A radical activist federal judge in the cesspool of Washington, D.C. sat in his courtroom on Monday, May 4, 2026, looked the man charged with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump in the face, and said the words “I’m sorry.”
Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, a Biden appointee who has made a habit of extending judicial sympathy to people who commit political violence as long as that violence is directed at Republicans, apologized to Cole Tomas Allen for the conditions of his detention following an incident in which Allen allegedly traveled across the country with a 12-gauge shotgun, a handgun, three knives, and a manifesto declaring his intention to kill the President of the United States and every member of his cabinet.
This is the American judiciary in 2026. Take a good long look at it.
Allen was placed on suicide watch after his arrest because he told FBI agents that night that he had not expected to survive the assassination attempt.
He had written a goodbye manifesto. He had sent farewell messages to family members.
He had traveled from California to Washington D.C., checked into the same hotel where the president of the United States would be attending a dinner, and attempted to push through a security checkpoint armed to the teeth.
The D.C. Department of Corrections, exercising the bare minimum of institutional common sense, placed him in a safe cell with 24-hour supervision.
Judge Zia Faruqui decided that this was a human rights violation and called an emergency hearing to apologize for it.
“I am very troubled by what they indicate the conditions that you have been subjected to,” Faruqui told Allen during the hearing. “I’m sorry. It sounds like things have not been the way they’re supposed to.”
Let that sentence marinate for a moment. A federal judge, appointed to serve the American people and uphold the law, apologized to the man who tried to kill the President. He said he was sorry.
To the man who packed a shotgun and three knives and wrote a manifesto about murdering the entire Trump cabinet. He was sorry. About a safe cell. In a jail.
Where murderers are housed. Because the conditions were not to the attempted presidential assassin’s liking.
Faruqui then reached for the most inflammatory possible comparison available in the D.C. judicial system and deployed it without apparent hesitation. He told the court he was disturbed that Allen had been placed in five-point restraints and housed in a safe cell, adding: “I never heard of one Jan. 6 defendant who was put in five-point restraints or in a safe cell.”
The judge used January 6 defendants as the baseline for how a would-be presidential assassin should be treated.
If Jan. 6 defendants got the Correctional Treatment Facility, then Cole Allen, the man who tried to gun down the President and his entire cabinet at a hotel in downtown Washington D.C., deserves no less.
That is the judicial reasoning of Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, and it should terrify every American who cares about equal justice.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro did not mince words in her response.
Prosecutor Jocelyn Ballantine told the court that Allen told law enforcement after his arrest that he did not expect to survive the attempted assassination of the president, and that given his history, the FBI recommended suicide watch as a protective measure for a man who had demonstrated both the willingness and the stated expectation of dying in service of his political objective.
Faruqui was not persuaded.
The FBI’s professional threat assessment of a man who traveled across the country to assassinate the President was overruled.
Here is what Faruqui promised the attempted Trump assassin from the bench: he would try to get Allen a cell with a window. He would make sure Allen got a Bible.
He would personally follow up with the D.C. Department of Corrections about Allen’s housing situation by the next day.
The sitting president of the United States survived an assassination attempt one week before this hearing. His Secret Service agent took a bullet to the chest and survived only because of a vest.
The President’s wife was evacuated in fear. And the judge presiding over the case of the man who pulled the trigger was personally advocating for better housing conditions and promising to find the defendant a window and a Bible.
This is not the first time Faruqui has apologized in open court to someone charged with politically motivated violence.
Three years ago he apologized to January 6 defendant Taylor Taranto, who had shown up to Barack Obama’s home in a van full of weapons, telling him “we as a country have failed you.”
A pattern has emerged. When defendants in Faruqui’s courtroom are charged with political violence, and that political violence is directed at Republican targets, the judge’s instinct is not accountability. It is sympathy.
It is apology. It is a commitment to ensuring the defendant knows the court will treat them fairly, said with the personal warmth typically reserved for victims rather than perpetrators.
Allen’s attorneys had actually filed a motion to vacate the hearing after he was taken off suicide watch, arguing the issue was resolved.
Faruqui kept the hearing open anyway. He had grave concerns, the court order said, about the seemingly unprompted solitary confinement and overall conditions of confinement.
The judge canceled the cancellation of the hearing to make sure he could personally apologize to the attempted Trump assassin in person. That is not judicial oversight. That is ideological advocacy wearing a robe.
Trump addressed the judicial proceedings on Truth Social, and his reaction reflected the rage felt by tens of millions of Americans watching a legal system they no longer recognize treat the man who tried to kill their president with the deference typically extended to the wrongly accused.
Congressional Republicans need to wake up and treat this moment with the seriousness it demands. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui just apologized to a would-be presidential assassin in an American federal courtroom.
He did it publicly, on the record, in front of lawyers and reporters. He did it one week after the assassination attempt occurred. He did it while the Secret Service agent who was shot in the chest is still recovering.
And there have been precisely zero consequences for the judge or the court. The same Republican Party that has been demanding accountability for the two-tiered justice system that protected Democrats and prosecuted conservatives needs to turn its attention to what just happened in D.C. Courtroom 4.
Allen remains in federal custody with a preliminary hearing scheduled for May 11. He faces three federal counts: attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, transporting a firearm across state lines, and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence.
The first count carries a potential sentence of life in prison. Federal prosecutors have characterized what Allen allegedly attempted as one of the darkest potential days in American history.
The judge presiding over his case spent the week apologizing to him. These two things exist in the same American justice system in May 2026.
The radical left spent five years demanding that January 6 defendants be held without bail, denied due process, and sentenced to maximum terms for walking through the Capitol.
Those same institutions are now using January 6 defendants as the argument for why the man who tried to kill Trump deserves better jail conditions. The double standard is not subtle.
It is not accidental. It is structural, it is documented, and it is playing out in real time in an American federal courtroom where a judge just told the alleged would-be assassin of the President of the United States that he is sorry about the cell.
Faruqui’s apology to Cole Allen will be remembered as one of the defining images of a broken American justice system that has been weaponized against conservatives and extended extraordinary mercy toward those who commit political violence against Republican targets.
The American people deserve a judiciary that dispenses equal justice under law.
