“Former President Donald J. Trump continues to make forceful public comments about the ‘stolen election,’ chastising individuals who did not reject the supposedly illegitimate results that put the current administration in place,” Judge Emmet Sullivan wrote in a recent opinion ordering the detention of Jan. 6 defendant Jack Whitton, charged with one of the most brutal assaults that day.

“[S]uch comments reflect the continued threat posed by individuals like Mr. Whitton, who has demonstrated that he is willing and able to engage in extreme and terrifying levels of violence against law enforcement with a chilling disregard for the rule of law … seemingly based on mistaken beliefs about the illegitimacy of the current administration.”

Prosecutors have also begun citing and echoing Sullivan's rationale. The latest incarnation came Monday, when assistant U.S. attorney Jessica Arco noted in court that Trump "as recently as today is still talking about this 'rigged' election.” Arco was arguing for the pretrial detention of Nathaniel DeGrave, a Trump loyalist charged with assaulting a police officer outside the Senate chamber.

“The defendant is of course entitled to his political preferences,” Arco said. “But given his prior acts of traveling across the country with weapons to ‘stop the steal’ and interfering with the peaceful transition of power on behalf of his idol, and his idol’s continued inflammatory rhetoric about a stolen election, the defendant continues to pose a ... threat to the community.”

Pretrial detentions are relatively rare in the federal system, and judges say they're meant only for extraordinary circumstances when public safety and justice itself are at risk. Most of the 400-plus Capitol riot defendants have been released on bond or personal recognizance — some with strict conditions like GPS monitoring or house arrest. But in dozens of cases, judges have agreed with prosecutors to detain Jan. 6 defendants considered an ongoing threat to public safety.

Until recently, Trump has been a relatively minor part of that calculus. Bereft of his once-ubiquitous Twitter platform, the former president has been less prominent since departing the White House and winning an acquittal in his impeachment trial for inciting the Jan. 6 attack. That began to change a few weeks ago, when Trump sought to recast the history of the Jan. 6 attack, disregarding the violence wrought by his supporters — who left more than 130 police officers wounded — even falsely declaring last month that rioters were “hugging and kissing” officers.

Trump’s offensive went into overdrive this week. In five written statements from Friday to Tuesday, Trump has sought to reignite his frenzied claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, assailing state officials who refuse to entertain them and praising others seeking to re-litigate the results.

“Why are the Democrats so desperate to stop this Election Fraud from being revealed? That answer is obvious!” Trump said in a statement on Friday, demanding that Arizona's governor provide security for a GOP-led audit of the 2020 election results.

Defendants have argued that the circumstances of Jan. 6 are unlikely to happen again: a “Stop the Steal” rally with a president urging his supporters to march on the Capitol, all coinciding with the quadrennial counting of electoral college votes by Congress. But Sullivan, other judges and prosecutors, citing some of Trump’s recent rhetoric, have pushed back on that reasoning.

“Even if the election has passed, all of politics has not,” Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said last week before opting to detain two leaders of the extremist Proud Boys group for orchestrating a march on the Capitol.

In a court hearing on Friday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected one defense attorney's claim that it's unlikely the nation will see political events that could provoke similar violent reactions in the near future.

“The same political issues, the same political concerns, are being pumped out into the airwaves on a daily basis," Jackson said.

Arco, the assistant U.S. attorney, also noted that Trump isn’t alone in his effort. “There are other news outlets and individuals maintaining that narrative,” she said during the DeGrave hearing.

The judge in the DeGrave case, Paul Friedman, seemed to accept Arco’s argument. However, he was quick to emphasize that the defendant's political beliefs and Trump’s ongoing commentary are relevant because DeGrave is alleged to have translated Trump’s words into a call for violence.

“There are a lot more people out there in the world, sadly, who believe the election was stolen when it wasn’t,” said Friedman, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. “Those people are not charged with anything for what they believe and continuing to support President Trump.”

DeGrave’s attorney objected to the consideration of her client’s political beliefs.

But it was the cases of Whitton and Jeffrey Sabol where Trump’s recent comments played the most notable role in Sullivan’s decisions to order pretrial detention. Both men are charged, alongside multiple other defendants, with committing one of the most brutal police assaults on Jan. 6 — yanking an officer into the crowd and beating him unconscious. Both may have faced detention absent Trump’s remarks, but Sullivan made sure to emphasize the risk of future violence they might commit in Trump’s name.

“There is ample reason to believe that fight is not finished for Mr. Sabol and others like him, making the threat of further violence present, concrete, and continuing,” Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan underscored the same point Thursday at a bail hearing for Michael Lopatic, a former Marine from Pennsylvania who allegedly punched a cop and had a penchant for naming birds he hunted after Democratic leaders. After a prosecutor speculated on whether Lopatic might be prompted to violence by “rumors or other unfounded allegations that may be out there,” the judge chimed in to insist the concern is far from theoretical.

“The unfounded allegations are out there, and they're being made constantly by the former president,” said the Clinton appointee. Sullivan ultimately decided to release Lopatic, despite those concerns, suggesting the circumstances of his involvement were different than Whitton and Sabol’s.

Lawyers for alleged Capitol rioters have also tried to leverage Trump’s commentary to their advantage, arguing that many rioters were simply taking cues from a commander-in-chief they believed had authorized them to march against Congress. Defense attorneys have said that many of their clients, especially former military members dotting the crowd, viewed Trump’s comments as a directive cloaked in the authority of the presidency.

But federal judges in Washington, D.C.,’s district court say they’re not buying this so-called Trump defense — and in fact, it may be another reason to keep defendants detained. By blindly following Trump’s orders, even when they interpreted those orders to include violence against Congress, the defendants can’t be trusted to abide by conditions of release, judges have determined.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s rejection of the Trump defense in the case of Proud Boys member William Chrestman has become a standard used by other judges in the court.

“Even more troubling than the implication that the president can waive statutory law is the suggestion that the president can sanction conduct that strikes at the very heart of the Constitution," Howell wrote in her opinion, "and thus immunize from criminal liability those who seek to destabilize or even topple the constitutional order,”

Despite the unintentional assist from Trump, prosecutors’ efforts to detain Capitol riot defendants have been decidedly mixed. Judges have struggled to determine which defendants pose a danger to society and which can be safely released, often making inconsistent judgments from one courtroom to the next.

Complicating matters, a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court panel ruled that two high-profile defendants, Eric Munchel and his mother Lisa Eisenhart, were detained based on a flawed analysis that failed to consider their capacity and inclination to commit future violence. Munchel and Eisenhart were ultimately released after months of detention.

A federal judge also recently released Capitol riot defendant Federico Klein, a former Trump administration State Department official. Klein had been detained for allegedly fomenting a violent push against police in a Capitol tunnel, but the judge in his case said Klein hadn’t been accused of pre-planning the assault and didn’t celebrate it afterward, raising questions about his propensity for future violence. Defendants charged with certain violent acts at the Capitol have begun citing the Klein case to fight detention.

Judges say the relatively subjective decisions they’re being asked to make — as well as the likelihood that detained defendants will have to spend months in jail, sometimes in lockdown, before they’re tried or convicted — has complicated their calculus.

“These are increasingly difficult decisions,” Washington, D.C., federal Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey said at a bail hearing last week. “You need to address like and unlike cases … It’s frustrating.”