A federal judge expressed deep regret on Tuesday as he granted a request by the Justice Department to throw out criminal charges against eight members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia who were charged with seditious conspiracy for the central role they played in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The move by the judge, Amit P. Mehta, came less than a month after one of his colleagues in Federal District Court in Washington made a similarly pained decision to dismiss Jan. 6-related charges against five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, who also played a key part in the Capitol attack. The twin rulings, which both judges made claiming that their hands were tied by the law, amounted to a final erasure of the vast investigation into Jan. 6, the largest criminal inquiry undertaken in the Justice Department’s 156-year history.
Confessing that he wished for “a different ending,” Judge Mehta blasted the Justice Department’s request for a dismissal in the case, saying it bestowed “unearned grace” on the Oath Keepers defendants — including on their leader Stewart Rhodes — “by wiping their records clean.”
He also took pains to recall the profound damage that occurred on Jan. 6 to people at the Capitol as well as to the nation’s politics, refusing to ignore either one as President Trump has sought to play down the violence of the attack and has repeatedly asserted that the rioters themselves were wronged by efforts to hold them accountable and deserve financial restitution.
“Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day,” Judge Mehta wrote, “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.”
In an almost elegiac tone, Judge Mehta, an Obama appointee, acknowledged that he was bound to “give way to the primacy of the executive branch,” which has wide latitude in making decisions in criminal prosecutions. But the judge seemed unable to bite his tongue entirely, chiding the prosecutors who had requested the dismissal even as he acceded to them.
“If it is their view that the public interest is served by surrendering convictions for crimes against the country to the gloss of an enduring public record, then that is an assessment to which this court must yield,” he wrote.
Prosecutors first requested that the charges be dropped in May. They noted that Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants had not been fully pardoned, but had only had their sentences commuted, when Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the Jan. 6 rioters on his first day back in the White House.
In their request to dismiss the charges outright, prosecutors had claimed that it was in the “interest of justice” — a notion that Judge Mehta scoffed at in his ruling. He pointed out that the government had never said that the charges against the Oath Keepers were “legally deficient” or that the evidence presented at two separate trials was insufficient to sustain their convictions.
Moreover, the Justice Department, he went on, never admitted to prosecutorial misconduct or identified any legal error that could have resulted in an unfair trial or a wrongful conviction. This was a not-so-subtle rebuttal of arguments that Mr. Trump and his allies have often made.
Judge Mehta spent the first three pages of his ruling reciting what Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants did on Jan. 6. He recalled how some members of the Oath Keepers were stationed in Virginia as a “quick reaction force” to support their compatriots at the Capitol and had assembled an arsenal of weapons that one witness at the trial described as the largest cache of firearms he had seen since serving in the military.
In the run-up to Jan. 6, several of the defendants made remarks on group chats embracing violence, Judge Mehta noted.
One of them, David Moerschel, wrote on Christmas Day in 2020: “It’s a war time Christmas. Gentleman, Trump is going to make his big move on Jan 6. Be prepared.”
On New Year’s Eve, Mr. Rhodes wrote in another group chat: “On the 6th, they are going to put the final nail in the coffin of this Republic, unless we fight our way out. With Trump (preferably) or without him, we have no choice.”
On Jan. 6 itself, nearly a dozen Oath Keepers, wearing military gear, marched up the eastern steps of the Capitol and entered the building. Half of them headed toward the Senate chamber, Judge Mehta wrote, where they sought to storm past a line of police officers. The others ended up in front of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Later, one of the Oath Keepers, Kelly Meggs, boasted to a friend, “We looked for her.”
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