The Justice Department has formally requested that a federal appeals court nullify the seditious conspiracy convictions of senior figures from two far-right organizations found responsible for their roles in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The move, if granted, would permanently bar future prosecution on those charges and effectively close the most significant legal chapter stemming from the Capitol breach.
Federal prosecutors filed the request with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, seeking to have the convictions vacated and the underlying cases dismissed with prejudice. A dismissal with prejudice means the defendants could not face retrial on the same charges.
The filing targeted leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, both of which had been prosecuted under seditious conspiracy statutes following the Capitol attack. Prosecutors had previously argued that members of both organizations engaged in coordinated efforts to prevent the constitutional certification of the 2020 presidential election results in order to keep Donald Trump in power following his electoral defeat.
Among the Proud Boys, four members, Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Ethan Nordean, were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. A fifth member, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted on that specific charge but convicted on other serious felony counts. On the Oath Keepers side, founder Stewart Rhodes and senior member Kelly Meggs were convicted of seditious conspiracy, while three additional members of the group were acquitted on that charge but convicted on related offenses.
The legal landscape for these defendants shifted after Trump returned to the White House. On his first day back in office, Trump granted a full pardon to Tarrio, along with more than 1,500 other individuals charged in connection with the January 6 riot. The remaining Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders named in the seditious conspiracy cases had their sentences commuted to time already served.
In the filing, Daniel Lenerz, deputy chief of the appellate division within the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, wrote that the executive branch had determined that continuing these prosecutions was not in the interests of justice, and that the same reasoning applied to others in comparable legal situations.
The department’s request was submitted ahead of approaching procedural deadlines in the ongoing appeals brought by the convicted leaders.
If the court grants the request, it would effectively eliminate the last remaining criminal convictions directly tied to the Capitol attack, marking the formal conclusion of what had been one of the most ambitious federal prosecutions in decades involving politically motivated violence.
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