U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the seditious conspiracy case against members of the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group, ending the last of the prosecutions tied to Jan. 6 after Republican President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons and commutations wiped out the rest. The judge, who oversaw the Oath Keepers’ trials and was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, said the government “asks to absolve these Defendants of crimes against the United States itself.”
That’s the machinery of power, plain as day. One president’s pardons, another administration’s reversals, and a federal court left to write the final line after the damage is done. The people at the bottom paid in prison time, convictions, and years of legal grinding. The people at the top got to call it reconciliation.
Who Gets Protected
Mehta wrote, “This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of Jan. 6. That book is now closed.” He also said, “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. The court cannot write a different ending.”
The court’s language lays out the hierarchy without bothering to hide it. Prosecutors and law enforcement officers are praised for securing convictions, while the broader political system absorbs the fallout and keeps moving. The “peaceful transfer of presidential power” gets treated like a sacred pillar, even as the state’s own response depends on selective punishment, executive mercy, and legal cleanup after the fact.
The move closed the book on the Jan. 6 cases that were wiped out with Trump’s pardons and commutations last year, freeing from prison people convicted of violent assaults on police and other crimes. More than 1,200 people across the United States were convicted of Jan. 6 crimes, including roughly 200 people who pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement. Most of the Jan. 6 defendants were granted “full, complete and unconditional” pardons, while Rhodes and other defendants in the seditious conspiracy cases only had their sentences commuted.
What the State Did Next
The Department of Justice in April acted to vacate the convictions of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and others in the seditious conspiracy case who had their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons. That reversed the Democratic Biden administration, which had hailed the guilty verdicts in one of the most serious cases stemming from the Capitol attack.
Rhodes was released from prison in January 2025 after Trump commuted the 18-year sentence he received in the case. Rhodes, who did not enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, denied wrongdoing and described himself at his 2023 sentencing as a “political prisoner.” James Lee Bright, an attorney who represented Rhodes at trial, said in a text message that he was “disappointed in the tenor” of Mehta’s opinion and that it was “not necessary to inject his personal opinions in such a fashion.”
Trump said the Jan. 6 defendants were treated unfairly by the justice system, and he said the pardons were intended to end “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people” and begin “a process of national reconciliation.” That’s the language of power laundering itself in public. The same system that prosecuted, pardoned, commuted, and vacated the cases now asks everyone to accept the whole mess as closure.
Trump also ordered the attorney general to seek the dismissal of roughly 450 cases that were pending before judges stemming from the largest investigation in Justice Department history. The scale matters. So does the reach. The state built the case, then the state unraveled it, and the people caught in the middle got to watch the apparatus rewrite its own record.
The People at the Bottom
Juries in the nation’s capital convicted Oath Keepers leaders and members of another group, the Proud Boys, of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power after Trump’s 2020 election loss to Biden. Those convictions now sit inside a political cleanup operation shaped by pardons, commutations, and a Justice Department reversal.
Mehta said the court “cannot write a different ending.” The system already did. It just took turns pretending otherwise.