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Tuesday, April 14, 2026
ANNALS OF TRUMPI$TAN: DOJ moves to undo Jan. 6 rioters’ convictions for seditious conspiracy. (Salvador Rizzo, Jeremy Roebuck & Perry Stein, WaPo, April 14, 2026)
From The Washington Post:
DOJ moves to undo Jan. 6 rioters’ convictions for seditious conspiracy
President Donald Trump last year commuted the prison sentences of 12 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Federal prosecutors are seeking to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions of 12 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who helped plan the Jan. 6, 2021, riots and led the charge into the U.S. Capitol, according to court documents filed Tuesday.
The request, from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro of D.C., is likely to be granted because prosecutors have broad discretion to pursue or drop criminal charges, even after defendants have been convicted. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers and a lead organizer behind the riots, is among those whose convictions Pirro is seeking to erase.
The move to undo the most serious convictions stemming from the assault on the Capitol marks the latest step in President Donald Trump’s quest to rewrite the event’s violent history. A mob of Trump supporters gathered in D.C. and disrupted Congress’s certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential race, echoing Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen.
If Pirro’s request is approved by the courts, it will wipe out the last remaining convictions related to the Jan. 6 assault.
Trump, on the first day of his second term, issued a blanket pardon that cleared more than 1,500 rioters’ criminal records for offenses related to the insurrection. That pardon did not extend to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Instead, Trump at the time commuted the prison sentences of 14 of those defendants, freeing them from federal custody. That clemency grant, however, did not delete the convictions from their records.
The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are two of the most prominent extremist groups in the United States, and both played a leading role in the Jan. 6 attack.
In court filings Tuesday, Pirro asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to vacate the convictions of 12 defendants from both groups: Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola, Roberto Minuta, Eduardo Vallejo, Joseph Hackett, David Moerschel, Kenneth Harrelson and Jessica Watkins. All of them have pending appeals.
Pirro, a Trump ally, also has sought to dismiss Jan. 6-related charges against one of the president’s former advisers, Stephen K. Bannon. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio separately had his conviction vacated and charges dismissed last year, also at the Justice Department’s request.
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, shown this past January, separately had his conviction vacated and charges dismissed last year. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Pirro said that once the latest slate of convictions is vacated, she intends to file motions to dismiss all the underlying charges in the trial court. That move, once approved by a judge, would fully clear all 12 defendants’ criminal records for having participated in the Jan. 6 riots.
In court filings Tuesday, Pirro gave no details explaining her action, saying only that “the United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice.” The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.
“This decision is long overdue,” said Norm Pattis, an attorney for Biggs, one of the Proud Boys. “This prosecution should never have been lodged.”
An attorney for Nordean, another member of the Proud Boys, said his client had been overcharged. Before the Jan. 6 prosecutions, few defendants suspected of rioting had faced treason-related charges such as seditious conspiracy, attorney Nicholas D. Smith said.
“Persistently fighting for truth and justice pays off!” Rehl, a member of the Proud Boys who is representing himself in court, said in a post on X.
Proud Boys members Zachary Rehl and Ethan Nordean walk toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
The Justice Department’s request came one day after Tarrio and Rehl had publicly accused Pirro and her office of fighting their efforts to overturn the convictions.
“We shouldn’t have to fight Jeanine Pirro for the truth that everybody already knows,” they wrote in an essay published by Gateway Pundit, a website popular among conservatives. “The President … knows these cases were a farce. Yet his own DOJ is still counter-signaling him.”
Jonathan Crisp, a defense attorney who represented Watkins, an Oath Keepers leader, said he had been trying to get her conviction overturned for about a year with no success. He said he was surprised by the timing of the government’s request since it landed days before he had a court-mandated deadline to file a brief in Watkins’s appeal of her conviction.
“The timing is interesting,” Crisp said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “But you certainly don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. We are grateful that this is happening.”
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