The final criminal case arising from the January 6, 2021 fascist attack on the US Capitol has been brought to an end, after federal judges were forced to dismiss the prosecution of senior members of the far-right Oath Keepers.

The last remaining proceedings were closed after Donald Trump’s administration instructed the Department of Justice to abandon cases against defendants whose convictions had previously represented some of the most significant successes of the federal investigation.

Seditious conspiracy

The final chapter concerned the Oath Keepers. On 4 August, Judge Amit Mehta granted the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the remaining cases against founder Stewart Rhodes and other members of the militia group. Mehta had presided over the Oath Keepers’ two seditious-conspiracy trials, in which Rhodes and others were convicted over a conspiracy to obstruct the transfer of power.

In a sharply worded ruling, Mehta said he strongly disagreed with the government’s decision but concluded that prosecutors had the legal authority to withdraw the cases. The dismissals followed Trump’s sweeping January 2025 pardons and commutations of January 6 defendants.

Sombre warning

As Searchlight reported earlier, on 10 July, US District Judge Timothy Kelly was similarly forced to dismiss the convictions of four senior Proud Boys – Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola – after the Justice Department requested that their cases be thrown out.

All four had been convicted of seditious conspiracy or related offences over their roles in the attack.

Kelly had also issued a sombre warning about the significance of what had happened. He described January 6 as an attack on the constitutional mechanism for the peaceful transfer of presidential power, noting that the mob had sought to overturn Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden.

Convictions erased

The scale of the reversal is unprecedented. Federal authorities ultimately charged around 1,600 people over the Capitol attack, making the investigation the largest in US history. By January 2025, more than 1,200 had been convicted, including more than 200 after trials.

Trump’s return to the White House transformed the legal consequences. His mass clemency effectively erased convictions and halted prosecutions that had continued for four years, including cases involving people convicted of assaulting police officers.

But the conclusion of the cases does not erase the evidential record established by the trials. Extensive video, testimony and court documents remain, documenting the violence and the attempts by organised far-right groups to obstruct the constitutional transfer of power.