The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington asked a federal appeals court on Tuesday to throw out the convictions of 12 members of two far-right extremist groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia, after they were found guilty years ago of charges in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The move was the opening step in erasing the guilty verdicts of the last few Jan. 6 rioters who were not granted total clemency by the pardons President Trump handed out on his first day back in the White House last year.
As part of his clemency decree, Mr. Trump commuted the lengthy sentences of the 12 Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, prompting their release from federal prison. Some of the defendants, such as Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, were serving terms of up to 18 years.
But while Mr. Trump released Mr. Rhodes and the others, he did not grant them the full pardons that he issued to nearly 1,500 other rioters who took part in the storming of the Capitol.
Hoping to expunge their records altogether, the members of the two groups challenged their convictions in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and were facing a fast-approaching deadline to file court papers presenting arguments about why the government had overreached in charging them with crimes like seditious conspiracy.
By asking the appeals court to toss out their guilty verdicts, the Justice Department avoided the awkward situation of having to defend the convictions. Such a move would likely have required administration officials to assert that the far-right groups were acting on behalf of Mr. Trump on Jan. 6.
At the end of the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy trial, prosecutors argued that members of the group were acting as “Donald Trump’s army” on Jan. 6, using violent force in a plot to keep Mr. Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election.
In similar fashion, prosecutors argued that Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates attacked the Capitol that day “to stop the lawful transfer of power” from Mr. Trump to his successor, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers defendants, bolstered by their supporters, have long complained that they alone, among the hundreds of rioters charged in connection with Jan. 6, did not receive Mr. Trump’s full mercy. The president has never explained his decision to free them from prison but not issue them pardons, though it has often been surmised that the political costs of granting total clemency to far-right extremists found guilty of sedition were simply too steep to bear.
Nicholas Smith, a lawyer for Ethan Nordean, one of the convicted Proud Boys, hailed the decision by prosecutors to ask for the dismissal of the convictions.
“We’re grateful to the D.O.J. for correctly assessing that seditious conspiracy was misused in this case,” Mr. Smith said. “Hundreds of years of precedent distinguish between riots and crimes that are akin to treason.”
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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