Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked a federal judge to throw the whole case out. The judge did.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta granted the DOJ's motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy case against Rhodes and seven other Oath Keepers members — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett, David Moerschel, and Edward Vallejo. These were the cases that CNN and the Washington Post once described as the most consequential criminal prosecutions in modern American history. The DOJ itself just asked the court to make them disappear.
Mehta didn't hide his feelings about it. "Today's epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy — the peaceful transfer of presidential power — to buckle," he wrote. Then he granted the motion anyway, because prosecutors have the legal authority to drop cases, and the judge acknowledged he couldn't write a different ending.
The filing was signed by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. The DOJ stated that the motion to vacate was "consistent with its practice" of seeking dismissals "where the government has decided in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal is in the interests of justice." Prosecutorial discretion. The same discretion Biden's DOJ used to bring the charges in the first place.
The Oath Keepers convictions came out of two separate trials in 2022 and 2023. Prosecutors had alleged that Rhodes and his followers stockpiled weapons at a Virginia hotel for potential deployment to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Rhodes got 18 years — the longest sentence handed down to any January 6 defendant. The others received lesser sentences. All of them had already been freed from prison before Tuesday's ruling.
This was the last of the major January 6 prosecutions. Trump pardoned approximately 1,600 January 6 defendants and ordered the DOJ to drop all pending cases on his first day back in office. The department has also moved to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions against Proud Boys leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. Former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio received a full pardon.
Defense attorney Nicholas Smith, who represented Nordean, put the legal stakes plainly: "We don't want a precedent that says any physical confrontation between protesters and law enforcement means a crime akin to treason, such as seditious conspiracy."
That's the argument the media never engaged with. Seditious conspiracy is a Civil War-era charge that hadn't been successfully prosecuted in decades before Biden's DOJ dusted it off for January 6. The question was never whether people broke laws at the Capitol — some did. The question was whether the most extreme charge in the federal code was the appropriate tool, or whether it was chosen because it sounded the most dramatic on cable news.
Judge Mehta called his ruling reluctant. The defense called it overdue. The DOJ called it justice.
When the prosecutors who built the case are the ones asking the judge to tear it up, the case was never as strong as the press conferences suggested.