies have often argued that critics have construed Jan. 6 into a bigger deal than it was, and have expressed concern about FBI involvement in the incident.
Trump has said only “a tiny percentage” of the massive crowds who attended his speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., actually violated the law and broke into the Capitol building. A portion of those who attended the speech walked over to the Capitol afterward. However, Trump has suggested that only a fraction of those “peaceful” protesters were involved in any violence or breaking into the building.
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While Trump has said “those who broke the law, you will pay,” he has also argued that most of those charged with crimes for Jan. 6 were innocent “victims,” “hostages,” “patriots,” and “warriors,” targeted by a partisan DOJ.
“You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington,” he said during a Univision town hall last October. “They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol, I said, peacefully and patriotically. Nothing done wrong at all … these are people that walked down — this [insurrectionists] was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows. But that was a day of love from the standpoint of hundreds of thousands, the largest group I’ve ever spoken to before.”
