“Listening without question to political rhetoric that leads to serious offenses, criminal conduct, is not an excuse when you’re standing in a court of law,” Howell told Glen Simon, a Trump supporter who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on restricted grounds. “You’ve got to use your common sense and your own sense of who you are and how you’d like to conduct yourself as an American citizen before just blindly doing what a political figure says.”
Howell then sentenced Simon to eight months in prison.
The “political figure” to whom the judge was referring is President Trump. And Howell is not just any judge; she is the chief judge of the D.C. District Court that is overseeing at least 850 criminal cases related to the Capitol protest.
